Meenu Hinduja Dheeraj Sudan - Best Plugins for Improving Productivity in Notepad++

MHindujaDheerajSudan

Hi everyone, I’m Dheeraj Sudan from the UK. I’m a software developer and also run a business with my wife Meenu Hinduja. And We regularly use Notepad++ for development and log analysis. We’d like recommendations on essential plugins that enhance productivity, such as code formatting, comparison tools, or session management. Which plugins do you personally rely on, and are there any compatibility concerns with recent versions?

Thanks
Meenu Hinduja Dheeraj Sudan

Alan Kilborn

@MHindujaDheerajSudan said in Meenu Hinduja Dheeraj Sudan - Best Plugins for Improving Productivity in Notepad++:

log analysis

The Analyse plugin is pretty good, IMO.

PeterJones

@MHindujaDheerajSudan said in Meenu Hinduja Dheeraj Sudan - Best Plugins for Improving Productivity in Notepad++:

code formatting,

Depends on what language your code is in. For example, for formatting XML, I recommend XMLTools; for formatting JSON, I recomment JsonTools.

For most programming languges, there are standard executable-based formatters that are considered “best practice” for that language. Instead of having a dedicated plugin for each language you write in, my recommendation is to use a plugin to route the files through that external formatter.

The “Pork to Sausage” (P2S) plugin is actually good for that: you can define “transformations”, where it passes the content of the file thru an executable, and replaces the contents with the output of that executable (unfortunately, you have to do a Ctrl+A to select the whole text first, before running hte P2S.
this post my @Michael-Vincent, and the follow-on a couple posts down, give an example script for the NppExec plugin that routes various filetypes to their appropriate formatter/pretty-printer executables.

Also, our compile/convert FAQ shows examples of how to do that sort of thing with both P2S or using NppExec to drive it – both are common solutions among the power-users here.

comparison tools

ComparePlus plugin. Hands down. No reason to consider anything else. It’s awesome.

session management.

The only session management plugin I can think of is Session Manager. I don’t use it, but I seem to remember people like it.

Which plugins do you personally rely on, and are there any compatibility concerns with recent versions?

Rely On: NppExec and ComparePlus are in my standard workflow for code development. And I use PythonScript for scripting tasks inside Notepad++ (like macros, but on steroids, because it has the full power of Python behind it), but that doesn’t fall within the types of tasks you were look for plugins for.

Compatibility: Pork2Sausage, NppExec, and ComparePlus are all actively maintained, and definitely don’t have any compatibility issues. I don’t know how Session Manager is doing for maintenance.