Notepad++ 7.6 & new Plugins Admin

donho

Hi @donho ,

Unfortunately here the plugins subfolder in the install folder contains in addition to the disabled subfolder the Images subfolder for the Bookmarkmanager. So if the plugins subfolder is removed in a new version, I have to recreate it copying the bookmark manager marker images - presumably the plugin needs to be modified.
I do not know if there is any other solution now.

Then you have to modify your plugin to adapt the new plugin folder structure. There’s no way back for this point. OTOH, I can promise you that such policy will be remained. So you won’t modify your code all the time.

Marshal-Kilgore

@donho
First I’d like to thank you for all the work you’ve put into this great program and your patience with humble user requests.

I’ve thought about the issue and would suggest to make the relevant paths user configurable, including the location of the standard configuration files.
For the current installation of Notepad++ 7.6, this would be:

Config folder: %AppData%\Notepad++
Plugin folder: %LocalAppData%\Notepad++\plugins
Plugin config: %AppData%\Notepad++\plugins\Config

or %ProgramData%\Notepad++\plugins, should you decide to change it.
System administrators and experienced users could tweak these paths to match their backup strategies, security concepts, etc.
A portable installation would simply use:

Config folder: .\
Plugin folder: .\plugins
Plugin config: .\plugins\Config

relative paths being relative to the installation folder, of course.
Developers could have multiple parallel installations of Notepad++ in 32bit and 64bit, using custom folders like:

Config folder: %AppData%\Notepad++-32bit-testing
Plugin folder: %LocalAppData%\Notepad++-32bit-testing\plugins
Plugin config: %AppData%\Notepad++-32bit-testing\plugins\Config

or

Config folder: %SCRATCH%\Notepad++-64bit-beta
Plugin folder: %SCRATCH%\Notepad++-64bit-beta\plugins
Plugin config: %SCRATCH%\Notepad++-64bit-beta\plugins\Config

The effort would be an extra configuration file (that resides in the installation folder) and should satisfy most grumblers. >;-)

ManiacJoe

Windows 10.1709

Notepad++ 7.6, 64-bit, build 2018-11-13 00:12:05

Admin plug-in dialog, update tab:
three items listed
select one or more
click update button
It tries to download Notepad++ 7.5.9 when it should be downloading new plug-ins.

dinkumoil

@ManiacJoe

Which list items (plugins) did you select? How do you determine that it downloads Notepad++ v7.5.9?

I have tested it with v7.6 (32 bit) on Windows 7 x64 and can not confirm this behaviour. It worked like expected and updated the selected NppSaveAsAdmin plugin.

ManiacJoe

@dinkumoil

Started with an install of 7.5.9.
Updated to 7.6 on top of it.

Now only two entries in the update tab:
DSpellCheck 1.4.7
Npp Converter 4.2.1

selected Npp
UPDATE

“Select YES to quit Notepad++ and continue the operations”
YES

“An update package is available, download it?”
YES

“Downloading npp.7.5.9.installer.exe”
ABORT

dinkumoil

@ManiacJoe

What is your installation directory for Notepad++? Did you select the option “Do not use %APPDATA%” during installation?

ManiacJoe

@dinkumoil

This one-post-per-20-minutes limit on us newbies is a killer…

I did an uninstall and re-install. This cleared up the problem.

To answer the questions:

the install folder is the default.
the appdata usage is allowed (unchecked).

László Botka

@donho said:

Then you have to modify your plugin to adapt the new plugin folder structure. There’s no way back for this point. OTOH, I can promise you that such policy will be remained. So you won’t modify your code all the time.

I like this new policy, unfortunately Bookmarkmanager isn’t my plugin, I’m not a programmer, just a simple user.
I tried to say, that to see the markers during Edit, I have to copy the “images” folder to the plugins folder ( “C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins”) in my case, if you (the Notepad++ installer) remove it from there.
Hopefully the plugin author will modify the plugin.

Andrew S. Baker

@donho There seems to be a bug in this version that does not accurately count the number of characters in a file.

I have several large script files that now show a discrepancy between the size reflected in Windows (at a CMD prompt) and with Notepad++

Other text utilities reflect the correct file size with Windows. All of them used to be in harmony just a week ago, prior to this update.

-ASB

Meta Chuh

@Andrew-S.-Baker

please make a local test copy of one of the script files where the reported length in the notepad++ status bar doesn’t match neither the reported size in cmd nor in the explorer properties.
make sure it is on a local disk and not on a network drive.
make sure it is not in a compressed folder !

then open this copy in notepad++ and check the size comparing np++ length and cmd bytes

if the sizes still differ:
open this copy in notepad++
in the np++ menu go to:
encoding > convert to ansi (or utf-8 if needed)

this makes sure no additional bom header is written to the file

optionally go to:
edit > eol conversion > unix (LF)
and then back to
edit > eol conversion > windows (CR LF)

this eliminates mixed line endings, in case some of your files have inconsistent end characters (mixed 2 byte crlf and either 1 byte cr or lf in some lines, as it happens if you are using different editors on different platforms for the same file.

please report back and let us know whether the sizes match after above steps or not.

Meta Chuh

one thing i forgot to mention:
make sure you are able to save the test copy after converting the encoding before rechecking the size.
in some rare cases you’ll see a greyed out save button after the encoding change, then please convert back and forth between ansi and utf-8 to make the save button accessible

Andrew S. Baker

@donho said:

OK, I see. How about an empty file pluginsForAllUser.xml makes Notepad++ load from %ALLUSERSPROFILE% ?

