

The number '41' gets interpretted as the letter 'A'. Instead, it looks at the number and say "what character should this number be interpretted as?", and will display a textual character. When you look at the file in Notepad++, it is not showing you those numbers. That is what is actually inside the file. see all those numbers in black in the center? Those are the bytes. Here is what that same file looks like in a hex editor (HxD): here is what a simple text file looks like in a text editor (Notepad++): What makes hex editors special is that they do not interpret the data as anything - they merely load it and display it for what it is: A raw series of bytes.įor example. So you'll end up seeing meaningless garbage. So when you open an image file in Notepad, it will try to interpret the data as text, even though it is supposed to be interpretted as image data. And the reason you can have text files is because programs like Notepad look at those bytes and interpret the numbers to be text. Now the reason you can have a bmp file that contains an image is because programs like Paint look at those bytes and interpret the numbers to be colors. There is nothing more to them than that *. Each byte is 8 bits, each bit is either a 1 or a 0. But that doesn't really help you understand it, and you won't understand it unless you understand how files work.Ī file is just a series of bytes. What those characters are is simply a textual representations of the bytes in the file. This question is ill-founded and doesn't really make sense.

dll files to the Notepad++\plugins folder.I used a hex editor to view them but they are invisible in hex editor Some of the plugins can be installed using Plugins Admin ( ALT + P) but some of them cannot, so in most cases we recommend copying. In this article, we would like to show you the most useful Notepad++ plugins for developers.
