Notepad++ Editor

Brad R Sunday 07 September 2008 - 17:15:26  

Despite my best efforts, I found myself needing to do some programming on a Windows XP box this weekend. And a few hours' struggling with WordPad convinced me that I needed a text editor designed for programmers. I have a copy of Ed4W that I purchased back in the Win95 days, but that old version wouldn't run on XP. So I decided to see what was available in the open-source world.

I decided to try Notepad++. It offers the main features that I use regularly: tabbed editing of multiple documents, syntax highlighting, regular expression searching, and macros. So far I've only used it for a few hours -- and I certainly haven't had the chance to explore the bewildering variety of menu options -- but it seems to be a very good fit to my needs.

Possibly the main disadvantage to Notepad++ is that it's only available for Windows. I suppose I should have tried to find a cross-platform editor, so that I can use the same tool under Linux. But I already have Linux editors I like, and I don't expect to be doing much work under Windows, so I don't mind having to learn something a bit different.
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