I am the owner of TimeCamp app that can track usage of desktop apps.
75% of office workers that use Google Chrome use Notepad++ on Windows.
Notepad++ is 21 years old
101–110 of 254 posts
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#102I continue to use Notepad++ despite having tried every other editor and IDE under the sun. This, of course, drives every person completely insane when I explain that my "IDE" is: - 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/SS…
What is your pattern for navigating to a function definition (as an example of a basic IDE operation that doesn't seem supported)? Grep?
From NP++, you could just ctrl-shift-f to "find in files" and it'll be quick about it, but I personally would grep from the root of the project. I usually keep a handful of command line tabs open in Console2, one for git, one for grep, one for build commands, others that are running local services etc. Anyways, the reason for this is the mental map / spatial geography of a project .. enough repetition cd'ing through folders and seeing file paths while grepping helps me visualize actual locations of things, which helps me grasp the entire structure of a project.
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.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#103Congrats to Notepad++, but this article reads like AI spam to me
Agreed. The author being "Michael" with no last name and no bio, the lack of any technical description of Notepad++, the lack of any comment from Don Ho, etc.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don’t know vim, notepad++ is fast on big files and has syntax highlighting for many languages. But vim does both better. Notepad++ is more windows in style with clipboard etc than base vim is.
It depends on how big 'big' is. Years ago I was working with large CSVs - several hundred MB - and Vim took forever. I found some other text editors that specialized in extra-large files (I wish I remembered the names now), and the one we tried worked like magic.
UltraEdit is really good with large files.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#105I continue to use Notepad++ despite having tried every other editor and IDE under the sun. This, of course, drives every person completely insane when I explain that my "IDE" is: - 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/SS…
What is your pattern for navigating to a function definition (as an example of a basic IDE operation that doesn't seem supported)? Grep?
ctags plugin
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love being a C developer. I'll still be using it when I retire, though hopefully mixed with Rust instead of C++.
My prediction is that C will still be in active use 100 years from now.
Linux will likely still exist and have a team of people maintaining it, so the odds are pretty good that you’re right.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#107This means Scintilla (the editor component in Notepad++, Geany, and others) is about 25. It was the foundation of my move away from proprietary editors like Visual SlickEdit, and served me well for more than a few years. I'm glad it's still around.
Same here. I used SciTE and Notepad++ way back in the day, probably 20-ish years ago. They were my first taste of useful light-ish weight text editors (with more features than plain old Notepad). Since then I no longer use windows as my daily driver and ended up settling on Vim, but I'm forever indebted to both SciTE and Notepad++ for opening my eyes.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#108Is there anything similar and lightweight that is cross-platform(or at least is available both on Linux and OS X)? I am not a Windows user, so that's a secondary priority for me
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait what? I'm not a Windows user, so I haven't used any version of WSL, but WSL 2 doesn't store the files on the Windows side? It seems to me that the whole "easy access to your Windows files in a Linux environment" was the point of WSL.
Wsl 2 can access files in windows, but it is very slow.
With the benefit of Linux and its filesystem being super (natively) fast in WSL2.
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.
Re: Notepad++ is 21 years old
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is your pattern for navigating to a function definition (as an example of a basic IDE operation that doesn't seem supported)? Grep?
From NP++, you could just ctrl-shift-f to "find in files" and it'll be quick about it, but I personally would grep from the root of the project. I usually keep a handful of command line tabs open in Console2, one for git, one for grep, one for build commands, others that are running local services etc. Anyways, the reason for this is the mental map / spatial geography of a project .. enough repetition cd'ing through…
I do the same thing (though with Vim as my editor instead of NP++). Grep is seriously underrated. (well technically I use my own grep replacement[1] instead for a few reasons, but plain old grep can get the job done very well)