If you’re like me you make extensive use of the Windows Notepad utility. I use it primarily as a quick way to jot down and/or edit blocks of plain text and to filter unwanted HTML markup from the many Microsoft Word files that I receive via email. Notepad does just one thing (text editing), and it does it quite well. But it does have its limitations, including the one that irritates me the most: You can only “Undo” the last change you made. All previous changes are lost forever.
After becoming irritated one last time yesterday evening, I decided to fire up Google and search for a good replacement for Notepad. I expected to find two or three of them, but to my surprise I discovered that there are countless text editors out there ranging from extremely simple to quite complex. After reading several reviews, I decided to give Notepad++ a try. And I’m so glad I did! Read on to find out why…
Notepad++ does everything that Notepad does, only better. First of all, you can click “Undo” to your heart’s content and the editor will happily comply, which is exactly what I was looking for.
This nifty little program also lets you load numerous files at the same and perform a global “search and replace” on all of them at once. Say you’re a web developer and you need to change a block of text in every page of a website (such as the copyright date in the footer). You can tell Notepad++ to search the directory the HTLM files reside in for all files containing the search string, then open all those files at the same time. Then you can have it replace the text you want to change in every one of those open files with something new, and it will do it for you immediately.
Although I have never used Notepad for creating or editing web pages, I can see myself using Notepad++ for that purpose since it supports line numbers, highlighted text and other programmer friendly features.
Notepad++ is available with several download options, all of them free. You can download the entire package if you plan to use it for programming, but you can also download a “minimalist” file set if you just plan to do basic text editing. Installing Notepad++ is as simple as unzipping the files into a folder. And since you don’t have to actually “Install” the program in order to get it to work, it is completely portable. You can simply copy the Notepad++ folder onto a thumb drive and take it with you wherever you go. To use it on virtually any PC, simply insert the thumb drive into an open USB port and get right to work!
To say I’m happy with this little jewel would be quite an understatement. I LOVE it! If you want to give it a try, you can download it at http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download. It’s free, powerful and fast.!
About the author: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE.COM. He has also built and maintains dozens of WordPress-based blogs.