Seamless upgrading to 64-bit

alexolog

What would be the easiest way to upgrade from a 32-bit NPP to a 64-bit, including:

All NPP settings
All installed plugins settings

Thank you.

PeterJones

Settings is easy: with normal installation, it goes in %AppData%\Notepad++ 🛈 whether it’s 32-bit or 64-bit installation, so the 64-bit will automatically see the settings.

Plugins: sorry, no easy answer: the installations go in two separate folders, and the plugin DLLs are incompatible between the two, so after you install 64-bit, you’re just going to have to install all the plugins from the plugins admin. But for the plugins settings, those go in %AppData%\Notepad++\Plugins\Config, so are shared between 32-bit and 64-bit.

Your actual biggest point of pain might be file association and related, because we’ve had reports from various users that when going from 32 to 64bit, one or more registry entries don’t get updated correctly, so it points to the wrong folder. If you have problems with that, you might want to search the registry for notepad++.exe, and make sure that any paths point to your 64-bit installation, not the 32-bit installation.

Michael Vincent

@alexolog

As @PeterJones says it’s easy and not so easy. I did this a few years ago. I should start by saying I’ve always used the portable ZIP edition, use local config option (so my settings are in the Notepad++ install folder) and I’ve never used the installer.

That said, I just installed 64-bit into npp64 directory, copied my plugins\config directory from the 32-bit one and other settings files (mostly in the main Notepad++ folder - config.xml, contextMenu.xml, shortcuts.xml) and then manually installed plugins. I did have some file editing to do (config.xml I believe contains the full path of Notepad++ so that had to be changed). Once I could run both, I spent some time making sure everything was “the same”. Then I used 64-bit only for a while and anytime I found something in my workflow was “missing”, I could revert to 32-bit while seeing if there was a way to address in 64-bit. I did find some plugins just were “missing” but I also found different - in some cases, better - ways to work without them (e.g. I gave up MultiClipBoard plugin (32-bit only) in favor of Ditto - system-wide smart clipboard). I eventually just deleted the 32-bit version as I became so comfortable with 64-bit and addressed any of the “missing” pieces.

So it doesn’t have to be one or the other, you can gradually shift. Hope that helps.

Cheers.

PS: This conversion time for me is when I forked a lot of 32-bit only “abandoned” plugins and made them available on 64-bit. That get’s mentioned from time to time - this is the “origin” story.

alexolog

It worked mostly seamlessly.

I had to search the registry for references of NPP that used the “Program Files (x86)” path or the equivalent “special folder” GUID, and edit them.

Similarly, config files in %APPDATA% had to be modified (Firefox, Thunderbird, IZArc, etc.) because I could not remember what applications I configured to use NPP as an editor.

But everything seems to be working now.