A great, slim text editor to keep on hand
January 20, 2019
A great, slim text editor to keep on hand
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Notepad++
Notepad++ has long been a go-to application for me to manage short notes, quick text-formatting, and quick code fixes for small coding projects. It is the gold standard for plain text editors and has all the features you wish came with the text editors of most operating systems, such as Notepad for Windows. Once you've used Notepad++ you'll never want to fire up the Windows Notepad again. You'll be able to indent multiple lines at once, duplicate lines, comment and uncomment with a keystroke, convert case, sort lines lexicographically or numerically, use syntax highlighting for a broad range of possible programming languages, and more. If that isn't enough for you, there are plug-ins available to add features like an ASCII to Hex converter, exporting to HTML, and spell-checking.
Notepad++ is not a replacement for higher-order IDEs like Sublime, Visual Studio Code, Atom or Eclipse, but it is great for smaller tasks and is a great way to quickly format text or perform quick edits to your code.
Notepad++ is not a replacement for higher-order IDEs like Sublime, Visual Studio Code, Atom or Eclipse, but it is great for smaller tasks and is a great way to quickly format text or perform quick edits to your code.
- It is probably the most useful plain text editor out there with the most robust set of tools.
- It's a super-fast, easy way to quickly format text or make quick, small changes to your code.
- It's actively supported and constantly improved upon by its developer team.
- It supports plug-ins to add additional features such as converters, spell checkers and exporting into other formats.
- It includes syntax highlighting for specific programming languages for improved readability.
- It is only available for Windows (sorry, Linux and Mac users!).
- It lacks some of the features of higher-order integrated development environments or code editors like Visual Studio Code, such as integration with Git or other versioning tools.
- It works best for small text files and lighter tasks such as indenting text blocks you copy and paste from elsewhere. You could use this for all your programming needs, but there are better options out there for a primary tool for that purpose.
- Notepad++ has saved me time for quick coding jobs where I don't need to fire up a full-featured code editor.
- It saves me a lot of hassle by automating the formatting and sorting of text in a variety of use cases, especially for creating or editing mock data for projects.
- It is a free product (although you can donate to support its development) and has been a great tool for me to rely on over the years.
Notepad++ has been my go-to for quick text or code editing jobs, or even sometimes for storing brief notes for later reference. Its biggest selling points are its host of great features for automating tasks like indentation, sorting and conversion to other formats, and its small footprint. It works best for these small jobs. As a primary code editor, you will find Visual Studio Code or Atom a better fit in terms of overall features and integration with important development tools like Git or Linters (which help you conform to a code style guide and best practices).