Notepad++: A Great Windows Editor

I spend a lot of my day in heavy development tools such as Eclipse¹, but often for editing simple XML I just want a quick tool to make fast changes. If I use the CLI (or Linux) it’ll be Vim, if I’m on Mac it’ll be Textmate but on Windows it’s Notepad++. I haven’t found an editor on Windows as clean as Notepad++ (if you use a tool professionally, you get to know it’s quirks pretty fast) for editing text of any kind.

Some people I know use awful tools that nag you each time you use them, why go through that pain? In college we used TextPad for learning Java before we jumped ship to a proper IDE (Netbeans and Eclipse). Textpad has a lot less features then Notepad++ in my mind from using the both of them extensively. In fact the only thing textpad did better was to have a built in macro to run a java program (which can be setup in Notepad++). If you write programs, I can only ask you never touch Notepad (oh my god the wordwrap horror), so give Notepad++ a try!