It has served me well in those terrible times when you get a new PC at work (usually Windows) but it is so locked down by Dept of IT that one cannot load anything useful... except a few things like browser... or Notepad++
It has saved my a@@ multiple times in one-or-two large consulting companies pretending to be technically advanced.
<3 <3
Except that windoze had that bug allowing to run the 'at' command to spawn some shell with system rights. From there, the sky was the limit.
A place to share... workarounds would be nice.
That said, it's a nice toolbox of common text operations, like sorting lines, removing duplicates, converting case and whitespace symbols and so on. I still use it daily for similar tasks, or just some TODO files, config edits and such.
I did look for something a bit more cross platform to replace it with and CudaText caught my attention (https://cudatext.github.io/) but nothing convincing enough to use something else on my Windows computer, or switch away from Visual Studio Code or Fleet on my Linux/Mac computers.
vim. ;) While yes, it has quite a learning curve, the payout IMO is ultimately worth it.
But Notepad++ will always have a place in my heart; it was what I used for a long time back when I was also still using Windows, and it's a solid editor, and leagues better than NOTEPAD.EXE. Especially 21 years ago, the landscape was much different. "DevC++" I think was the other editor I had that was competing with it.
Sometimes there's issues with these, but they're generally quite good for daily use (although slower)
Excellent performance for big files (some might know Universal Viewer for this task, it's from the same dev), simple and efficient like Np++ while still having some more advanced features. Very customizable through options and plugins.
I probably use it a couple of times a week but never to write. I don't even consider it in competition with tools like VS Code, etc.
I just tried this, opened a bunch of tabs and edited the text in them all.
Right click tabs, close all to the right, left or close all but this.
Then it shows a message box asking to save, click No To All.
All tabs closed :)
As it stands, I use it frequently - just not for code.
There is also PSPad on Windows which is similar to Notepad++.
Other than that it’s pretty good. Like BBEdit on a Mac.
Edit: I rather miss markdown rendering, not primarily editing. Should have been more specific.
[1] https://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-SOFTWARE/Office/Suite...
The amount of random malware run/installed by non-technical users falls off a cliff when they don't have to solve these problems for themselves.
Also has a nice logo for a FOSS app. Branding is important, even for FOSS, which so many unfortunately fail at. If your software creation is associated with a foot or a rat, then you're doing it wrong.
- Hex Editor Plus: Gets disabled every update due to “instability” but has never caused issues for me.
- XML Tools: Schema validation and XML formatting
- JSON tools
- (Text) Compare
I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.
Something that always made me prefer to go use other editors. Or perhaps if incremental search support regular expressions?
- Notepad++ for editing, pretty much stock, no plugins
- command line for git and grep (Console2 or Git Bash)
- File Explorer alongside Everything [0] for navigating files
- Beyond Compare [1] for visual diff/merge
- WinSCP/PuTTY for SFTP/SSH (usually to Linux)
- Synergy [2] for sharing keyboard and mouse between Windows and MacOS
I personally enjoy being in all 3 major OS's at the same time, and find it helpful to separate concerns to their respective applications/interfaces -- it helps me keep a mental geography of "where things are" and "what tool is used for which purpose", rather than being beholden to a IDE-dictated workflow or tool that's obscured behind specific UI patterns.
That said, I'll happily use Handbrake over command-line ffmpeg for a lot of things, so obscuring behind UI isn't always a bad thing.
Anyways, HUGE RESPECT to Notepad++!
find/xargs/grep for exploring code, finding definitions, etc.
standard utilities (ls, cp, mv, etc.) in the shell for file management
Meanwhile, in VS Code etc you can just hover over something and click to go directly to it, which is cool, but it's kind of like teleporting instead of actually driving to the destination enough to learn the roads.
I do a similar thing with git PRs -- for example, if you build something that follows a bundled pattern (ex. a component that has frontend, backend and data-related files, plus naming conventions), having a clean + complete reference PR to revisit when you make new components helps ensure I don't miss anything and stay consistent. I usually view these in-browser since Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab all have nice interfaces to see what files you need, where they go, how they're named, etc.
