Call me old fashioned, but I use quite frequent Notepad. I like it because it's fast, and it's a perfect program when you want to write something down, and fast. Now, because it's very basic I thought maybe there's something out there that keeps the simplicity of Notepad, but offers more. And there are quite a few Notepad replacements. One of them is Notepad2, a program born from Florian Balmer's need for a "fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting".
Ten things I like about Notepad2:
- it highlights code syntaxes based on different schemas, also matching visual braces
- it shows indentation guides and line numbers
- when writing html/php it automatically closes the opened tags (when you finish writing the starting tag, it will add the ending one too)
- it does code folding (between two matching tags)
- has an improved find and replace
- it offers a way to display an opened window Always on Top (by pressing a key combination)
- and probably the best of all is that you can install it and have the old notepad completely replaced, so now when you want to edit a file even if it says it will edit it with notepad it actually opens in in Notepad2
I'm sure there's more to it than I've discovered, but it's a far better choice than using the simple Notepad windows offers. The default installation doesn't give you the code folding option and the total Notepad replacement, that's why you need to download a modified version from here: Notepad2 3.0.20-rc3 (scroll down at the end of the page where it says My Custom Notepad2 Builds and select the normal installer for the version you want installed (the latest for now is 3.0 rc3, I'm not giving a direct link to the exe because it will probably change). Once you have it downloaded simply run it and you'll get a prompt if you want to install it and replace Notepad, at the end of the installer you'll notice that the old Notepad was retired and replaced by Notepad2. The View menu will let you customize the way it looks.
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