This is a quick list of the plugins available for Notepad++ that can benefit developers (as of January 2018).

All plugins are available from the Plugin Manager inside Notepad++. There are plenty more which you may also find useful in the Plugin Repository – these are the ones I usually install as I’ll generally do HTML, JS and PHP programming in Notepad++.

• Converter
  – Converts selected text (hexadecimal string or ASCII string) to ASCII or hexadecimal string according your choice.
• DSpellCheck
  – Spell-checking plugin which features: Underlining spelling mistakes and finding mistakes only in comments and strings (in documents of recognised languages like C++, C#, Java, PHP etc).
• HTML Tag
  – Adds useful HTML writing features, such as HTML and XML tag jumping (like the default brace jumping), and HTML and JS entity encoding and decoding.
• JSTool
  – The most useful feature for me of this plugin is the JSON syntax highlighting, prettify and minify features.
• Markdownviewer++
  – Provides a viewing pane for previewing Markdown. Useful for writing your readmes for GIT. Do take note though that Markdown is an non-standard markup format and not all MD features of a site may be supported (eg; at least one table format GitHub supports isn’t rendered in this plugin at this time).
• MIME Tools
  – Has a really useful Base64 encoding/decoding feature. Can also do entity encoding.
• PHP Autocompletion
  – Provides auto completion for standard PHP classes and functions.
• Tidy2
  – Gives you a selection of tools to prettify or minify HTML and XML. Also provides code ‘tidy up’ features.
• XML Tools
  – Adds XML validation (schema + dtd), syntax checker and auto-closer, along with a load of other useful features. Note that this plugin will often warn that is has not been properly signed when you go to install. Install at your own risk, though given it’s still listed in the plugin repo I feel confident it’s safe.