Windows Notepad come free but so is Notepad++ that adds so much more
June 12, 2021

Windows Notepad come free but so is Notepad++ that adds so much more

Canh Tran | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Notepad++

Notepad++ is not standard software in the organization but because it is distributed as free software, I personally use it and have seen it used by some of my colleagues. When first looking for a powerful text editor, the available licensed software for this purpose was the commercially licensed UltraEdit. With licensing and having to request yearly for a renewal, I was personally looking for an equally useful alternative which landed me with Notepad++ and I have been using it ever since.

Pros

  • Persistent tabs that save content even when shutting down the program or dreaded BSOD
  • Vertical selection for multi-line deletes and edits
  • Regular expression search & replace
  • Quick conversion of encoding and newline characters
  • Toggle word wrap and hidden characters
  • Lots of plugin support
  • Notifies if a file has been changed on disk by another app

Cons

  • UI looks a bit dated.
  • Sometimes the number of options are overwhelming and require a quick search to figure out where to locate a particular function.
  • Some way to do a diff between files would be great. Still need to resort to another paid app for that - unless it is a buried function I don't know about or there's a plugin for it.
  • Free!!
  • GPLv3 license which is allowed by the organization.
  • Consistent software updates.
  • No better ROI than free.
  • Lightweight footprint makes it very quick to start up and shutdown.
  • Installed only takes up 19MB of disk space.
UltraEdit was offered as a licensed product by my organization, however, because there was a cost to it, I had to obtain manager's approval for the yearly license required to keep it working. This was a hassle for something as simple as an editor. It was a convenient need to have UltraEdit but an inconvenience to get the license renewed and not a useful allocation of company money. While UltraEdit looked more polished as a commercial product, there was not really anything missing and it can be replaced one-for-one with Notepad++.

Do you think Notepad++ delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Notepad++'s feature set?

Yes

Did Notepad++ live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Notepad++ go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Notepad++ again?

Yes

Notepad++ is a great lightweight text editor and is an immediate install to replace the default Windows Notepad for me. It is suitable for quickly opening and editing single text files and for jotting down quick notes that may be temporary.

It is great for quick edits on copy & pasting pages of text. I would use it to update paths using vertical selection or through regex search & replace.

It is not a full IDE for any kind of code editing but it is very fast to open single code files, xml or json and is my preferred way to look at contents in these files rather than opening in a code editor.

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