Notepad++ A lightweight, but powerful text editor
March 04, 2019
Notepad++ A lightweight, but powerful text editor
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Notepad++
I use Notepad++ (NPP for short) for doing source code editing for our static webpages (such as landing pages that I don't want to be included in WordPress). NPP provides a lot of features that the default notepad software in Windows is lacking, so it makes doing this kind of work a lot easier.
- Supports tabbed editing, so you can open or create multiple files in a single window.
- Provides syntax highlighting so you can easily distinguish different components of code, errors, and strings.
- Allows code folding, so you can view sections of code that you want to see and hide the content of blocks that are not relevant to what you're currently working on.
- Features autosave. You won't lose your work just because you forgot to manually save your project.
- Supports plugins/macros. I added a plugin that lets me compare two files and highlights the differences.
- Does not feature true syntax checking. NPP can identify code elements, but it doesn't verify if the code is correct/compilable.
- Only works on MS Windows.
- Notepad++ is free. Who doesn't love software that makes you more productive and doesn't cost anything?!
- NPP saves time. Syntax highlight and code folding make it faster and easier to work on projects.
- The autosave feature of NPP has prevented me from losing my work more than once.
Atom and Notepad++ are both free text editor tools. Notepad++ is extremely lightweight whereas Atom can use a lot of memory and be slow with large files. Both apps have a solid UI and both support plugins (they're called packages in Atom). Atom does integrate with Github though, and that could be a huge benefit for other developers. Ultimately, I use NPP because I don't care about Github integration and I prefer using programs that don't use a lot of system resources.