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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 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?

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85% accept rate
Interesting question? Could it be that the problem was fixed on plug-in side and the Notepad++ side wasn't notified of it? In the end, you could always ask developers why is the plug-in tagged incompatible. – AndrejaKo Jul 13 '10 at 11:48
A Google search for Notepad++ HexEditor instability finds a thread (number 2 only to this Super User question) which suggests HexEditor "can crash Notepad++ in some rare cases". – Bavi_H Jul 14 '10 at 4:04
...And here's a relevant-looking bug tracker search for open HexEditor bugs: Notepad++ Plugins - Tracker: Bugs - Open - HexEditor – Bavi_H Jul 14 '10 at 4:16
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Thanks for the comments. I've been to Notepad++'s Sourceforge forum, and found some entries. 2009-12-09 HexEditor v0.9.5 vs N++ v5.6.1 2009-09-25 Hex editor 2009-09-11 Hex-Editor v0.9.5 available It seems safe data-wise, with some display bugs which they're working out.. Good enough for me, as my main concern was the question of data corruption. – Peter.O Jul 16 '10 at 16:49
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5 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

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.

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Thanks for the comment... Perhaps I was using it in a way which didn't trigger the bug.... In the 10 months since I asked the question, I've worked around the issue by using Emacs as my "serious" editor... (actually I've shifted camps entirely to Ubuntu, where I can still use Notepad++; running in wine.. :) – Peter.O May 18 '11 at 15:16
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up vote 1 down vote

Some plugins are disabled by notepad++ when you upgrade it :/. One of my favorite diff plugins got disabled a while back and I have had to get a earlier version of notepad++ to cope.

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up vote 1 down vote

Just put it back in the plugins folder and it works fine.

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up vote 1 down vote

I too like the HexEditor plugin. I rolled back Notepad++ to older version to be able to work with this plugin. Now I checked the latest version on Notepad++ (v5.9.2 unicode) with the latest HexEditor plugin (v.0.9.5 unicode) and it works! The plugin is no longer disabled.

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It's available but the Stability still says there are reported problems. – PPC-Coder Jul 22 '11 at 15:23
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up vote 0 down vote

Simply copying HexEditor.dll back from disabled to pluggins folder solves the problem. I haven't come across any crash.

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