How can I change the icon for Notepad++

Steven Brough

How can I change the icon for Notepad++ so all the icons on the computer have a different image, I like Notepads icon and am used to seeing that for text files. but they didnt help.

Re: How can I change Notepad++'s icon?

Windows 10 Home

TroshinDV

@Steven-Brough
Download http://www.smorgasbordet.com/pellesc/
Open the NotePad ++ file. EXE and change the icons.

PeterJones

@Steven-Brough ,

As an alternative to editing the icon inside the executable (which has the dangers that you could easily corrupt the executable into not working right, and means that you would have to edit the icon every time you updated Notepad++ to a newer version which would get annoying), you can use the standard Windows tools for assigning icons. Because the question “how do I change the icons of all text files” is the same as “how do I change the icons for all image files” or “how do I change the icons for all PDF files” – you use Windows tools to do so.

The way I do such things is directly in the Windows Registry using regedit.exe (please note that editing the registry does have dangers as well, but that if you follow directions, you generally won’t mess anything up). in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, navigate to .txt ; it will have the (Default) value of something like txtfile ; navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile (or whatever it was for yours); there might be a key (looks like a subfolder) called DefaultIcon – if not, right click on txtfile and New > Key to create it – then go into DefaultIcon ; point the (Default) to the location of the icon (mine defaults to %SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-102 which is the Windows-standard text document icon; yours might be "C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe,-100" which points to Notepad++'s standard icon; you could also point it to c:\some\path\to\myFavorite.ico to use some specific icon).
But Windows 10 is slowly moving away from the old .txt => txtfile mapping, and is pushing harder to force you to use their “Open With” and “Default Apps” settings, which make it harder to change things like the icon – if the registry settings above don’t work for you, you might have to search the internet for other ways to change the icon for a specific file type (Because really, this is a Windows question, not a Notepad++ question).

PeterJones

@PeterJones said in How can I change the icon for Notepad++:

which make it harder to change things like the icon

Since I was curious, and confirmed that my current machine was using the OpenWith choice for .txt files, I experimented a bit. In the registry, there is an HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad++.exe key. If I navigate to that, it has a shell subkey, which defines the various actions in the same way as old-fashioned associations in the registry. Thus, I tried creating the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad++.exe\DefaultIcon, and gave the (Default) = "c:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe",-101 . After convincing Windows to refresh icons (sometimes requires logging off and back on, or rebooting), my .txt files (and anything else that’s OpenWith Notepad++) now use the Notepad++ chameleon icon. So, yes, if the old .txt => txtfile => DefaultIcon doesn’t work, maybe Applications\notepad++.exe\DefaultIcon will work for you.