Plus it's written in rust and as we know, it's blazingly fast.
That blog is eight years old now, but still pretty accurate.
For more details at the level of the regex engine, see: https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar
My cli bogeys are pdftk and imagemagick - both wonderful achievements, but I rarely need them, and they get "paged out". So there I am using web services that probably are just a GUI with pdftk and imagemagick underneath ...
Ah, also a Notepad++ user. Happy 21, time to buy it a (another, shh) beer.
What I really want is a damn good Terminal/Emulator for Windows AND Linux that can run the same set of tools with zero overhead. Boggles my mind that everything is slow and janky to this day.
What I've very often done is use command line tools like compilers, search&replace etc inside WSL2, in a Windows terminal. You have the benefits of speed and all the CLI tools of the Linux world. And then have the GUIs, like vscode, running on Windows. Vscode has its server running on the WSL side, so still very good performance.
Best of both worlds, since the GUIs and the CLIs are tightly integrated.
WSL2 uses "disks" emulated via image files that are stored as ordinary Windows files (but in a secret place). This makes most file I/O from inside WSL2 faster than from inside WSL1.
WSL2 can use the Windows file system (and vice versa) via file servers.
When a Linux app inside WSL2 wants to use a Windows file, the Linux kernel (there is only ever one for all running WSL2 images!) talks to a Windows app that does the file serving.
When a Windows app wants to use a Linux file from a WSL2 image, the image first has to run (might take a little while for it to boot) and then a daemon there serves the file to the Windows app.
I think one of the file servers use a version of the 9P protocol. Maybe they both do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol)
Things that do lots of file I/O (such as compiling) are way faster under WSL2 using local file systems than under WSL1.
(waves). Yep, it does "the needed".
"2 is bigger than 1" can take a hike.
Eventually, I installed a WSL2 distro so I could run Docker, then I had to reimage the machine because corporate reasons, and then, with my work involving less Windows-specific code, I decided to not recreate my pile of hacks, but start with a fresh WSL2 setup. It works well enough, so that's what I use now.
FWIW, I always liked WSL1 more. WSL2 is basically just more streamlined VirtualBox setup; WSL1 is magic.
WSL1 is a subsystem on the NT kernel, allowing Linux binaries to run natively on Windows itself (not a virtual machine). It's the spiritual successor to Interix, that showed up in NT 4.0 and was removed in Windows 8.
The flip side is Wine, allowing Windows binaries to run natively on Linux.
Really cool technology really early, but I can't say I'm nostalgic!
I think you're the second-to-last one :-)
Not to say you are doing something wrong - whatever suite your needs. For me, WSL2 provide Linux tooling, i.e. systemd, which WSL1 just cannot by design. The very same way managing system as I do on servers.
When it's possible/makes sense, I do run gitlab-runner in my WSL2 for easier builds debugging, when setting up new projects for programmers - comparing to 250-300+ ms latency working on remote hosts, it's often much more productive.
Basically stable Linux without fighting with Linux-on-desktop-year-to-come.
[1] https://www.ghisler.ch/wiki/index.php/Total_Commander_under_...
It was amazing. I've used midnight commander on Linux, but it isn't close to Far IMO.
In fact, I think it's just one guy - Christian Ghisler. Kudos to you, sir.
the wildcard search alone is worth the entry price
been using it for like 10+ years
Synergy and PBP (Picture-by-Picture) with an ultrawide monitor is great! I can split half my screen as Mac and the other as Windows, and the mouse and keyboard just seamlessly jump between the "gap" in the middle of the screen. I switched from a double screen setup (side by side) to an ultrawide and I've been happier than ever.
Any sane text editor won't let you rename a new document until you save it, but it is useful for some use cases.
I would just keep pressing ctrl+n whenever I needed a fresh file and never close anything.
Then again, this reminds me of the saying I've heard, that AIs now are at the dumbest point they will be in our lives. Presumably at some point, it will be difficult for human beings to distinguish it or even have their 'instinct' set off.
The field is generally still young, so I look forward to good solid software just getting older and older and still working well. Makes it worth learning and internalizing.
