Notepad++ – Notepad Plus Plus – the Review

Program:   Notepad++
Publisher:  team of programmers, http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Category:  Text Editor / Programmer’s Editor
License:  GNU General Public License (GPL)

I had been looking for a program like Notepad++, and now I’ve found it. My normal editor for writing the newsletter and web pages is EditPad Pro.

The big advantage to EditPad Pro over most text editors is that it recognizes a number of different computer languages and automatically color-codes the text as it is typed.

For example, HTML tags all use the *lt; and > symbols. When I type the < and if the file has an .htm, .html, or .html extension, EditPad Pro displays the < and the following text in red until the tag closes with a > character. Similarly, values in quotes are shown in blue.

This open-source, freeware text editor is designed to support a number of source code languages in addition to being a simple text editor. Notepad++ runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 and XP (and, presumably, Windows Me and Windows 2003 Server).

Some of the feature of Notepad++ are:

• Supported languages : C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, Javascript, RC resource file, makefile, ASCII art file (extension .nfo , screenshot1, screenshot2), doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS source files, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python, Lua, TCL, Assembler, Ruby, Lisp, Scheme, Properties, Diff, Smalltalk, Postscript and VHDL.
• Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
• 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
• Oh, yeah. It works as a plain, non-programming text editor, too.

Notepad++ provides all the functionality for which I was looking. This is great, since I now can use Notepad++ on my desktop computer. I can get color-coded syntax checking with Notepad++ for free, without buying another license for EditPad Pro (my license is on my Dell notebook).