Notepad++ – Completely free Notepad Replacement
The basic Notepad that comes with Windows is very simplistic. In fact even Microsoft brought out a better version (Wordpad) back almost 10 years ago. WordPad supports Unicode so can display foreign characters without any problems. But both are still pretty lacking, but despite that you do hear of people who have built websites using notepad. This is masochism on the same order as doing serious artwork using Paint!
Notepad++ is loosely named after the programming language (C++) that it is written in and is at heart a programmers text editor. It has lots more commands, including a Macro facility that lets you record, save and replay sets of commands to do repetitive jobs. It has a powerful set of find and replace options and lets you switch easily between different text file types. It also comes with a large set of syntax handling files so that it can colour code and highlight syntax for many programming languages.
A plugin system lets programmers add new extensions and this page on Sourceforge has a long list. This includes an FTP client so if you want to build websites at least it will be easier to make changes to pages on the server.
Overall if you are looking for a decent free text editor on Windows, this is recommended.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.