Notepad++ is distributed as free software. The project was hosted onSourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over 27 million times[2][3]and twice won the SourceForge Community Choice Award for Best Developer Tool.[4] The project is hosted on TuxFamily since June 2010. To display and edit text and programming language source code files, Notepad++ uses theScintilla editor component.Notepad++ is a text editor and source code editor for Windows. It aims to be a lightweight and robust editor for a variety of programming and scripting languages. One advantage of Notepad++ over the built-in Windows text editorNotepad, is that Notepad++ supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files.
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General features include:[5]Features
Tabbed document interface[6]
Drag-and-drop
Multiple clipboards (plugin required)
Split screen editing and synchronized scrolling
Spell checker (requires Aspell) (Spell checker does not distinguish between text and code)
Supports text encoding formats such as Unicode, for international writing systems
Find and replace: with regular expressions (including multi-line); over multiple documents; and marking/summary of occurrences
File comparison
Zooming
Source code editing features include:[5]
Auto-completion
Bookmarks
Syntax highlighting and syntax folding
Brace and indent highlighting
Smart highlighting
Regular expression find and replace (in perl compatible extent)
Speech synthesis
FTP Browser (plug-in included in standard installation)
Macro recording and execution.
Various tools such as line sorting, text encoding conversion, text folding
File status auto-detection
Notepad++ also support Unix line endings if required so can be used to work with texts that have been produced on, or will be moved to machines that run Unix operating system.
[edit]Programming languageThe following languages are natively supported by Notepad++ as of version 6.1.6:Ada, asp, Assembly, autoIt
C, C++, C#, Caml, Cmake, COBOL, CSS
D, Diff
Flash ActionScript, Fortran
Gui4CLI , Go
Haskell, HTML
InnoSetup
Java, Javascript, JSP
KiXtart
LISP, Lua
Makefile, Matlab, MS-DOS, INI file
NSIS, Normal Text File
Objective-C
Pascal, Perl, PHP, Postscript, PowerShell, Properties file, Python
R, Resource file, Ruby
Shell, Scheme, Smalltalk, SQL
TCL, TeX
Visual Basic, VHDL, Verilog
XML
YAML
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.[5] 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.
[edit]Plugins
Notepad++ has support for macros and plugins.[8] Currently, there are 27 official plugins for Notepad++, 10 of which are included by default in the program.[9] The first plugin to be included in the program was "TextFX", which includes features such as W3C validation for HTML and CSS, text sorting, character case alteration and quote handling.[10] Plugin site lists over 140 runnable plugins.
[edit]Development
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.[5]
[edit]Interface translations
Notepad++ supports switching into local language after providing a single XML file containing all text that should be translated. As of 2013, user community has contributed translations into many languages, as well as into some local dialects.
[edit]Controversy
In March 2008, the "Boycott Beijing 2008" banner was placed on Notepad++'s SourceForge.net homepage.[11] A few months later, most users in China were unable to reach the SourceForge.net website for about a month (June 26, 2008 – July 24, 2008). This led to widespread belief that China had banned SourceForge.net in retaliation for the Boycott banner.[12][13][14]
In January 2010, the US government forced open source project hosts to comply with US law and deny access from five countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria). As a response to what the developer felt was a violation of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy, in June 2010, Notepad++ moved out of US territorial jurisdiction by releasing a version on TuxFamily, in France.[15][16]
[edit]See also
Free software portal
List of text editors
Comparison of text editors
