2010-04-02

Notepad++ doesn't suck

If you have ever gotten fed up with text editors that don't offer enough functionality to make them useful in every-day situations or if you have ever been irritated with text editors that have too much overhead and take too long to load, you will be pleasantly surprised if you try Notepad++.

Notepad++ is a free open-source text editor that has been my primary editor when I am using a windows operating system for about the past year. I have found that it has been surprisingly versatile and has definitely saved me hours if not days of work simply by not sucking. The only feature that I can think of off the top of my head that could make this application any better is if it had all of the key-bindings from vi.

Even though it doesn't have the same key-bindings as vi, it does provide a lot of the functionality that you may be missing from other editors. Macros are one of my favorite features in the application and allow you to repeat a set of key-strokes automatically as many times as you wish - I will devote an entire blog to this feature at some point in the future because it's just that awesome. Other features that I frequently use are Regular Expression matching/replacing throughout documents, find/replace within files(On the filesystem - they don't even have to be open!), the nppexec plugin, and of course the xml plugins are noteworthy.

Syntax highlighting is very good for many languages and it also offers basic auto-complete features(although this feature is most definitely not as powerful as intellisense if you're used to that - so don't get your hopes up there.)

As I said above, I use this editor as my primary editor. That may not seem like much to say for some people, but any programmer(ok, any programmer that doesn't suck) knows that almost all of their time will be spent in their text editor. I frequently use this editor for classic asp, c#, vb .net, SQL, x86 asm, php, html, javascript, css, and other misc file types that I deal with.

Go download this application and give it a shot - you will thank me later...
Home of Notepad++

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