Reflections of my thoughts….

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

WYSIWYG

If you have a colour printer, print your source code (or whatever you want) in colour.
User Defined Syntax Highlighting

It 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-completion

For 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 supported

Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported

You 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 Views

The user can set the position of the views dynamically (only in 2 views mode : the splitter can be set in horizontal or in vertical)

File Status Auto-detection

Zoom in and zoom out

Multi-Language environment supported

Bookmark

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.

Macro recording and playback

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

Friendfeed is a cool aggregation service which took aggregates many social media websites. They’ve introduced the service with a cool new feature called “Like this”. You can press the like button to mark your emotions towards the shared content. Finally the number of people liked the story and comments give every author a good satisfaction and inspiration to share more! Of course believe me.

Facebook also introduced the “Like” option to the shared contents inspired from friendfeed. but recently I’ve noticed that, lot of good, bad news are happening around but without having any common sense or understanding people are “Liking Stories” (even myself accidently liked a sad story, which I never supposed to").

This came to my attention when Barack Obama’s page posted the Passing Away for Senator Kennedy. You can see 38,847 people like this story so far.

It surely doesn’t make any sense. It’s a great loss for a nation. People may clicking the like button for showing the interest to the stories or may be just because the news was shared by a “The President” who’s a celebrity on the same platform. It’s method to convey your feeling towards what’s he shared.

Another story is shared by the Indian Army. It’s again the feelings of a nation, a sad news shared by the protectors of great India. But still lot of people liked this story (I accidently clicked by misunderstanding the trooper with trespasser. Anyway I unlike it quickly) .

I think facebook (or any other service providing this feature) should provide an option to control this by the author itself. Because social networks are not simply automated robots. Ultimately it aims people and Sharing their thoughts and information. The services should be flexible and apt to make good sense and value to their users stories and emotions.