NotePad++

Summary

The best overall best text editor you can find for handling all kinds of tasks related to text manipulation. Feature rich with consideration on user experience as a priority, NotePad++ outshines most if not all the text editors available out there. As a surprise, it is free too.

Review

NotePad++ is a very powerful text editor. Some people may overlook this great application because it shares its name with notepad, the most basic text editor of all. The truth is, you can hardly find a text editor, including the commercial ones, that can beat the usefulness of this nice compact application.

First, NotePad++ has almost no file size constraint. It pretty much can load anything you throw at it. A 100 Meg logfile, no problem. 300 Meg database text dump, works just fine. Unlike some other text editor that marginally open these huge text files and then slow to a crawl making them pretty much useless for editing / searching, NotePad++ stays functional all the way with these huge files. This alone makes the application a must have for those who need to work with huge text files. For example, traders who are piecing together some database records from all kind of sources.

Second, NotePad++ is very fast. It is implemented in native C++ so find and replace works as fast as such process can be. It also support file based search which is usually a feature you find in the advanced development platforms only. All the search results are saved for you until you choose to discard them. It also makes these search results readily available across sessions. It is similar to what it does with all the open files. NotePad++ save the state of what you are doing when you exit the program. So next time you open NotePad++, you can immediately return to where you were as if you never close the application.

Third, NotePad++ has a very powerful macro system. It can record your keystrokes and let you replay the macro in many different ways. Having some imagination, you can easily adapt the macro function to reformat a text database into another format to serve a different purpose without the need to either modify all the data manually, or write a short program to do the job.

There are just too many features to cover in a short review. NotePad++ has all the standard functions of a programming language editor, supporting many different kinds of programming languages. It has dictionary function in case you are writing non-programming content. If you want to know if it has certain specific features you need, it is easier for you to try out the application yourself.

Overall I consider NotePad++ a must have application. It works great and it is free. Personally, I think it is a good idea to support the creator and contributors of NotePad++ through the donation page on the site. Send them some coffee money to show your gratitude is not a bad idea if you like NotePad++ like me.

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