NP++ plugins are great, except when they're terrible
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I’ve been a Notepad++ user for over a decade, it has been my editor of choice for a long time but I think I’m finally frustrated enough after my latest incident to start exploring alternative solutions. In my experience the core application is great, but when trying to extend it’s functionality with plugins it becomes a completely different and unstable beast. Unfortunately there are some features that I require that are only available as plugins and not natively supported by NP++, otherwise I would just disable the plugins altogether and keep chugging along with it. Today my installation got stuck in a lovely infinite loop - when opening the application there is a message that Notepad++ needs to close to complete updating plugins, where it proceeds to crash upon clicking OK, then relaunches itself with the same message. This is probably the third or fourth time over the course of my history using Notepad++ where the application suffered catastrophic unrecoverable failure like this due to some plugin or other breaking in a horrible way that cripples the entire program. I could spend my day trying to muck out the borked plugins (again) or just nuke the installation entirely and spend my day reconfiguring a fresh install instead… either way I lost a day debugging my development environment instead of my code. I used to just take these problems in stride but nowadays I have deadlines to deal with and can’t afford the risk of my editor dying a horrible death on me in the middle of a project like this. I will probably make the switch to Sublime Text, even though I find it completely asinine that a text editor costs nearly as much as the entire Microsoft Office suite. The lack of a proper linux port for NP++ has also become a growing point of contention for me as I have been working more heavily on linux environments recently.
Goodbye Notepad++, we had some good times and fond memories together over the years, but it seems we have finally grown apart from each other and I need to find a more stable and supportive relationship with my text editor.
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Have you tried EditPad Pro?
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Once you get tired of Sublime (just as I got tired of Eclipse) and come back to NP++ (over wine), you can try to be less of a cry baby and help the community a bit.
Identify the plugin that cause problems and report it. Try to provide some helpful debugging information to the plugin developer, and start with a kind thank-you word.Why do you need to reinstall NP++ when you are on a deadline?
Even if you need to deploy it over multiple machines, Notepad++ does not really need installation. Just zip the binaries that work for you and extract them.
How many plugins do you try to install? There are tons of plugins but most people only use a few. -
@Arthur-Davis said:
I find it completely asinine that a text editor costs nearly as much as the entire Microsoft Office suite
A comment such as this from someone that appears to develop software (perhaps to make a living) sort of blows me away. Microsoft has their own business model, that bears little resemblance to that of small software companies, which I presume (perhaps wrongly, perhaps not) that the makers of Sublime are. Thus, maybe they NEED $79 per copy to stay alive. Again, I don’t know… What I do know is that if I want to use a piece of software, I don’t balk at the price. I have routinely paid $80 for software I’m going to use, and have rarely, if ever, regretted doing so.
I look at Notepad++ as something an individual (Don Ho, in the beginning) created on his own time, and graciously allows me to use (i.e., benefit from). Have I seen bugs? Yep. Have they ever been too burdensome to work around? Nope. Do I get all bent out of shape if something doesn’t work right, and go on the forum and rant and demand fixes, or say I’m switching to something else? Nope (at least I don’t think I do…). Do I get my money’s worth? Yep. :-)
