I LOVE Notepad++ !! 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
My IT gave us right to run a few things as admin. Among them, n++. And guess what, it has a "Run" menu item so you can launch any child process. Perfect.
I 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…
I think I'm one of the last people using WSL1. I think everyone jumped to WSL2 because 2 is bigger than 1, but they're really different things. WSL1 lets me keep my files on the Windows side, let's my IDE (PHP storm) remain performant with no Linux to Windows file system overhead, but I still get to use all the Linux CLI tools. I still pay some overhead for that, but it's better than doing it the other way around and…
Completely off topic, but I was a Linux user for years, then I had to use Windows with WSL2, and it was a constant struggle.
I recently switched to a Mac M3, and oh boy, it is a pleasure to use.
No more fighting the Windows/WSL divide, slowness and command line tools.
Also M3 is a really fast beast.
It does have the benefit that if the file changes or is deleted then you can carry on working with the old version. (It notifies you when this and lets you choose whether to reload/close.)
Wouldn't windows not let you do that if the file is opened exclusively? I also assume you can retain a handle to a "deleted" file on windows, like you can on *nix machines.
I think you're just restating the same benefit in a different way: you can modify or delete a file (or even just open it without modifying it) in another process while Notepad++ has it open.
This 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.
Me, too! Use mostly Jetbrains these days, but we've been standing up some windows servers, and putting NPP on them - which reminded me of Scintilla: wrote my own turbo-charged IDE on top of it ~22 years ago. That secret sauce led to lots of work.
I haven't used Notepad++ since they were exposed for having a CIA backdoor, which they "fixed" after it came to light. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v733-fix-cia-hacking-npp-...
The existence of a hacked DLL doesn't mean notepad++ had anything to do with it.
I admit I don't use Notepad++ to actually write anything -- I use it view large files, do complex search & replace, regex, reformat files, data manipulation, etc. 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.
Based on the products name I think this was the main goal--to replace windows' bundled notepad.exe. For me, notepad.exe had some ridiculous issue, which I can't remember (I think maybe a very low limit on the file size?), that forced me to look for a replacement ca. 2005. The other piece of software from that time I'm still using is sumatrapdf.
For Windows 11 users, the latest Notepad.exe can also pick up where you left off the last time the app was closed.
Except when you try to close it, it asks whether or not you want to save the unsaved tab, with a modal, one per every unsaved tab . It kind of defeats the purpose of this feature.
That must be some setting for you. It doesn't prompt to save on any of my several Windows machines, and I don't recall configuring that anywhere.
I haven't used Notepad++ since they were exposed for having a CIA backdoor, which they "fixed" after it came to light. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v733-fix-cia-hacking-npp-...
The existence of a hacked DLL doesn't mean notepad++ had anything to do with it.
There is still no real equivalent on Linux. Kate seems nice but its session management isn't ideal.
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.