Using Notepad++ to Organize Game Guides and Documentation

Mohsin Raza

I’ve been using Notepad++ to organize documentation for a Nintendo 3DS gaming project and I’m curious how other users manage large collections of text files.

My workflow includes:

Writing gameplay guides and walkthroughs.
Organizing notes with Markdown and plain text.
Managing hundreds of article drafts.
Using Find in Files to quickly locate game names, characters, and keywords.
Comparing different versions of articles before publishing.

I’m interested in learning how other members use Notepad++ for large documentation projects outside of software development.

Do you use any plugins, custom themes, or productivity tips that make organizing large text collections easier?

I’d love to hear about your workflow and recommendations.

PeterJones

moderator aside: I approved the above post after removing what was likely just a spam URL. I am doubtful that the OP actually intended it as anything but an excuse to drive traffic to their 3DS site. But the questions asked aren’t completely out of the realm of general interest for a Notepad++ forum, so I decided to sanitize the post and let it stay, in case it drives actual discussion. Changed the Topic Title to be more generic, to match what’s on-topic for this forum.

@mohsin-raza ,

Those workflow steps all seem reasonable to do in Notepad++.

Comparing different versions of articles before publishing.

I definitely use the Compare++ plugin to compare files: if you’re using Git or SVN for version control, it even has the ability to do the equivalent of git-diff or svn-diff, without having to manually have two copies with different versions of the same file, so you can see how the file has changed since your last commit, which is quite useful.

use Notepad++ for large documentation projects outside of software development.

I mean, there are plenty of people who use Notepad++ for making websites. There are some users here who pester us with a gazillion questions on how to edit raw HTML with regex (even though regex isn’t the best tool, since HTML is too free-form for most regex to work effectively).

And I use Notepad++ for editing the Markdown of the Notepad++ User Manual. But I don’t do much “fancy” outside of normal Notepad++ usage (with the occasional MarkdownViewer++ to preview the rendered version of the Markdown… though since we use hugo, I actually use hugo to render to HTML and view it in my browser instead, because of hugo’s special features that MarkdownViewer++ doens’t render properly)

Do you use any plugins …

Depending on the underlying language/filetype of the documentation:

HTML ⇒ there are plenty of plugins helpful with HTML – just use Plugins Admin and type in HTML, and it will step through some. Though one of the most useful would be XML Tools, which can help with pretty-printing
Markdown ⇒ there are multiple plugins for helping with Markdown: there are some “preview” tools which render your markdown into a panel inside the Notepad++ window, for example. Again, typing Markdown in the search bar in Plugins Admin will give you some ideas
GitSCM ⇒ allows you to integrate Git version control actions inside the Notepad++ interface, so you don’t have to drop to the command line or using a git GUI in Windows Explorer

custom themes

Themes are just the color sets for the builtin languages. Everyone has different preferences as to what colors “look best” to their eyes. I don’t understand how you could think “custom themes” would help; would you care to explain/expound on that?

Did you mean “custom User Defined Languages [UDL]”, which allows custom keyword-based syntax highlighting? Then, depending on what languages/format you are using for the text of the documentation, some might help. Notepad++ already ships with a Markdown UDL, but if you don’t like the colors that ship with N++, you can always edit the UDL to choose different colors. And, since it’s a UDL, if you don’t like the decisions that were used for how to apply keyword-based styling to something that’s more punctuation-based, you can play with alternatives.

If you have an underlying language/format for your file that’s not found int he Languages list, you should consider looking at the UDL Collection repository, which collects user-submitted UDL, and many languages have one or more user-submitted UDL (and some have associated functionList and autoCompletion definitions). The CollectionInterface plugin (available thru Plugins Admin) can make it easier to install such a UDL (especially with the FL or AC additions) rather than manually trying to figure out where to put each of those files.

But all-in-all, your post seems so generic and vague that I’m not convinced that you didn’t just use an AI with a prompt like “pretend I use [INSERT TEXT EDITOR NAME HERE] to edit my documentation, and write a post for me that adds a link to [WEBSITE URL AND NAME HERE] in something that they won’t mark as spam/off-topic”. If that’s what you did, you failed, because we didn’t include your spam link in your post. Please read the rules of this forum before posting more spam. If your future posts – to this topic, or any other topic in this forum – try to re-include links to your site, or other sites you might want to advertize, you will be banned. Other posts in this discussion which include links to sites not related to Notepad++ will also be blocked and their users banned. If this topic just devolves into an attempted honeypot, where the only posts are people trying to violate these restrictions, the topic will be locked.