Notepad++ development began in September 2003 by Don Ho, a former Paris Diderot University computer science student.

[12] Notepad++ was built as a Microsoft Windows application; the author considered, but rejected, the idea of using wxWidgets to port it to the Mac OS X and Unix platforms.

[15][16] In January 2010 the US government obliged US-based open source project hosts to deny access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria to comply with U.S.

[17] As a response to what the developer felt was a violation of the free and open-source software (FOSS) philosophy, in June 2010 Notepad++ moved out of US territorial jurisdiction by releasing a version on TuxFamily, in France.

As such, it may properly highlight code written in a supported schema, but whether the syntax is internally sound or compilable, cannot be verified.

In addition, it supports reinterpreting plain text files in various character encodings and can convert them to ASCII, UTF-8 or UCS-2.

[36][37][38] In January 2015, the Notepad++ website was hacked by activists from the Fallaga Team who objected to an Easter egg endorsing Je suis Charlie.

[39] The Fallaga Team has been linked to ISIL and is also believed to be responsible for the 2017 hacking of websites of the British National Health Service.

In the release notice, the author expressed concern that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been "subjected to political indoctrination, and sometimes even torture" in the Xinjiang re-education camp.

He called for "additional pressure on the Chinese government to stop their oppressive actions and crimes concerning the Uyghur people".

[41] The software's dedicated site came under a distributed-denial-of-service attack and its GitHub issue page was bombarded with nationalistic rhetoric, though it later recovered after being moved behind Cloudflare's anti-DDoS service.

In the release notice, the author expressed his concern about the Chinese government implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong.