Move aside Notepad, your successor has arrived! (Notepad++)

Member Name: stuff10

Product:	Notepad++
Date:	03/09/09 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, small download, colour coding, multiple documents

Disadvantages: Search feature isn't fantastic

Notepad++ is a free text editor for Windows that's aimed to be a Notepad-replacement for web developers like myself. Non-developers will probably find this review quite boring, so please accept my apologies in advance.

Notepad++ was created by the team at SourceForge and is available to download from the website at: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net. The range of download options can be a bit confusing, but I recommend going for the compiled version (installer.exe) which is just under 3mb to download. Once downloaded, installation should only take a few seconds.

So what's the difference between Notepad and Notepad++? Well, your bog-standard Windows version of Notepad allows you to write a bit of text, save it and print it but not really do anything more. Notepad++ is aimed at developers/coders and improves upon Notepad in several ways...

The most glaringly-obvious improvement is the addition of colour-coded text. Notepad++ will separate all of your code into different colours which makes it much easier to read and decipher. There's support for all the major web languages in there, including HTML, PHP and ASP as well as support for traditional languages such as C++, Java and Python.

The interface is easy to use, with many more icons and features than traditional Notepad. You can open multiple files within the same window thanks to the excellent tabbed interface, and there's a powerful find and replace feature that's quite useful too. My only problem with the find and replace feature is that it will only search through documents that you have open - unlike Homesite which will quite happily search through every file in a particularly directory.

There's also a few more advanced features which I don't currently use, but which could come in handy some day, such as: code auto-completion, drag and drop support and macro recording playback. Although I can't comment on how good these are as I don't use them at the moment.

Notepad++ will be no good for the amateur Dreamweaver developers out there, but for those of us who write code the proper way, it's an invaluable tool. And best of all, it's totally free to use! :)

Summary: A great, free code editing tool

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