For the last year or so I’ve been using Crimson Editor for doing my basic text editing and html coding. But just this week I’ve been turned on to something new, better, and open source. It’s called Notepad++.
Notepad++ is an open source program that serves both as a source code editor and as a replacement for Notepad. All the things you hated about Notepad are gone! And Notepad++ is extremely simple to use. If you want to work on html or some other source code, you can click on Language and change it from “Normal Text” to one of almost 40 different programming languages. You can even create your own custom “language!”
The language affects how your text is displayed. For example, in basic HTML, all the HTML tags are colored blue, while the tag parameters are red and the values are purple. Comments are green and are in a smaller and different font. There’s even an italic display of ASCII codes, so if you add a or something like that, it looks different from the regular text.
I’m quickly becoming a fan of Notepad++. Some other features that I like are the tabbed windows, so you can have multiple files open at the same time, tab between them, and EASILY copy and paste material from one to the other (Crimson Editor still hasn’t got that worked out). Also, (and what originally drew me to this program) they’ve got a search/replace feature, which Notepad doesn’t. You can also insert bookmarks into the documents, so you can find your place quickly. If you’re working on code, the indenting function works great. And if you have a lot of text or code, you can even zoom out to see more (or all) of the document and create a screenshot if you like.
Visit http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm to download the program, to read more feature details, and to see screenshots of its various features in action.
FYI, here are the features of Notepad++ :
Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
WYSIWYG
User Defined Syntax Highlighting
Auto-completion
Multi-Document
Multi-View
Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported
Dynamic position of Views
File Status Auto-detection
Zoom in and zoom out
Multi-Language environment supported
Bookmark
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
Macro recording and playback
Na
July 26th, 2006 at 13:41
Will have to check this one out.
Two progs I’ve been using for a long time, though for different reasons, are:
1) TextPad (www.textpad.com) - an awesome text editor with all the bells and whistles: code generation, syntax highlighting, customizable “clip libraries” (ever just want to dump an empty HTML table into your code?), macro recording, and an amazing ability to format text quickly (removing odd line breaks, changing the case of a sentence, etc.)
2) TreePad (www.treepad.com) - I don’t use this for text editing so much as I do just for keeping multiple “notepads” going at once; it’s like having several notepad files open in the same browser window - and you navigate between them, not with tabs, but with a tree menu; very slick.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:33
Me thinks the search and replace feature will make my life easier when I do the next patron load.
Hmmmmm….
~BCP
October 14th, 2008 at 3:43
I use for editing Notepad++ because is a very complex program and support languages like C; C++; Java; C#; XML; HTML; PHP; CSS; makefile ASCII art (.nfo); doxygen ini file and other. Olso you can edit several documents at the same time. I got it from here: Notepad++