C is in its 50s, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere (:
Part of what pains me about much modern software, with its always-online and tied-to-some-cloud-service nature, is that it tends to die. The learning you do goes to waste, when some fickle company pulls the plug in the future.
I like to build stuff that lasts, whether it's a cathedral or a bazaar, and I like to use stuff that was built in that way, too.
[1] Okay, forever is a long time. Maybe some day keyboards will be extinct, and that will make keyboard-centric software obsolete. Same could be true for screens, or even the broad architecture of computing hardware as we know it. But those changes tend to happen slowly, and there's time to adapt.
In 100 years there will probably be somebody maintaining Linux for sentimental reasons. But it probably won't be in practical use.
It's hard to imagine this happening to Linux in particular because it's ridiculously flexible. But things always change.
I think you could say that software lasts forever when it's author wants it to. There is plenty of dead proprietary software that dates from before the era of cloud services; it's dead because, just like the SaaS company that pulls the plug today, nobody thought (or dared) to preserve the source code.
To make sure software really lasts, history shows us that the best thing one can do is to release the code as FOSS :)
on the other hand, most new code sold is not designed with longevity in mind. everything has support lifetimes, and the same thing gets rehashed under new banner and sold. the incentives are not aligned for long-lasting stuff. can't have old opera buildings if the new concerts set up tents every season.
regardless, C is too big to never get worked on supporting for future hardware.
I've heard of it for years, of course, but I don't really know it beyond 'GUI advanced text editor'.
Notepad++ is more windows in style with clipboard etc than base vim is.
Not sqlite, out of curiosity? which do you use when? I'm going to need one of them soon, which is why I'm asking ...
FWIW, the aformentioned text editor working with the 200+ MB file could edit the entire thing almost immediately (at the UI level; I don't know what happened in memory). Each record was less than a screen-length, so maybe 100 char/line conservatively, so maybe 2 million lines. iirc I could insert a character on every line without problematic latency - my memory says mabye 10 seconds, but unless it was a dirty operation, that can't be true?
I enjoyed it's transient new file tab without needing to specify a file location.
I like its find and findall and count better than other editors.
Do other editors miscount?
I think the most useful feature is the ability to create new files without picking a filename or location. Then having those files still open on application restart. It’s a workspace. That’s its killer feature.
Ability to record macros. Line operations, sorting and all. Marking and search operations on marked lines, much more powerful than it sounds. Plugins galore, write your own, or just run text through your own exe. BOM manipulation. User defined syntax highlighting.
But most importantly it’s the ease of use. I can explain complex operations to extremely casual users. Can’t do that with vim. I’ve been able to help people perform complex manipulations on crazy files that they never would have accomplished another way. NP++ literally opens a door to people who would never do these things otherwise.
75% of office workers that use Google Chrome use Notepad++ on Windows.
we are migrating to Clickhouse so it will be easier to get some interesting stats soon, then from MySQL ;)
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v733-fix-cia-hacking-npp-...
You could in theory do something similar with literally any Windows application that links a DLL (i.e. virtually all of them).
The fix is just an improved signature check, so that Notepad++ detects if that DLL has been tempered with, by the CIA or anyone else, or by a virus. But as Don Ho himself said, it is a rather weak protection, for that specific attack. Notepad++ is free software, the CIA (or any malware author) can make a version with Notepad++ with a backdoor and there is nothing the author can do, it is true for all free software, and most proprietary software too.
But Don Ho being Don Ho, and because it is the CIA, he had to make a rant about it. I don't like his attempts to push his political opinions with Notepad++, but that's his software, his rights.
His opinions are pretty much just ethical stances, so I have no issues.
Honestly I want to take Scintilla or whatever and just add in session support, syntax highlighting and spellchecking, and then I'll have my perfect editor.
Textadept (Lighter but niftier) https://orbitalquark.github.io/textadept/
If anyone else is so inclined, I'll save you the search: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/donate/
(unaffiliated with the author, admire old-fashioned people who don't switch from free to paid)
I say it as a Mac user. It is the one thing I miss after switching away from Windows.
Quick editing for everything with Notepad++ and Plugins.