I have always appreciated a good text and souce code editing software. For plain and advanced text editing, I wouldn’t even dare to use MS Word as it is bloated and, not to mention, inappropriate for code.
Enter Notepad++, a free tool licensed under GPL. It has a nice interface similar to many popular code editors. It has line numbers at the side and you can see the actual representation of hidden characters like carriage return, line feed and tab. This is a really great feature since it is easy to see how text is encoded.
For example, if there are trailing spaces after a line or if spaces are used to indent lines instead of tabs.
Another feature I love about this program is that it lets you zoom in and out of the text document. The interface also lets you work with tabs so you won’t have to open multiple Notepad++ instances. Shortcut buttons are also neatly laid out on the top menu.
It also supports Macro which let’s you automate those painstakingly monotonous tasks.
The tool supports a lot of code syntax format like ASP, PHP, Java and XML. The tool implements appropriate color coding and text folding pairs if necessary.
You can also edit more than one file at the same time side by side:
The tool is also loaded with cool plugins like Base64 encoding and FTP client so you can quickly upload your updated text files.
Put simply, I love this software. As a programmer who writes a lot of code, I will make this my default code editor. It is not bulky unlike modern IDEs so it is quick to load. The additional plugins and its capability to record and run macros make it simply the best text code editor around.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
I had used Notepad++ for the longest time, but then I found NaviCoder Editor. I’ve since not switched to any other editor.