Filed under: Developer, Text, Freeware
Lee's Favorite Apps: Notepad++
Fortunately, I discovered Notepad++. It's totally free, extremely powerful, and does everything I need an editor to do (and a whole lot more). It's based on Scintilla, which is a fantastic foundation for source code editing.
What makes it so great? For starters, it's portable, it supports tabs, syntax highlighting,drag and drop, macro recording, regular expression search and replace, and auto-completion. That's barely the tip of the iceberg.
Multiview editing lets you two documents at once - or two views of the same document. Collapse regions of your code that you don't need visible while editing. Zooming makes code easy to read even on small screens (like my MSI Wind). Bookmarking important or troublesome locations in your files makes navigating them snap.
Plugins add another dimension to N++, and I've got a few favorites. Light explorer adds a small but very useful file browser pane, FTP Synchronize automatically updates your server with changes saved to a local copy, Quick Text offers powerful snippet management, and Secure Pad adds encrypt/decrypt functions.
There are several other great add-ons, and Notepad++ has an enthusiastic, supportive community. They have also contributed tons of autocompletes, translations, themes, and language additions - everything from Smarty to UnrealScript.
Notepad++ is simply a great application.

Neon Maze

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
-=Ben=- said 2:24PM on 10-09-2008
Notepad++ is awesome
Great post Lee!
_________
-=Ben=-
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Rocketboy said 2:32PM on 10-09-2008
Another one to check out is PSPad. But when it comes down to the uber-helpful text editors, it starts to become simply a matter of preference.
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yuval said 2:54PM on 10-09-2008
I love this program.
It is very powerful and very intuitive so you easily find tools to make your work more effective.
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supernova_hq said 4:40PM on 10-09-2008
For anyone running linux, you can run this in wine, or get it's linux counterpart scite (in ubuntu's repositories). I personally prefer notepad++ (no macro or multi-document stuff in scite), but run linux. If anyone knows of a native "direct" port of notepad++, please post it.
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Dx said 4:52PM on 10-09-2008
Great Program. My main software development source code editor.
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Joe said 11:39AM on 10-10-2008
It is a good app to use, works great on xp. But i have had issues with my home vista computer.
Will have to take a look at PSPad.
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tsudohnimh said 8:02AM on 10-11-2008
I've been using Notpad++ for several years now and love it. It is great for network pros that deal with text config files on switches and routers.
Tsudohnimh
KnowtheNetwork.com
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ivanvx said 10:19PM on 10-12-2008
I simply love Notepad++, it's one of the few apps i miss when using OS X which is most of the time, I tried to replace it with textwrangler but N++ can beat anything.
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james 42 said 10:41PM on 10-13-2008
Great app, I use it all the time.
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