Notepad++ - A GNU Licensed, Source Code Editor for MS Windows

If you're a computer programmer then having a fully featured source code editor is a must. Although all the IDE (Integrated Development Environment, heck, like you didn't know that :P) suits come with ones of their own yet if you use MS Windows while creating your programs, then Notepad++ is a pretty powerful utility nonetheless.

One other important thing about Notepad++ is that it uses less system resources still giving you the ability to edit a program with a larger source code. I'm not a programmer (although I've played very little with C/C++ in the past, well I just created a "hello world" :/) so other than using it for those type of purposes, I find Notepad++ is extremely helpful while editing XML files, which I usually have to do since I'm a bit of a nerdy blogger :P.

Main features...

*. It's a shame than it's a GNU licensed program yet only support MS Windows. No GNU/Linux support.

*. Written in C++ and as mentioned above uses a very little system resources.

*. Plugin support (by using which you can expand its features such as adding automatic spell checking, export the source code to RTF/HTML, etc).

*. Supports a lot of different computer languages such as C, Objective C, Assembly, Shell, SQL, etc.

*. Search and replace.

*. Auto completion of codes (pretty handy since you don't always have to retype the codes again and again).

*. Macro recorder support (playback, start recording, save, etc).

*. TextFX support.

These are just a very few to mention. But as said before, even if you aren't a programmer you can still use this as a powerful text editor ... but since the GUI is loaded with features, it can be a bit confusing for the everyday users, I think (including me:)).

Anyhow, for all ya MS Windows programming geeks, you can get the latest version of Notepad++ from this download page. Oh yeah, it's FREE!.