NotePad++ (NPP) is an open-source professional text editor, now 16 years old (2003-2019 and continuing) and which offers a highly attractive alternative to award-winning commercial proprietary text editors, such as UltraEdit. Why NPP and why should you make the switch? I recall switching around this time (v5.2 NPP), after being impressed at how quickly and well the column editing feature I had inquired about had been implemented. Over the next five years, Notepad++ caught up to UE, and six years later, by 2009, NPP was a worthy alternative, and rapidly adding features. Indeed, TC and UE were a pair made for each other, and UE was my text editor of choice, paired with TC as file manager, when I started out in software engineering in 2001. Mead, a year after Christian Ghisler started Total Commander. What came before?īefore the arrival of Notepad++, the best text editor at the time was UltraEdit (UE), released in 1994 by Ian D. An interview with Don Ho is here, with a little history here.

The goal of NPP is efficient programming and low CPU consumption (Don Ho has interestingly tied the vision for his editor to be the lowest carbon footprint professional editor out there.) What this means is performance coding is key, for which reason NPP is coded in C++ using only direct Win32 API and STL calls.

NotePad++ is developed by the French software engineer Don Ho beginning in September 2003 (2 years after his graduation with an M.Sc.

Notepad++, by Don Ho, multi-view with syntax highlghting

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