Plugins - too much of a good thing
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Having spent entirely too much time working with a mysterious loss of control of plugin menus, I wish to share the knowledge to help other users avoid the aggravation.
TL;DR: Installed plugins incur a cost even if they are not being used. Each menu item uses up one of the 500 available plugin command IDs.
See …\PowerEditor\src\resource.h { ID_PLUGINS_CMD_LIMIT & ID_PLUGINS_CMD }
Notepad++ will silently ignore attempts to activate any menu items encountered after the 500th ID is enumerated. The plugins themselves will continue to operate, but options and actions controlled using the \Plugins’plugin’\ menu will not be acted on.
Notes on the attached table:
A menu item is one of the text lines (black or grey) that shows up as the mouse is dragged down a plugin menu.
A lower level menu item means there is no dialog expansion triangle on the right side of the menu list.
PythonScript seems to violate this rule with it’s expansion of ‘Scripts\Samples’, but I cannot be certain as I am just starting my Python & PythonScript education.
NppExec expands beyond it’s initial 19 menu items when scripts are added by use of the ‘Advanced Options…’ dialog. Additional consoles each use another 19 IDs assuming no added links to their ‘Advanced Options…’ ‘Menu Items’.
Note that the venerable NppTextFX uses 31% of the available ID locations.
The lesson: Don’t keep plugins installed if you don’t use them.
items plugin DLL menu+lower name version date ---------- ---------------------- ----------- --------------------- 2 BetterMultiSelection v1.4.0.0 (2021.05.26 7:45 AM) 15 BookmarksDook v2.3.3.0 (2021.04.29 1:01 AM) 4 ColumnTools v1.4.2.1 (2021.05.19 9:38 AM) 3 CustomLineNumbers v1.1.7.0 (2020.08.16 4:01 PM) 8 DSpellCheck v1.4.21.0 (2021.06.20 7:05 PM) 13 Explorer v1.8.2.16 (2021.04.29 2:20 AM) 2 ExtSettings v1.2.1.0 (2019.10.06 2:52 PM) 2 FallingBricks v1.1.0.0 (2008.09.24 8:41 PM) 13 FingerText v0.5.60.0 (2012.05.03 7:20 AM) 6 Linefilter3 v1.0.0.0 (2019.09.23 5:35 PM) 6 LuaScript v0.11.0.0 (2021.03.15 7:39 PM) 4 MarkdownViewerPlusPlus v0.8.2.0 (2019.01.12 12:01 AM) 2 MenuIcons v1.2.3.0 (2021.04.23 10:36 AM) 14 mimeTools v2.6.0.0 (2021.07.15 7:11 PM) 4 NPPJSONViewer v1.40.0.0 (2020.07.11 5:55 PM) 3 NavigateTo v1.12.3.0 (2018.03.13 11:29 AM) 5 NppCalc v1.5.0.0 (2021.07.09 2:13 PM) 3 NppColumnSort v1.0.0.2 (2014.01.19 3:38 PM) 5 NppConverter v4.3.0.0 (2021.07.15 7:11 PM) 3 NppEditorConfig v0.4.0.0 (2019.02.21 6:45 AM) 3 NppEventExec v0.9.0.0 (2017.08.14 12:37 PM) 19+13 NppExec v0.6.9.9 (2021.07.22 1:05 PM) 5 NppExport v0.3.0.0 (2021.07.15 7:11 PM) 3 NppFTP v0.29.7.0 (2021.03.17 12:03 AM) 7 NppFavorites v1.0.0.1 (2018.10.15 9:38 PM) 4 NppHorizontalRuler v1.0.0.3 (2019.01.16 5:50 PM) 2 NppJumpList v1.2.2.0 (2015.04.10 6:04 PM) 4 NppMenuSearch v0.9.3.0 (2019.10.22 11:55 PM) 1 NppPlates v0.1.0.0 (2016.01.07 8:36 PM) 5 NppQCP v2.1.1.1 (2021.02.22 7:53 PM) 5 NppSnippets v1.6.0.0 (2021.03.17 12:03 AM) 157 NppTextFX v0.2.6.0 (2016.01.06 7:26 PM) 31 NppTextViz v0.4.2.0 (2020.05.29 9:15 PM) 11 NppToolBucket v1.10.6622.4 (2018.02.17 6:57 AM) 2 NppUISpy v1.0.4.0 (2019.06.26 11:37 AM) 2 OpenFileInFolders v1.0.0.1 (2017.07.13 3:32 PM) 4 pork2sausage v2.2.0.0 (2021.06.02 6:07 AM) 9 PreviewHTML v1.3.2.0 (2019.03.16 4:57 AM) 8+17 PythonScript v1.5.4.0 (2020.04.21 4:02 PM) 5 QuickText v0.1.4.1 (2020.03.30 8:13 AM) 1 RegRexPlace v?.?.?.? (2014.01.19 3:40 PM) 8 selectNLaunch v2.1.0.0 (2019.01.11 11:42 PM) 8 Tidy2 v0.2.0.0 (2016.01.07 8:34 PM) 24 ZenCoding-Python v0.7.0.1 (2014.01.19 3:44 PM) 2 ZoomDisabler v1.2.0.0 (2016.09.27 8:25 PM) 5 _CustomizeToolbar v5.1.0.0 (2021.07.22 6:29 PM) -
@artie-finkelstein said in Plugins - too much of a good thing:
Notepad++ will silently ignore attempts to activate any menu items encountered after the 500th ID is enumerated.
Maybe, you should report a bug for it on GitHub.
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@mere-human - I’m not sure it’s an outright bug. Being silent about the ‘attempted overflow’ is not nice behavior, but the limits I exceeded are published.
I’m still investigating other corners of this little escapade. My numbers in the table in the original posting are correct in a first order sense (i.e., they were hand counted and are within 10% of the listed value).
So far, the only more reliable way I’ve found to determine the resource usage of a plugin is to install it and then probe it with the NppUISpy plugin by @dinkumoil (Andreas Heim). I love the irony of loading yet another plugin to investigate the resource usage of previously installed plugins.
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@artie-finkelstein said in Plugins - too much of a good thing:
I’m not sure it’s an outright bug.
But you could phrase it as a feature request, giving an example of your usage showing it’s not that hard to get enough Plugins menu entries to use up the 500-entry limit, which might be enough to convince them to change the
ID_PLUGINS_CMD_LIMITfrom22500to22999(giving about 1000, not just 500)… or change from 22000…22500 to 30000…39999 to give plenty of room for even the plugin-est installation ever. -
@artie-finkelstein said in Plugins - too much of a good thing:
I’m not sure it’s an outright bug. Being silent about the ‘attempted overflow’ is not nice behavior, but the limits I exceeded are published.
Maybe, it’s not a bug. But it makes some use cases uncomfortable. So we can think about such improvements as:
- Show a warning when the plugin maximum is exceeded.
- Increase the plugin maximum value.
- Some workaround that doesn’t need us to rely on the numbers at all.
1 and 2 seem quite valid and feasible.
Feel free to create GitHub issues for these if you want. -
Thank you for the gentle reminder about 'Feature Requests.
[Feature Request] - exceeding ID_PLUGINS_CMD_LIMIT #10263 has been made
