Meet nshini – A Notes.ini Editing and Conversion Tool
Daniel Nashed – 5 July 2026 10:39:00
If you've administered HCL Domino long enough, you've probably edited notes.ini more times than you can count. It looks like a simple text file—but it isn't. notes.ini is stored in LMBCS, a Lotus-specific character encoding.
Modern editors expect UTF-8. While ASCII-only settings are usually safe, any non-ASCII value—passwords, international characters, or localized paths—can be silently corrupted simply by opening and saving the file in a standard editor.
That's exactly why I created nshini after working with another HCL partner on one of his support tickets.
In his case support asked him to make changes to the notes.ini which broke umlauts.
nshini transparently converts notes.ini between LMBCS and UTF-8 using the official Domino C API. You edit a normal UTF-8 file in your preferred editor, and the tool safely converts everything back when you're done.
This makes working with notes.ini much more comfortable on both clients and servers.
When changing settings on a server you can always use "set config".
On Windows, nshini integrates seamlessly with Notepad++, allowing you to use one of the best text editors available, complete with syntax highlighting, search, and visual diff support.
On Linux, it works equally well with your favorite editor while providing clean UTF-8 output for scripts and command-line tools.
Beyond editing, converting notes.ini to UTF-8 opens the door to modern tooling. Configuration can be compared with standard diff tools, processed by scripts, indexed, or even analyzed by AI workflows without worrying about legacy character encoding.
nshini also provides commands to read and update notes.ini variables through the Domino API, making it useful for automation as well as interactive administration.
The project is open source and available on GitHub:
GitHub: https://github.com/nashcom/nshini
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