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Building Notepad++ with Microsoft Visual Studio

Pre-requisites:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 (C/C++ Compiler, v143 toolset for win32, x64, arm64)

There are three components which are built from one visual studio solution:

  • notepad++.exe: (contains libSciLexer.lib)
  • libScintilla.lib : static library based on Scintilla
  • libLexilla.lib : static library based on Lexilla

Notepad++ is always built with Boost regex PCRE support instead of default c++11 regex ECMAScript used by plain Scintilla.

Build notepad++.exe:

  1. Open PowerEditor\visual.net\notepadPlus.sln
  2. Select a solution configuration (Debug or Release) and a solution platform (x64 or Win32 or ARM64)
  3. Build Notepad++ solution like a normal Visual Studio project. This will also build the dependent Scintilla and Lexilla projects.

Build libScintilla.lib and libLexilla.lib:

As mentioned above, you'll need libScintilla.lib and libLexilla.lib for the Notepad++ build. This is done automatically on building the whole solution. So normally you don't need to care about this.

Build libScintilla.lib with boost and libLexilla.lib via nmake:

This is not necessary any more and just here for completeness as this option is still available. Boost is taken from boost 1.78.0 and stripped down to the project needs available at boost in this repo.

  1. Open the Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio
  2. Go into the scintilla\win32\
  3. Build the same configuration as notepad++:
    • Release: nmake -f scintilla.mak
    • Debug: nmake DEBUG=1 -f scintilla.mak
    • Example: nmake -f scintilla.mak
  4. Go into the lexilla\src\
  5. Build the same configuration as notepad++:
    • Release: nmake -f lexilla.mak
    • Debug: nmake DEBUG=1 -f lexilla.mak

History:

More about the previous build process: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/13959/building-notepad-with-visual-studio-2015-2017

Since Notepad++ version 6.0 - 7.9.5, the build of dynamic linked SciLexer.dll that is distributed uses features from Boost's Boost.Regex library.

Building Notepad++ with GCC

If you have MinGW-w64 installed, you can compile Notepad++ with GCC. Otherwise MinGW-w64 can be downloaded here. You can also download some collection of tools which supports MinGW-w64, like MSYS2 or WinLibs.

Building Notepad++ is regularly tested on a Windows system by using MSYS2 project. Current versions of tools used to building (such as GCC, Make or Bash) can be checked by looking at some logs from the finished building (for example in the current-build page). Other versions may also work but are untested.

Note: Before building make sure that the system PATH environment variable contains $MinGW-root$\bin directory. Otherwise you have to set this directory yourself in Windows settings. You can also use a command like set PATH=$MinGW-root$\bin;%PATH% each time cmd is launched. But beware that if PATH contains several versions of MinGW-w64 GCC, only the first one will be usable.

Compiling Notepad++ binary

  1. Launch cmd and add $MinGW-root$\bin to PATH if necessary.
  2. cd into notepad-plus-plus\PowerEditor\gcc.
  3. Run mingw32-make.
  4. The 32-bit or 64-bit notepad++.exe will be generated either in bin.i686 or in bin.x86_64 directory respectively, depending on the target CPU of the compiler — look for the full path to the resulting binary at the end of the build process.

Some additional information:

  • The directory containing notepad++.exe will also contain everything needed for Notepad++ to start.
  • To have a debug build just add DEBUG=1 to the mingw32-make invocation above. The output directory then will be suffixed with -debug.
  • To see commands being executed add VERBOSE=1 to the same command.
  • When a project is built outside of the PowerEditor/gcc directory, for example when using -f option, then the entire project path must not contain any spaces. Additionally, the path to makefile of this project should be listed as first.
  • When a project is built through MinGW-w64 with multilib support, a specific target can be forced by passing TARGET_CPU variable with x86_64 or i686 as value.