Notepad++ not responding

Fleur Schut

I’m using Notepad++ a lot but today I can’t launch it since it’s not responding. I tried to uninstall via the control panel but I get an NSIS error message saying Error launching installer’. I tried to manually launch the uninstall.exe file retrieved in the program folder, but that provokes the same error. Since my version is 7.5.6, I downloaded a more recent version and tried to install that. The installation worked (so I now have version 8.1.4), however when opening Notepad, it’s still not responding. I have Windows 7 Enterprise.

PeterJones

@Fleur-Schut ,

There are plenty of people who use Notepad++ every day without “not responding” difficulties; and my guess is there are still plenty of people who, like you, still use Win7 despite MS dropping support more than a year ago, and still use Notepad++ on that older OS without difficulty. (Even I still have one Win7 machine that I keep around because of one piece of hw that I rarely use that requires a driver that only works on Win7.)

your old v7.5.6 was pretty old – so it was much better used with Win7 than the modern 8.1.4 will be (because there were more instances of Win7 back when v7.5.6 was new), so it should have in theory worked well.

So my guess is that the “not responding” is probably a result of the particular plugins you have installed, or the config files you are using.

For all the experiments below, you will want to make sure you understand what I say when I mention %AppData%. We have a FAQ Desk entry about %AppData% if you need to learn about it or need a refresher.

For all the experiments below, I am assuming you have killed any “not responding” notepad++ instances and closed any instances of notepad++ from a previous step. We are keeping these experiments separate.

Experiments to try:

Download a portable zip edition, and unzip into a folder where you have write permission (like your Desktop). Run the executable that’s in that folder. If it works, then it’s further confirmation that the problem lies with your particular installation. Exit the portable Notpead++.
Try to run your installed copy without plugins: go to C:\Program Files\Notepad++ (or wherever your installed copy of 8.1.4 is), and open up a cmd.exe or powershell window there; on the command line, run notepad++ -noPlugin . If it runs without a “not responding” problem, then it is one of your plugins that is causing the problem; if so, let us know, and we can give next steps for debugging which plugin is the culprit. Exit Notepad++
Try to run your installed copy without loading the current session, because sometimes when it’s trying to load a network file or a file or directory that no longer exists, it can freeze or stop responding; and if you had a huge file, maybe you no longer have the memory or resources to open that huge file again: go to C:\Program Files\Notepad++ (or wherever your installed copy of 8.1.4 is), and open up a cmd.exe or powershell window there; on the command line, run notepad++ -nosession . If it works, then it was one of the files that it was trying to re-open that was causing the problem; exit Notepad++, go to %AppData%\Notepad++ 🛈, and rename session.xml to session.xml.bak; the next time you run Notepad++, it should work normally, but not have any of the previous open files open. If you want to look up what your old open files were, to try to re-open them in the responding Notepad++, look at %AppData%\Notepad++\session.xml.bak, which will list the files. Try them one at a time if you want them open again.
Go to %AppData% and rename Notepad++ to Notepad++.bak ; run your installed Notepad++ – this will run it without any of the existing config files, and will create a new %AppData%\Notepad++ directory with fresh/known-good config files. If it works this way, then one of your old config files was the culprit; at this point, you can either just continue from the fresh config state, or you can try comparing the old and new config files, to figure out what went wrong, and maybe try to get back as many of your old settings as you can.

Fleur Schut

@PeterJones said in Notepad++ not responding:

%AppData%\Notepad++

Thank you so much for the detailed explanations. Option 3 did the trick!

mere-human

@PeterJones said in Notepad++ not responding:

We are keeping these experiments separate.
Experiments to try:

I feel like this kind of answers are invaluable and should be more accessible to other users.
Maybe, we should create a FAQ section in Notepad++ User Manual and add links there?

Ashutosh Sharma

@mere-human Worked for me. Thanks