The "Old Steady" of Text Editors on Windows
December 20, 2018
The "Old Steady" of Text Editors on Windows
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Notepad++
Notepad++ is used by technical and non-technical teams at my company. Almost everyone on my team (Technical Consulting) who is on Windows uses Notepad++. We use it to write scripts, view CSV and XML data, and as a general text editor. We also use a plugin for Notepad++ called "Fingertext" extensively to help us write commonly used scripts.
- It has a simple UI.
- It is generally fast.
- It has syntax highlighting for most common formats/languages and you can add your own for custom languages.
- You can customize a lot about how it works and there is a large plugin collection available to extend functionality.
- It is free.
- My biggest annoyance is large file performance. I open large XML files frequently and it can handle them eventually, but the program locks up while it is loading. If you open a really really large file it will freeze and never recover.
- I like the simple UI, but it feels a bit dated, especially compared to new competitors.
- The 64-bit version doesn't support the plugins I need.
- The tool is free, so the investment is just time. The time spent is much less than time saved for me.
- It does what I need it to do and does it well.
Notepad++ is the no-frills, simpler options that is an old reliable text editor. The alternatives have slicker interfaces and more features, but can be overkill for certain uses. The quality of plugins that Notepad++ has is a bit higher and there is less noise. Notepad++ is also easier to customize.