Saturday, April 19, 2008

Notepad++ minus Comic Sans

'Unfortunately, I (Notepad++ author) am one of very few users who like "Comic Sans MS" font.
So just remove Comic Sans MS font from your system, it will be a easier solution for both of us.'
- Notepad++ FAQ Page

Now Comic Sans is a very good font I agree, but every font has its purpose. Having Comic Sans showing up on text files make them ridiculously difficult to read. Unfortunately, comments in any language are set to Comic Sans by default - and the reason is perhaps what I've quoted above from Notepad++ FAQ.

Well, even though the author of Notepad++ is touchy about this subject, there is no reason to remove either Comic Sans or Notepad++ from your system. Here's how you change the default.
1) Go to %APPDATA%\Notepad++ folder. (%APPDATA% usually refers to "C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data" in Windows XP.)
2) Here you'll see a file called styles.xml. Open it with Notepad++.
3) Replace all "Comic Sans MS" (including quotes) with "".
4) To make matters worse, comments are not only Comic Sans, but also set with a different font size. Just replace all fontSize="8" to fontSize="" and you're done!
5) Save the file and restart Notepad++.

And you're done! Notepad++, an excellent tool, is now the way it should be!

3 comments:

  1. Yay, thank you for this trick!
    What I did was set the global override font to Lucidia Console, but this trick fixed the size as well!

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  2. There is a global font/size override setting in new versions of Notepad++, you can find it in Settings, Styler config (I am using v4.9.2).

    Just put a check on [x] Enable global font, and [x] Enable global size.

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  3. The setting in at the following location:

    Settings,
    Styler Configurator...,
    Language: Global Styles,
    Style: Global override
    [x] Enable global font
    [x] Enable global font size

    ReplyDelete