In case this dead horse deceased parrot is ever viewed again:
I found a third way to speed up the loading of large source code files by manipulating the “langs.xml” file:
Hide or rename the “langs.xml” file. Notepad++ will complain if it can’t locate “langs.xml”, but will continue to work after the warning dialog box is dismissed.
Create an absolute bare-bones version “langs.xml” with all source code sections removed. Full contents of <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> works nicely. The file cannot be a zero-length file, it must have some minimal contents.
Just the specific language section can be removed or commented out (surrounded with <!-- & --> tokens):
<!---
<Language name="json" ext="json" commentLine="" commentStart="" commentEnd="">
<Keywords name="instre1">false null true</Keywords>
<Keywords name="instre2">@id @context @type @value @language @container @list @set @reverse @index @base @vocab @graph</Keywords>
</Language>
-->
As with the file renaming and hardlink creation approaches, there is no syntactic and keyword highlighting or FunctionList available, but otherwise all other features are available.
Neither hiding other folders [userDefineLangs, autoCompletion, functionList] nor hiding other files [functionList.xml, stylers.xml] showed any significant speedup in the file load time. There may be an unique combination of XML file changes that does speed up load time.
NOTE: While variations 1 & 2 will disable formatting for ALL source code files edited, variation 3 only affects the language name commented out.
If large source code files must be edited frequently and both the file rename and hardlink approaches are not practical to use:
Unzip a separate portable version of Npp into Npp4FTB2EE (Npp for files too big to easily edit) <grin>
Replace the default “langs.xml” file with a version based on variation 2 or 3 above
The folders [userDefineLangs, autoCompletion, functionList] and file functionList.xml can be deleted
These variations have been tested and work properly in both Npp v8.1.4rc & v7.9.5 and should also work in earlier versions but YMMV.