After doing the write-up for WinPad, it occurred to me that any NotePad replacement would not only have to be superior to NotePad, it would have to be superior to WordPad as well, while still remaining small and nimble, or why not just use a full-featured word processor? After all, WordPad isn’t a significant improvement over NotePad, but just enough to keep the occasional “writes monthly letter to Grandma” user from being forced to purchase a $600usd Office suite. Bad PR and all that. Worse, it might let a competing software writer get a foothold in the gap between the two, eh?

That in mind, I looked for a NotePad alternate that seemed to be brimming with features not present in either MS default offering. I found NotePad++.

Acquisition and Installation

I picked up my copy of NP++ from SourceForge, but like WinPad, you can get it from a few other download sites as well. The package is just over a meg, and only takes up about 3 and a half megs when installed. This app is a mature open source project, so the source code is available on this page as well. The application can be downloaded as an executable (EXE) or in ZIP format. For the casual user, I recommend the EXE. This page is also where you can grab the plugins to expand NP++’s functionality, as well as an applet to permanently replace NotePad as your default TXT editor.

There are over a dozen languages available, but the License Agreement was obviously written with the assistance of lawyers. It’s about 15 pages long, and my eyes glazed over after 30 seconds. It’s got to be the longest, most complicated EULA I’ve ever seen on free software. Makes me a little nervous in these days of legal loopholes and double-speak.

The installer offers you some options, the only one not checked by default that I’d recommend is “As default HTML viewer” to have NP++ open when selecting ‘view source’ in your web browser. If you plan on using the applet to replace NotePad, this is a bit superfluous, however.

Features and Use

NP++ is largely geared towards the coder. It supports coding in a variety of programming languages including C, C++, Java, C#, Pascal, Perl and many others. If you’re a coder you should read here in detail.

While the Uber-geeks are off doing that, the rest of us will check out a few of the other features. While many of the things this obviously well-made app does are well over my head (I’m no coder), enough of the features are in my radar picture that I spent quite a bit of time playing with it. I actually ended up writing this article in NP++, only copying it to Windows Live Writer to format it to fit the blog. The zoom in/out is very clever, as are the dozens of text effects, such as reversing upper/lower case. As I’m only a couple rungs above the hunt-and-peck typist (tried for years, call it a mental block) this feature will come in very handy when I type an entire paragraph with the capslock on.

NotePad++ also has some very advanced search and replace functions, including the ability to search other files for strings of text without opening them all. NP++ supports multiple tabs, so you can work on several docs at once. I’ve had 3 or 4 NotePad windows open at once, I’ll be using this feature, that’s certain.

There’s a full-featured spell-checker, a wide variety of plugins I mentioned earlier, as well as macro support.

System Friendliness

As said above, NotePad++ take up only 3.5 megs on disk. With no text typed in, the memory footprint is about 10,000K, but this increases as you add text. With multiple large documents open, this could grow exponentially, of course.

Uninstaller left the program folder and 2.5 megs of files behind, including the main EXE that had to be manually deleted.

Pros: Feature-packed, yet still quick & nimble. Open-source, Free.

Cons: Non-power users may find it TOO feature-packed to be convenient, uninstaller needs work. Script to replace default NotePad should be built-in, rather than a separate download.