Plugins gone?!

zejjnt

The last few versions have made plugins stop working and change places, but now they are totally disappearing?!
I use NP++ 32 bit, and though my plugin folder has everything both in AppData and the Program Files (x86)-folder, the only plugins I see are MIMETools, Converter and NppExport.
What has happened now?

It would also be nice to know what has happened with plugins overall the last few versions, since they don’t seem to load from the same directory I am now forced to put everything in both AppData and the program folder (but as mentioned above not even that works anymore).
And the plugin manager and plugin admin detect different updates, but none of them are able to actually update the plugins (prompt for admin, prompt for restart, start again and the same notice of a new plugin version).
And when I remove EVERYTHING and start fresh, there is no plugin administration at all so yes, I have tried to start over.

It seems like something fundamental has changed in the last versions regarding plugins in many ways and if this shit goes on I’ll be forced to revert to some version from november when it was still working, which I would rather not do since other stuff is working fine.

Meta Chuh

welcome to the notepad++ community, @zejjnt

if you have recently updated to notepad++ 7.6.6 from e.g. 7.5.9:
the plugin folder structure has changed a bit, due to user demands of making the plugins folder more sorted and human readable.

before, the plugins folder was a single folder, where all plugin dlls and eventually their additional files were stored.
this caused many users not to know which files belonged to which plugin, making a manual plugin cleanup very difficult without performing a complete clean re-install.

now, the plugins folder is more structured, separating each plugin into a dedicated folder, which matches the plugins’s .dll name.

solutions:

to migrate old plugins:
(compatible plugins only)

please go to plugins > open plugins folder... to open up your plugins folder in windows explorer.
look for a plugin dll name of a plugin you might need, e.g. HexEditor.dll.
create a folder with the dll’s name, but without the .dll extension, e.g. HexEditor.
move your plugin dll to this folder, e.g. HexEditor.dll to plugins\HexEditor.
if existent and known, move additional plugin helper files to the new folder as well. (HexEditor will not have any)

to reinstall supported plugins:

please go to plugins > plugins admin.
search for your desired plugins and select them.
press install to install your desired and available plugins.

note: there are more plugins compatible with 7.6.6 than provided at the plugins admin available plugins list.
please search at our community for additional manual install instructions for many of those plugins.
if you can’t find it, please open a new topic, we will help you on all plugins which are known to run on newer versions of notepad++.

direct answers:

And the plugin manager and plugin admin detect different updates

important note: do not use the old plugin manager on newer versions of notepad++, like 7.6.6, as it is incompatible, due to not being aware of the new folder structure.
as for now, plugin manager is no longer maintained, and serves it’s purpose only for versions 7.5.9 and below.

And when I remove EVERYTHING and start fresh, there is no plugin administration at all so yes, I have tried to start over.

important note: if you remove “EVERYTHING” you will also remove the plugins admin’s nppPluginList.dll, which contains the compatible plugin list, resulting in the disappearance of plugins admin from the plugins menu.

many thanks and best regards.