Notepad++ is a source code editor for Windows. It is distributed as free software. The project is hosted on SourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over sixteen million times.[1]

This project, based on the Scintilla editor component, is written in C++ with only Win32 API calls using only the STL in order to increase performance and reduce program size. The aim of Notepad++ is to reduce overall power consumption by using efficient binaries that require less CPU power.[2]

Notepad++ is available only for the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, users can still get Notepad++ to work on other platforms like Linux and Mac OS X, using software such as Wine.

Programming languages
Notepad++ supports syntax highlighting and syntax folding for 48 programming, scripting, and markup languages.[2] It attempts to automatically detect the language that a given file uses, using a modifiable list of file extension bindings. Users may also manually set the current language, overriding the extension’s default language. The program also supports autocompletion for a subset of the API of some programming languages.

Users can also define their own language (for syntax highlighting) and its respective API (for autocompletion) by using the built-in User Language Define System.[2] Users may configure the syntax highlighting’s font styles per element, per language, and the resulting formatted script may be printed in full-color (WYSIWYG). Additionally, Notepad++ displays indent guidelines when source code is indented with tab characters, and highlights closing braces, brackets and tags.

Some of its features include:

• Auto-completion (language and file)
• Bookmarks
• Syntax highlighting (and brace and indent highlighting)
• Drag-and-drop
• File status auto-detection
• Regular expression find and replace
• Split screen editing (“View/Clone”) and synchronized scrolling
• Zooming
• Spell checker (requires Aspell)
• Tabbed document interface
• FTP Browser (plug-in included in standard installation)
• Support for various file formats including unicode.
• Find and replace text or text strings of text over multiple documents simultaneously.

Although Scintilla does not support multiline regular expression search and replace, Notepad++ does contain support for plugins which help mitigate this fact.

Notepad++ home page
Notepad++ download