Fed up with with the normal notepad of Windows? Or are you want some good flexible and powerful text editor? Here it’s Notepad++. The features are truly amazing @ free of cost.
Besides the excellent editing features( just check it’s menu, you will get amazed) Notepad++ features are
Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
If you have a colour printer, print your source code (or whatever you want) in colour.
User Defined Syntax HighlightingIt allows user to define his own language : not only the syntax highlighting keywords, but also the syntax folding keywords, comment keywords and the operators.
Auto-completionFor most supported languages, user can make his/her own API list (or download the api files from dowload section). Once the api file is ready, type Ctrl+Space to launch this action (see screenshot).
Multi-Document
Multi-View
Regular Expression Search/Replace supportedYou can open a document by drag & drop. You can also move your document from a position (or even a view) to another by drag & drop.
Dynamic position of ViewsThe user can set the position of the views dynamically (only in 2 views mode : the splitter can be set in horizontal or in vertical)
Multi-Language environment supported
Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
When the caret stay beside of one of those symbol { } [ ] ( ) , the symbol beside of caret and its symmetric opposite symbol will be highlighted, as well as the indent guideline (if any) in order to locate the block more easily.
You can save several macros and edit their keyboard shorcuts for the next use.
Another hidden gem in this editor is the build in (Okay, a built in extension) command window. Which is replica of window cmd.exe. This was one of the most helpful one for me when I was working with clearcase server. I was encountering with make files and C++ source code all there was no Visual Studio project file to build. either I’ve to create a dummy project and add these files to Visual Studio and create build commands as the “External tools” option in Visual Studio. But I was truly comfortable with the folder view (I could not see it in the latest version) to manage my files as solution explorer and use the command line to build the project. It was simply awesome and comfortable. Also I don’t need to pay too much memory for Visual Studio as I can do same things here with a lightweight tool. Also it’s integrated with Context menu to easily open the required documents.
It supports plugins and some handy plugins like compare , FTP synchronize etc.
Have a try – Download it here
Some other powerful text editors you can try but I feel this is really comfortable.
- Crimson Editor (Before I am moving to notepad++, I was a hard fan of this one)
- Notepad2
- TextPad