Notepad++ is the
best text editor in the world, bar none. Before you laugh at "the open source people even have to make their own version of notepad" have a look, it's really a thing of beauty. I've heard people say programming is an artform, and I think that's silly and ego maniacal, but the finished product in this case is, well, it is to text editors what FireFox is to web browsers.
Tabs for different files, syntax highlighting for most languages, macros, plug ins,
collapsible code regions (
and it does that MUCH better than Dreamweaver or Visual Studio!), search & replace with regex, across all open documents, all that jazz. The new version has a hex editor. You can make a block selection and auto comment it out. The "Run" menu will launch your file in FireFox or IE, perform a Google search, and more. It's got zoom in/out for your text, synchronized scrolling to compare two documents, a functions list I don't understand yet. It can escape quotes for C or html, and I swear to God there was a spell check, but I can't find it.
Now this is starting to sound like a spam post. The thing is, the open source community are swingers, and I love her ( Notepad++ ) so much, it can't be wrong to share her with others. You could spend $50 or $100 on UltraEdit, and we use that at work, but I like Notepad++ better. You should all try it, seriously, if you're reading a coding forum, this is a wonderful environment for editing all kinds of code, but particularly html, xml, css, and javascript. PHP, too, I guess; built in link to PHP help.
Open Source is a beautiful thing, people doing what they're good at to make the world a better place in a small way. A positive contribution with money not involved. FireFox, Notepad++ and Open Office are examples of the good in human nature. More to the point, though, Notepad++ is wonderfully useful, saves me time, makes editing XML files for testing so much easier, and it's fully integrated into my way of using computers, the way Photoshop is for people with artistic talent.
So if you're not using it, have a try, and if you are, but have an older version, upgrade. The new one is sweet!
