These super-generic “what’s your workflow?” posts come up every once in a while. Maybe you should try to search up the older ones – they follow almost exactly your wording, so they shouldn’t be hard to find. I don’t seem to remember the original poster coming back and learning anything from them, or even interacting again in most cases, so I don’t know that there’s really much point to them.

But since you ask, UDL and built-in syntax highlighting are non-negotiables, and I like the regex-based s+r (though I don’t need the complicated expressions that so many people ask us to make for them). As far as plugins go – for automating stuff for myself, PythonScript and NppExec and QuickText (I set up most of my workflow stuff ages ago, such that I don’t do anything new with those plugins, really… they just sit in the background making my life easier without me thinking about them anymore.)

But really, context-less questions like this are meaningless. What features, plugins, etc, would help you depend completely on what you do in Notepad++. If you never touch HTML, then someone saying all their favorite XML/HTML plugins would not help you one whit.