Notepad++ release 8.9.8.1

PeterJones

@tordenflesk said:

My layout got corrupted/reset by this upgrade. Plugins etc. are installed but layout, themes fonts etc. are back to defaults:

quick way to restore?

Hopefully, it’s just that it used to point to local config but is now AppData, or similar. Can you share ?-menu’s Debug Info?

upgraded / Installed via scoop.

My guess is that the 8.9.8.1 fix for the 8.9.8 scoop problem somehow had that side effect. But that’s just my guess as someone on the periphery. With your Debug Info, one of the experts might have more insight.

rdipardo

@PeterJones said:

Hopefully, it’s just that it used to point to local config but is now AppData, or similar.

As a scoop user myself, I can confirm that it will configure Notepad++ for portable usage by default.¹ Removing the magic doLocalConf.xml file at %USERPROFILE%\scoop\apps\notepadplusplus\current is probably all that’s needed.

¹ This is one setting that’s not preserved during an upgrade (the other being the autoCompletion folder), while the contents of ${NPP_INSTALLATION_ROOT}\{backup,cloud,plugins,themes,userDefineLangs} are kept in sync by means of junctions between the canonical current folder and the versioned one. Someone should open an issue in the scoop repository, I just haven’t found the free time yet.

donho

@rdipardo said:

As a scoop user myself, I can confirm that it will configure Notepad++ for portable usage by default.¹

Thank you for the confirmation.
Are you saying that scoop changed their way to install Notepad++ due to the Regression of failure to open files via Notepad++ symlink paths in v8.9.8?

rdipardo

@donho said:

Are you saying that scoop changed their way to install Notepad++ due to the Regression of failure to open files via Notepad++ symlink paths in v8.9.8?

No. Scoop has always used junctions to persist the user’s config files — before and after v8.9.8 — by linking the (portable) installation directory to a stable %UserProfile%\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus folder, e.g.,¹

> dir %UserProfile%\scoop\apps\notepadplusplus\8.9.8.1

10/01/2026  08:01 PM    <DIR>          .
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <DIR>          ..
09/24/2026  09:58 AM    <DIR>          autoCompletion
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <JUNCTION>     backup [\??\C:\Users\Rob\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus\backup]
...
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <JUNCTION>     cloud [\??\C:\Users\Rob\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus\cloud]
...
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <JUNCTION>     plugins [\??\C:\Users\Rob\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus\plugins]
...
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <JUNCTION>     themes [\??\C:\Users\Rob\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus\themes]
...
09/29/2026  06:20 PM    <JUNCTION>     userDefineLangs [\??\C:\Users\Rob\scoop\persist\notepadplusplus\userDefineLangs]

The problem I was mentioning is with the installation script (available here). Because it always downloads a portable release, the bundled doLocalConf.xml file is extracted — and kept — every time, whether or not the user wants to run in portable mode.

¹ Notice that autoCompletion is not soft-linked, probably by oversight.

donho

FYI: the auto-update is triggered for this release.

drunkaan-cloud

Search in Files not working (no result found where obviously there are) in this release. Reinstallation => NO SUCCESS. I had to revert to 8.9.8 to use it again.

PeterJones

@drunkaan-cloud said:

Search in Files not working (no result found where obviously there are) in this release. Reinstallation => NO SUCCESS. I had to revert to 8.9.8 to use it again.

v8.9.8.1 Find in Files works fine for me.

Please:

Try with all plugins disabled, to make sure it’s not a plugin issue
share ?-menu’s Debug Info
share your FIND WHAT (use ` before and after your search, like `my.*search` , so that the Forum doesn’t “eat” your search characters as post-formatting)
share all the options in the Find in Files dialog (Filters, Directory, Search Mode, other checkboxes – a screenshot would be easiest)
does your directory contain *.lnk to files or other directories? or windows junctions or symlinks or hardlinks?

minneyb-unix

The installation keeps failing in my user\appdata\roaming\Notepad++\ folder. It keeps saying that access is denied. Its access is granted.

xomx

@minneyb-unix

Maybe an antivirus or similar problem.

Yesterday, I had some false-positives even while trying to download N++ GitHub artifacts. I checked these "notepad++.exe"s via VirusTotal and these were flagged (only by the MS own Defender engine). Now it’s ok, so I’d try again.

Xuân-Thơ HOÀNG

@Coises
Notepad++ v8.9.8.1 appears to misdetect a valid UTF-8 file without BOM as OEM 855. The file contains valid UTF-8 multibyte characters and can be decoded successfully as UTF-8. When “Autodetect character encoding” is disabled, closing and reopening Notepad++ correctly identifies the file as UTF-8. Re-enabling autodetection causes the same file to be detected as OEM 855 again.
For example, string UTF8 Ok but incorrect auto-detection: 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠

Coises

@Xuân-Thơ-HOÀNG said:

@Coises
Notepad++ v8.9.8.1 appears to misdetect a valid UTF-8 file without BOM as OEM 855. The file contains valid UTF-8 multibyte characters and can be decoded successfully as UTF-8. When “Autodetect character encoding” is disabled, closing and reopening Notepad++ correctly identifies the file as UTF-8. Re-enabling autodetection causes the same file to be detected as OEM 855 again.
For example, string UTF8 Ok but incorrect auto-detection: 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠 🧠

Just my personal opinion, not any sort of “official Notepad++ position”: Autodetect character encoding is an accident waiting to happen. There is no way to consistently and accurately detect character encoding on Windows, because Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, did not choose to store the character encoding of a file in any sort of metadata.

If you really have many files with different legacy character encodings, you will have to intervene manually to get correct results. There is no way around it. Autodetect character encoding might or might not reduce the number of cases where you must manually select the correct encoding, but sometimes it will be wrong. You can use the Encoding | Character sets menu to select the correct encoding before you modify the document in any way.

More common is to have just two potentially ambiguous cases: so-called “ANSI,” meaning the system default code page, and UTF-8 with no byte order mark. Outside of contrived examples and files that were supposed to be UTF-8 but contain invalid byte sequences, it is easy to tell those two apart with a very high rate of accuracy. (However, Notepad++ has a bug that can cause UTF-8 files to be mis-detected as ANSI.) That works better if you do not check Autodetect character encoding.