Open Source Recources

Notepad++ Text Editor

Notepad++ is a free source code editor that is written in C++, supports many programming languages, and uses minimal memory to achieve the greatest efficiency. Given that it's lightweight, easily customizable, and free, Notepad++ is an essential tool for anyone working with code.

Feature-Rich

Notepad++ offers a bevy of features within a simple user interface. Its syntax highlighting function is especially valuable; it makes working with various programming languages a snap and you can set the language highlighting to apply at any given time while you're editing. The syntax colorizer uses color to differentiate the coding, making it easy to find mistakes and modify them. If you have a color printer, you can even print your code in color.

The search and replace function is another excellent feature – you can open several different files and search and replace in all of them at once. That text-replacing is amazingly fast. Further, Notepad++ allows you to add views, so you can view the page in CSS and HTML side-by-side, for example. It has great convenience features – tabs, line-numbering, built-in spell checker, many handy macros that run extremely fast, column copy and paste, among others. Plus, it fully supports drag and drop.

It's available in a portable version; you can run it from your thumb drive. Above all, it's very stable, which is especially important to anyone who's lost code when a program froze up on them in the middle of editing.

Customizable

One of the great strengths of Notepad++ is that it's very extendible and customizable. Superficially, it has lots of themes so you can alter its look. More essentially, there are many useful plug-ins, like the FTP plug-in which offers quick synchronization with FTP folders. It's also quite simple to record your own macros. You can then set keyboard shortcuts to make them easily accessible.

Drawbacks

Notepad++ is not perfect, of course. It works best for quick, simple editing as opposed to bigger coding jobs. There's no ISO support. It doesn't have any form of code assist or error detection. It can get buggy in Vista, just like every other program.

Even taking into account those drawbacks, Notepad++ is one of the best general purpose editors for Windows. It's a fast and easy all-round text editor for programming, layouts, properties, etc. and even if you're new, it's very easy to familiarize yourself with the program. Above all, it's free.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/