User Manual History
Prior to 2019, the Notepad++ “manual” was a wiki that had been locked to user input since 2015, so it was years out-of-date.
In the Summer of 2019, Peter Jones spearheaded a team effort to create a new User Manual website tracked in GitHub, allowing collaborative contributions without the vandalism risk posed by a wiki. The first version of https://npp-user-manual.org was released on September 8, 2019, with a description of Notepad++ as of v7.7.1.
Starting in release 2.4, the GitHub release page for each version of the User Manual contains a zipfile with an HTML copy of the User Manual which you can download for offline reference. The landing page for the User Manual contains a download link to the newest offline zipfile:
All releases of the Notepad++ User Manual can be found in the GitHub releases page for the project, but some major milestone versions of the manual are linked here:
| Manual Version | N++ Version | Offline Download | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | v7.7.1 | n/a | Initial Release |
| v2.4 | v7.9.5 | ↗ | First Offline Bundle |
| v2.5 | v8.0 | ↗ | Dark Mode |
| v3.6 | v8.5.3 | ↗ | Last release with v7.x specifics |
| v4.3 | v8.6.5 | ↗ | First release with automatic Dark/Light for offline user manual zip |
After a new major revision of Notepad++ is released (like from v7.x to v8.x), there will be a few versions of the manual that still contain mentions of the previous major-revision specifics, but eventually those specifics will be removed. When a major version is no longer discussed in the Online User Manual, this History page will link to the last User Manual release with specifics to that major version. (A similar process may be used for smaller revisions (like v8.x to v8.y), if the User Manual maintainers feel that the historical notes need to be reduced.)