@Claudia-Svenson said in How to set "UTF-8 WITH BOM" as default Encoding even for old but changed textfiles?:
This would be a great convenient enhancement feature.
Natively, there is no such feature (and it’s not likely to happen, IMO).
Using a plugin, it’s doable. For now, it requires using a not-yet-released version of the EditorConfig plugin, but they are supposedly eventually going to release a new version with all the features/fixes from the last 6 years.
EditorConfig plugin should be able to handle the charset attribute. But the version available in Plugins Admin is still 6 years old, and does not include that attribute. They merged the PR that implemented charset in 2023, but have not done a release since v0.4.0.0 in 2019. (In October 2025, they put in an Issue to encourage themselves to do a release, but there’s still apparently a showstopper preventing them from moving forward.)
I just forked their repo, and did a build based on their most recent codebase; I call that “0.4.0.1”, so that there’s something to distinguish it from the official version. For a couple of months from 2026-Mar-30, GitHub should have some artifacts of my v0.4.0.1 build.
Exit Notepad++
Go to
https://github.com/pryrt/npp-editorconfig-plugin/actions/runs/23767310769#artifacts and download the right artifact for your machine (most likely the one ending in --x64).
Unzip, and copy the DLL to c:\Program Files\Notepad++\Plugins\NppEditorConfig\NppEditorConfig.dll
create .editorconfig file at the top of your document structure (like c:\users\username\.editorconfig), populate it with:root = true
[*.bat]
charset = utf-8
[*.py]
charset = utf-8
[*.txt]
charset = utf-8-bom
[*.ps1]
charset = utf-8-bom
The next time you save a file with one of those extensions (as long as it’s in the same folder as the .editorconfig file, or a subdirectory of that folder), it will use the charset indicated when you save the file in Notepad++
(GitHub will remove those artifacts sometime in the next few months. If EditorConfig hasn’t done an official release since then, and the files are gone, feel free to ping me here, and I can trigger a new build to GitHub)