if like me, you find yourself wanting to quickly open a text document to paste/edit some text and dont want to wait for a bulging application to open it then you will just love Notepad++.

Notepad++ is a text editor, HTML editor and programmers editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good Notepad replacement, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.

It's a free opensource application that is just great for editing text documents, html or php files and just about anything where you want to quickly edit simple text or do funky things like mass find/replace functions, macros, quick-text, highlighted source and much more.

I use to quickly replace text strings within multiple files (sometimes hundreds) within website directories. This wonderful little application has literally saved me hundreds of man hours and stopped all that annoying repetetive cut/paste/replace function that I used to do before I found it.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

I've used EDITPAD previously and quite liked it but NOTEPAD++ is just fantastic.

I'm using version 5 (beta) at the moment and the syntax highlighting while I'm editing a massive list of PHP templates for this drupal website is just terrific.

Here are the features of Notepad++ :

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding

Supported languages :
C C++ Java C# XML HTML
PHP CSS makefile ASCII art (.nfo) doxygen ini file
batch file Javascript ASP VB/VBS SQL Objective-C
RC resource file Pascal Perl Python Lua TeX
TCL Assembler Ruby Lisp Scheme Properties
Diff Smalltalk Postscript VHDL Ada Caml
AutoIt KiXtart Matlab Verilog Haskell InnoSetup
CMake YAML WYSIWYG

If you have a colour printer, print your source code (or whatever you want) in colour.

User Defined Syntax Highlighting

It allows user to define his own language : not only the syntax highlighting keywords, but also the syntax folding keywords, comment keywords and the operators.

Auto-completion

You can edit several documents at the same time.

You have two views at same time. That means you can visualize (edit) 2 different documents at the same time (screenshot). You can visualize (edit) in the 2 views one document at 2 different positions as well.

Regular Expression Search/Replace supported

You can search and replace one string in the document by using the regular expression.

Full Drag ‘N' Drop supported

Dynamic position of Views

File Status Auto-detection

If you modify or delete a file which opened in Notepad++, you will be notified to update your document (reload the file or remove the file).

Zoom in and zoom out

.... and much much more......