Notepad Replacement
Filed under Computers, Programming, Reviews, Software
I spend much of my time editing text in Visual Studio. I love their text editor...but Visual Studio is too big to load just to edit an occasional text file. For that, I use Notepad or Wordpad.
I ran into an issue where I needed to look at a specific line number in a text file. Visual Studio lets you jump to a line number, but Notepad/Wordpad don't.
I could load Visual Studio and then jump to the line number...but I decided to look for a Notepad replacement...and I found a great one!
It's called Notepad++. It is *exactly* what I was looking for...a free editor that gives you all the functionality of Visual Studio in a text editor that loads very quickly.
Things that I like about Notepad++:
- Line numbers/go to line number
- Free
- Quick to load
- Bookmarks
- Ctrl-F3 Search (searches for the word under the cursor without opening a dialog box)
- Uses the same keyboard shortcuts that Visual Studio uses
- Regular Expression Searches
- Tabbed Document Interface
- Syntax highlighting for C++, HTML, XML, Python, Lua, JavaScript, C# (and many others)
- Support for Windows, UNIX, and Mac line ending
- Macro recording/playback
- Plug-in Support
- Spell Check
- Alt-Left Mouse Button select (great for selecting a single column of text)
You can download Notepad++ (npp) here. I used npp.4.2.2.Installer.exe.
Highly recommended!
Notepad++
Wordpad
Notepad
Visual Studio
Review
Comments (6)
Thanks David, I've been looking for something like this. I'm kind of amused by its start up configuration - it seems to want to exercise every font I have on my system when viewing C++! It works well with Python and the few other languages I checked.
I also noticed that my code looks pretty nice in there, but boost doesn't!
Posted by NickPo | September 9, 2007 1:07 PM
Posted on September 9, 2007 13:07
I used Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/); it isn't free, but I like the interface. I'll check out notepad++.
Posted by Steve's Cat | September 11, 2007 10:43 PM
Posted on September 11, 2007 22:43
Ctrl-G in Notepad pops up a window to go to a specific line. At the same time, it displays the current line number you are on.
Posted by Adam | November 8, 2007 11:03 AM
Posted on November 8, 2007 11:03
@Adam:
Thanks for the correction...notepad has support for "go to line #", but wordpad does not.
Posted by David | November 9, 2007 10:10 PM
Posted on November 9, 2007 22:10
New version of Notepad++ was released today, v4.7.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Posted by bubba | January 2, 2008 7:32 AM
Posted on January 2, 2008 07:32
BDV Notepad is an other Notepad replacement utility with many useful features that allow file encoding conversion, line sorting, case conversion and word wrapping.
http://bstdownload.com/reviews/bdv-notepad-5/
Posted by vl | April 27, 2011 4:32 AM
Posted on April 27, 2011 04:32