Early last week, I came across a link to Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Tool List. I'm always a sucker for a tool or utility list. There's just something about reading them and saying (to myself), "he likes that piece of junk?" or "Oooh, shiny! I've never seen that one before." The first to make me feel smug and the second to find new useful stuff to play with.
First item on Scott's list falls into that second "shiny" category. Notepad++, eh? I've been a loyal Notepad2 user for a couple years now. It generally works just fine for me... But I wander over to the Notepad++ site and have a look at what it has to offer. I wasn't at the main page for more than a minute and I was well on my way to becoming a convert. Multi-Document (TABS!) and Multi-View were pretty much all it took to get me to try this one out.
I've had it installed since then and been using it full time as my code editor, so that means I've got over 11+ hours a day with it for the last 4 days. And I'm definitely a convert. Changing the "Styles" is easy. I tweaked up a style I liked on one machine, then installed Notepad++ on another machine. At first I was a bit dismayed to realize I'd have to retweak everything again but a quick look under
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x:\Documents and Settings\MyName\Application Data\Notepad++
turned up all the config files. Copying them over from one machine to another brought along my tweaks and settings. Sweet.
Did I mention that it has tabs? And they can be re-ordered? Nerdvana...
What else? Plugins. Bunch of plugins available from the download page. So far I haven't had a chance (or apparently the need) to do much experimentation there. One that comes with main download is the Explorer plugin. This adds a little floating file browser. Handy to quickly find files to edit. What's really nice about it though is you can save directories to a "Favourites" list for quick access. I'm working on several projects with code bases on different servers. This little feature doesn't sound like much but I've come to find it indispensable. I wonder if there are plugins for integration with source control? That'd be rather neato.
The parsing and such works quite well in most cases. That being said, I do have a couple classic ASP source files that create XML snippets and those tend to make the syntax/color parser throw a wobbly.
For example, something like this just kills the parser:
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'Build the input XML string
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xmlIn = "<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""UTF-8"" ?>"&vbcrlf
Fortunately, that's not something I do very often! I think it sees that opening xml fragment and gets confused as to which parsing rules to apply. Other than that one minor nit, this editor is probably the slickest thing since sliced bread.
I may have to spend some time with Scott's list and see what other apps I've not found yet.
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September 3rd, 2006 
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Most of the windows “powerusers” I know use Notepad++…I can’t believe you hadn’t heard about that one
But…for text editors, nothing, and I mean nothing, can come close to emacs…you should give it a try, I’m pretty sure there’s an emacs (or xemacs, which is an emacs fork) ported to windows…you should give that a try
The learning curve is harder than for most text editors, yes…but once you learn it, you come to realize that there’s nothing like it, and it’s hard to accept anything inferior
Surprised I’d missed it too… I’d fixated on notepad2 for windows editing… didn’t realize I was missing out.
Besides, you know when I want more I go with vi. :-p I have enough pain in life, I don’t need emacs too!
Any editor that is “modal” should be taken out to the backyard and shot, IMNSHO
Needing to remember what damn mode you are in is a PITA, and not worth having to deal with 
Never looked at notetab before? Not really targetted at programmers I guess maybe… I dunno I’m not one so wouldn’t know what to look for but it’s had draggable tabs for a long time I think… It’s had tabs for ages. I know that. It’s why I used it. I had a tabbed notepad program before I had firefox lol.
notetab, yummy.
Rich: Well, I’ve looked at it in the past. Notetab is nice and all, but just not quite what I’m after as a code slinging tool. Or wasn’t when I last checked it out.
Vox: I’d look at emacs again, but I just finished therapy from the last try… my brain just is NOT wired that way. vi I can handle, I think I have “finger memory” for life, but emacs is just… wrong.
such the purist you want me to code my posts in pure html and yet wanna cheater program for your programming.
Your hatred has blinded you, grasshopper. This editor does not code for me. It does tag-matching and color-coding for many languages, but it generates no code. Do not let your emotions get the best of you!
*grin* That’s a good idea… give me an html plug in for a notepad program that turns my html red until I close a tag. that would be VERY nice actually since among them what ever lookit my code I’m known as Muad-he-who-leaves-tags-open-dib lol. I know… that’s not what you said, but such an animal would be nice… might alleviate my dislike of htmlifying stuff by hand. Maybe a variation on spell check that notices badly done tags too like when I do an a href=http and forget the quotes…. now I gotta look for this thing out there
Rich, the “turn html red until you close the tag” is what tag-matching and color codeing is all about
In the windows world, nothing does that better than notepad++ (except emacs, but emacs is not for the faint of heart…you have to learn an AI language to be able to configure it 
I’ll give it a look.
Try uninstalling it with the program that came with it. Not you Vox. You’d have to go find a friend with a windows machine lol.
The uninstaller doesn’t work. I tried uninstalling it earlier, thinking it wasn’t for me. But there’s 8 files and 2 folders that the uninstaller left behind. To do a test I removed them, installed an uninstalled without ever running the program even so it’s not settings or .ini or .cfg files. I rebooted… still there.
It might be a great program, but I’m leery of a program that can’t even remove itself. If it can’t do that right what else does it do badly?
Sorry, but programs that won’t go away when I tell them to are a huge button of mine. That’s just rude. When I ask a guest to leave I want it to leave. This one doesn’t.
Odd. But I have to admit I’ve never had the desire to uninstall this one.
*grin* which I knew would be the response.
[...] I struggled a bit with including a text editor. In most cases, for my purposes, regular old notepad would suffice… but in the end I broke down and installed Notepad++ to the USB key [last mentioned in this post]. As the machine I was working on already had a Notepad++ installation this step caused some challenges. [...]