Review of Notepad++

If you are a hardcore web developer that likes to get his or her hands dirty with the code, Notepad++ is the application for you. Unlike Dreamweaver and FrontPage, it does not have a graphic What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface for designing web pages. Instead, it looks a lot like the standard notepad.exe that comes with Windows. Where it differs from Notepad is that it carries a multitude of features and is designed specifically for text-based code development.

It's an open-source piece of software designed for Windows, but Mac OS X and Linux users have been able to run it with programs like Wine.

Advantages of Notepad++

Simplicity. If you've spent years learning HTML, CSS, XHTML, PHP, and a whole horde of other languages, you probably know what you're doing when it comes to creating websites. The WYSIWYG editors can be frustrating to some who prefer to create tight, lean code from the beginning.

Notepad++, like many other coding environments, can recognize multiple languages, and it organizes your code into the proper form while highlighting the functions, variables, and such with different colors.

There are 27 total “official” plug-ins, 10 of which come with the package, and several other unofficial plug-ins that you can use at your own risk. One of the most useful plug-ins is TextFX, which checks your code for W3C compliance.

Other features include: automatic completion, bookmarking, an FTP browser, a hex editor, and more. Notepad++ is intended to be as light-weight as is possible, so it takes up fewer resources and doesn't slow you down. Other coding environments can eat more resources than the program you're making, and they can include so many unwanted features that the interface is clogged. That's where Notepad++ succeeds — if you know what you're doing, it's fast, easy, and clean.

Disadvantages of Notepad++

If you need all the bells and whistles that come with the more bloated packages, you will probably not be satisfied with Notepad++. It's essentially like designing a website in notepad, but it helps you see the code more clearly. If you don't already know what's going on, it probably won't help you out.

Conclusions

Many developers will pull up a file in notepad to make a quick alteration. Since Notepad++ is free and makes code much easier to read, you might as well download it and start using it. It's a great, light-weight tool to help you out whether it's a small fix or designing an entire site by hand.

• Fixed and Fluid Website Design: Benefits and Drawbacks
• Outsource Your Labor or Find Work on oDesk
• 5 of the Best Free Tools for Web Editors
• Write HTML Quickly With Zen-Coding
• An Alternative to Dreamweaver: Microsoft's FrontPage