Notepad++ is a great editor… The regular expression facility is stunted, but I can live with that. It is OK for most find/replace situations, and for the occasional others I'll just hop across to UltraEdit (Unicode) or TextPad (ASCII only).
However, I can't live without a hex editor on tap!
The Notepad++ HexEditor plugin seems to work fine… I use it frequently.
For some reason unknown to me, this plugin is forcibly disabled by Notepad++ whenever I upgrade to the latest version (of Notepad++), with a message something like ".. due to instability issues".
HexEditor.dll gets moved into a "quarantine" subfolder: .\disabled.
This sounds a bit ominous. I have searched high and low, and I have found nothing which makes any reference to this mysterious "instability".
The plugin is available on the Notepad++ plugins page (which lists third-party plugins, and is not, strictly speaking, a Notepad++ page), and there is no mention of instability.
What's going on? Does it randomly get it wrong and corrupt data? Does it crash Notepad++?
Can I trust this plugin?
Best Answer
The Hex Editor plugin was disabled for being unstable. This means that the plugin crashed Notepad++ in some situations. I encountered this problem myself when trying to save an edited file.
Earlier versions of Notepad++ don't have those problems with the plugin.