Windows – Notepad++ autosave plugin not working

When you get into this kind of scenario, you have probably done the install of the required dependencies wrong. Things to look for:

1. If your Notepad++ is a 32-bit executable, you must not have 64-bit DLLs (or vice versa). The bitness of the DLLs and the bitness of notepad++.exe must match (32-bit to 32-bit, or 64-bit to 64-bit).

2. Make sure you don't have XMLTools.dll sitting in the base directory where the notepad++.exe lives.

3. Make sure you don't have any of the four XMLTools.dll dependencies sitting in the plugins directory! The plugins directory is only for actual Notepad++ plugins; any other DLLs sitting in the plugins directory will be dynamically loaded by Notepad++ and attempted to be activated as plugins. But, since libxml2, iconv, etc. are not actual plugins, but rather, dependencies for XMLTools, the dynamic load will fail, because these DLLs do not have the Notepad++ plugin hooks. This will cause weird errors about "ANSI" and stuff.

4. If you don't have any other plugins installed that require native dependencies, you can safely delete any DLL file in the same directory as the notepad++.exe, except for SciLexer.dll. SciLexer is a core component of Notepad++ and must be kept.

5. If you haven't done this yet, look in \path_to_your_notepad++_installation\notepad++\plugins\ext_libs

Copy those DLLs to the same directory as notepad++.exe:

iconv.dll
libxml2.dll
libxslt.dll
zlib1.dll

Error: Installation of plugin failed

The latest version of the plugin manager was 1.4.9 at the time this answer was written(see Notepad++ Plugin Manager)

You can always find the latest release by going to https://github.com/bruderstein/nppPluginManager/releases/.

Try a manual install of the plugin manager:

1. Close notepad++

2. Download the latest plugin manager PluginManager_1.4.9_UNI.zip from https://github.com/bruderstein/nppPluginManager/releases/download/v1.4.9/PluginManager_v1.4.9_UNI.zip

3. Unzip the downloaded file

4. Copy plugins\PluginManager.dll to your notepad++\plugins directory

5. Restart notepad++