It would be better to load from both locations. That we, if there are shared/global plugins they will be read from the All Profiles locations + the user-specific location where they will have unique plugins.

No need for the extra file to trigger the behavior.

AJ-Stevens

@dinkumoil said:

@AJ-Stevens

The reason why plugins are no longer installed to %ProgramFiles% is according to this comment of @donho the following:

The reason of installation to <Userprofile>\AppData\Local\Notepad++\plugins<plugin-name> is Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform. A UWP package is immutable so there’s no way to install plugins into Notepad++ installation directory.

It seems like he wants to publish its own Windows Store App variant of Notepad++, thus there is no way back to installing plugins (even partially) to %ProgramFiles%.

Oh a Windows Store App variant? Urgh… I’d rather an MSI installer for the regular Windows Notepad++ application.

Fran Favorini

@AJ-Stevens said:

Oh a Windows Store App variant? Urgh… I’d rather an MSI installer for the regular Windows Notepad++ application.

Agreed.

mathcalvo

Where can I find the new Plugins Admin tool? After fresh install (32 or 64 installer), the plugin menu is missing and no Plugins Admin tool. After coping some plugins in the %localappdata%\Notepad++\plugins in can see the plugin menu, but not the new Plugins Admin tool.
Where to find it? I am missing something?

Max Brante

A question that has been asked a few times in keeps getting ignored: Me and a few others have made a fresh install of 7.6 and we dont’t get a plugins menu or the plugins admin is nowhere to be found.
How to troubleshoot this?

AJ-Stevens

@mathcalvo said:

Where can I find the new Plugins Admin tool? After fresh install (32 or 64 installer), the plugin menu is missing and no Plugins Admin tool. After coping some plugins in the %localappdata%\Notepad++\plugins in can see the plugin menu, but not the new Plugins Admin tool.
Where to find it? I am missing something?

@Max-Brante said:

A question that has been asked a few times in keeps getting ignored: Me and a few others have made a fresh install of 7.6 and we dont’t get a plugins menu or the plugins admin is nowhere to be found.
How to troubleshoot this?

If you installed Notepad++ using another account with Administrator rights but are now trying to run Notepadd++ as a normal user account, you’ll find the Plugins menu missing, as the Plugins Admin and default plugins are installed only for the user account that installed/updated Notepad++. Generally this is the recommended setup for a corporate environment, whereas at home a user may login to their computer as an administrative account.

This is the problem we’re discussing with the developer, alone with the location and permissions of adding in plugins based on various corporate and personal environments requirements. Some corporate environments want strict controls on the delivery of plugins and prevents users from installing plugins (remove any options to), only allowed to use the ones IT deploy. Some corporate environments are happy to leave the Plugin Admin function there, but require it to use Admin rights, and some are happy for users to be able to load in plugins as they wish (though these should be to individual user profiles), and some want to be able to specifically pre-load some plugins on a computer for all users of that computer, but also allow users to install their own plugins, however some prefer that the Machine level IT installed plugins supersede the user plugins if there’s a conflict and some prefer the user plugins to supersede the machine installed plugins.

Typically to force the requirement of Administrator rights for plugin installation, would be to locate the plugins directory under a protected directory, such as Program Files, and via a program setting that is only changeable with administrator rights to ignore/not permit user profile location plugins.

So basically, there needs to be a variety of options added to Notepad++ at installation, ideally as switches, which can be changed in Settings but only by first elevating to Administrator rights, a safe place for these settings would be Machine level registry or installation folder and some behaviour by Notepad++ to use dual location of the install path and the user profile path, depending on what settings have been set. One such setting would determine whether there is any point putting the plugins and theme folders in the current profile installing Notepad++ or whether it should keep these in the installation directory and copy to the next or all user profile that starts Notepad++ on a first run.

Manual Fix

To manually fix it, look for the C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\ folder in your username profile and the username profile that was used to install Notepadd++, you’ll find a “plugins” folder and a “themes” folder, move these two folders from the installer profile to your own profile. Then start Notepad++ and you’ll have plugins menu and the Plugins Admin.

If it is an administrator account, you’ll need the administrator or IT department to get to these files and move them to your profile for you as a normal user account will be blocked from accessing an administrative user accounts profile.

Note that if you install any plugins using the installer account (such as by using Run as Administrator), these are stored in the C:\Users<username>\AppData*Local*\Notepad++\plugins folder, move these to your profile to save redownloading/installing them again.

AJ-Stevens

Maybe also worth explaining for some that %AppData% is a shortcut to YOUR folder, the full path is C:\Users<username>\AppData*Roaming*\ and %LocalAppData% is a shortcut to YOUR folder, the full path is C:\Users<username>\AppData*Local*\

The difference between Roaming and Local? If you had a roaming profile (used in some corporate domain environments), the Roaming folder goes with your profile to other computers when you logon for consistency of settings and preferences between Workstation (computer), whereas the Local is only on that specific machine and does not “roam” with you.

Meta Chuh

@Max-Brante

they don’t get ignored, but most of us are already tired of repeatedly posting the steps and reasons again and again

did you select the option “do not use %appdata%” while installing to C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) ?
you can check if you look at ? > debug info > local conf mode, if it is on, then you did.

if yes, then reinstall notepad++ from here https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v7.6.html
and make sure you don’t select “do not use %appdata%”

Mihai Ungureanu

Hello,

My “PortableApps” updated Notepad++ and I cannot control the plugins in any way.

What can I do?

I would not want to touch the system folders and config in any way.

Please let me know.

Regards
Mi