Why does Notepad++ disable the HexEditor plugin?

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 I 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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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

Solution 3:

I too like the HexEditor plugin. I rolled back Notepad++ to an 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.

Solution 4:

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