I love Notepad++. When working in Windows it’s my go-to text editor. One thing I don’t like about it, though, is that it seems to only work in one window by default.

It turns out there is a way to change Notepad++ to work more like Notepad – that is, each file you open opens up in a new window instead of a tab in the same window. There doesn’t appear to be a menu option to enable this functionality; however it is still possible to get Notepad++ to behave more like Notepad that way, thanks to this post.

The trick is to create an empty file named asNotepad.xml and to place that file in the directory where Notepad++ is installed (C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++ in my case.)

That’s it! once the empty asNotepad.xml file is in the Notepad++ program directory, it acts more like notepad in the sense that each file is opened in a new window. Handy.