Offensive Installer - Please Fix

John Coogan

I support over 14,000 users at hospitals across multiple states in the USA. I am on the phone with nurse practitioners daily, recommending that they use Notepad++ (instead of Windows Notepad) when attempting to solve complex issues with medical data that is transmitted in text file format.

Our contracts are with state and federal agencies. We have gone as far as to reference Notepad++ as a great time saver and we tout it’s awesome features.

However, the installation screen is a continual embarrassment to us, please see the included picture. It is making our organization look juvenile, and it is personally a great embarrassment to be on the phone with doctors, hospital CEO’s, and nurses especially, while helping them to install your software.

So, I respectfully ask: Please remove the statement about sex from your installation screen. Imagine how it makes a nurse practitioner feel when she is tasked with providing medical care to an abused sex worker.

Thanks.
John Coogan

PeterJones

@John-Coogan ,

The developer is rather a free-speech absolutist, and he chafes whenever anyone suggests that he choose to moderate his own personal expression through the application.

However, if you want to get his attention and try to convince him, you should create an issue in the GitHub repository, because he won’t see it here.

(Note: it’s been tried before, like here, without success.)

John Coogan

@PeterJones Thanks for the advice. Will do.

mkupper

@John-Coogan See if you can use a portable installation. The “installed” and “portable” versions are nearly identical. If you download and expand one of the portable .zip or .7z files you will see that the package includes a file named doLocalConf.xml. Delete that file and Notepad++ will use %AppData% for its configuration files. The standard installer copies the files to %ProgramFiles% (64-bit) or %ProgramFiles(x86)% (32-bit) which normally needs administrator rights to copy in the files.

I think the main issue you will run into is that Notepad++ is a project and resulting application designed for individual desktop users. It still seems to be very much a work in progress in terms of setting up an installation for “all users” of a computer, installation on either locked down desktops or remote-desktop machines.

For example, Notepad++'s Run menu allows for the user to run any other application on the machine. You likely don’t want that if you are trying to create locked down desktops for people. Notepad++'s plugin architecture is very powerful in the hands of a person who owns and controls their own desktop but also can be abused by someone trying to bypass controls you may want to impose on a desktop.