Notepad++ is undoubtedly the most popular text editor for Windows. It is fast, free and uses a minimal of the system resources. I have been using Notepad++ myself for more than ten years. It comes with all the features that one would expect from a text editor or source code editor. And we can add many more features to Notepad++ using a number of freely available plugins. For example, we can add encryption features to Notepad++ using a plugin called SecurePad.
The SecurePad plugin for Notepad++ adds the capability to encrypt documents using Blowfish cipher which is almost as good as the powerful AES. Here is how we can install and use SecurePad in Notepad++ quickly:
- Launch Notepad++ and from the menubar select Plugins → Plugins Admin.
- From the list of Available plugins, select SecurePad and then click on the Install button. This will download the required files for the plugin, install SecurePad and finally restart Notepad++
- After Notepad++ has restarted, you can access SecurePad by picking Plugins → SecurePad from the menubar. It offers encryption of the entire document or only of the selected text.
- When encrypting a piece of text or an entire text file, you will have to supply the password which is used when decrypting the same document. If you forget this password, you will never be able to decrypt that text file.
SecurePad gives easy access to encrypt or decrypt files or selected text from within Notepad++. It is easy to install and works flawlessly on Notepad++. The encryption process is very fast and it encrypts everything in a flash.
If you cannot seem to make it work through the built-in plugins installer tool of Notepad++ then you can also manually download SecurePad from its Github webpage and extract it to the plugins folder of Notepad++. You can download SecurePad manually from https://github.com/DominicTobias/SecurePad.