How can I configure the NppExec plugin for Notepad++? I would like NppExec to compile my C files, run them, and show their output, all within Notepad++. gcc and g++ are compiler -drivers of the GNU Compiler Collection (which was once upon a time just the GNU C Compiler ). Even though they automatically determine which backends (cc1 cc1plus ...) to call depending on the file-type, unless overridden with -x language, they have some differences. The probably most important difference in their defaults is which libraries they link against automatically. According to GCC's online documentation link options and how g++ is invoked, g++ is roughly ... it couldn't find any C / C ++ compiler in your PATH environment it couldn't find a CC environment variable defined with the full path to a compiler It was defaulting to nmake. Now here comes the problem: it does remember your implicit generator/ compiler choice in it's variable cache (see CMAKE_GENERATOR in CMakeCache.txt). A compiler is, more generally, a program that converts a program in one programming language into a program in another programming language (arguably, you can even have a compiler with the same input and output language if significant transformations are applied).
