Notepad++ inserting special Unicode characters in UTF-8

notepadspecial characterstext editingunicodeutf-8

What's the best ways to enter special Unicode characters into a Notepad++ document? Do I have to rely on the operating system (Windows)?

Looking for a see-and-click solution.

I can bring up the ASCII Insertion Panel with Edit | Character Panel — that works great — but it only has the 256 raw characters. In UTF-8 mode I'd like to have a similar feature for the full encoded set, e.g. the Greek alphabet, math symbols, etc. I don't want to have to use the numeric keypad. Similar question on SourceForge but no answer there either.

Best Answer

Set up a User Defined Command:

  1. Select the Run menu then the Run... menuitem
  2. Enter charmap
  3. Click Save...
  4. Enter a name to identify it, e.g. &charmap (the ampersand lets you specify C as the accelerator key, so Alt+R then C activate it, unless you have another command with the same accelerator key).
  5. Optionally specify a keyboard shortcut to trigger it, e.g. ALT and Num +
  6. Click OK

Now whenever you want to enter a character, either use the Run menu or shortcut/accelerator key to open Windows Character Map, and either pick one or more characters or search for it/them using its Unicode name in "Search for:", copy to the clipboard, close Character Map and paste in Notepad++.

Note that you have to be in a unicode format for the characters to display in Notepad++. This is done by going to the Format menu and selecting "Encode in UTF-8" or similar. Now you can paste in Greek letters, subscripts, etc. into Notepad++.

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