How to Enable Multi-Instance Mode in Notepad++

Notepad++ is the most popular and very powerful text editor. It is available for Windows users and offers many unique features for editing the plain text files. It can be used to write source code files for a number of programming languages . It supports colored syntax highlighting  for a number of programming languages such as HTML, CSS, PHP, C, C++, C#, YAML, VBScript, JavaScript and more.

By default, Notepad++ runs in the single-instance mode. This means that all the files opened in Notepad++ open in the same window. If you open more than one file, then these files are opened in the new tabs inside the same window. This could be a problem if you do not want to open all the files inside the same instance especially if you want to open hundreds of text files.

Fortunately, Notepad++ also supports a multi-instance mode too. We can enable this mode if we want to use Notepad++ in multiple instances. This way we can open all the files in different Notepad++ windows.

Here is how you can enable multi-instance mode for Notepad++ easily:

  1. Launch Notepad++. Select Settings and then Preferences from the menubar to open Notepad++ preferences.
  2. In the Notepad++ preferences, select Multi-Instance & Date from the left side list of categories.Notepad++ Multi-Instance Mode
  3. On the right side select the checkbox Always in multi-instance mode and then click on the Close button.
  4. Close the Notepad++ window and launch it again.

In the multi-instance mode, Notepad++ creates a new window whenever you open a text file in Notepad++ so that it can open that file in that newly created window. This is different from the single-instance-mode behavior where all the newly opened files are opened in a new tab in the already open Notepad++ window. In the multiple instance mode, Notepad++ might consume a little more memory than the single-instance or mono-instance mode.