There is no other third party text editor more efficient and lightweight than Notepad++ on Windows. I only use Notepad++ on Windows, to save my CPU cycles and RAM.
My biggest complaint is getting the ”An update is available” notification pretty much every time I restart it. I wish there was a ”stable channel” for it
Give EmEditor[0] a try, I can load gigabytes of text and edit with no issue, it's fast and snappy. Has a bunch of cool features, like visualising CSVs as tables :)
The killer feature for me besides the lightweightness of Notepad++ is it's ability to remember what files were last opened and also "save" unsaved tabs.
I end up using it like a glorified sticky tool which I know windows did have at some point, but Notepad++ provides the same functionality with a much better experience.
Don't rely on it too much. Multiple times I had to manually reopen the files located in the backup folder of Notepad ++. Once an unsaved file was lost. By comparison, Obsidian automatically saves on each edit, but since Obsidian isn't raw and has formatting quirkiness, it absolutely isn't a replacement for N++.
Sublime Text has been my choice for years. Most often I'm in an IDE or in VSCode, but when I need to inspect or edit a file quickly or find-and-replace across an entire directory I use Sublime. It's nice and snappy.
Several years ago I tried loads of "lightweight" graphical text editors for Windows, searching for something with fast start-up and ability to load (and edit) humongous text files. Been using PSPad back then, with NPP as a side-kick, but when it came to dealing with super large files, this editor came as the most performant and reliable. It's data and memory footprint is super tiny and is quite extensible.
I've never used it as a primary editor so cannot speak much about features (yes it seems dated and configurations seems wonky) but really proved to be workhorse for me.
(Nowadays I mostly live in VSCode but still keep this AkelPad (and Foxe [1] / First Object editor for XML files) around when necessity to deal with something huge arises.)
AkelPad is great for big files, but at some point it stopped updating the date of a file when I edit it, which has been causing trouble for my backup scripts and for syncing. Is this a known issue?
PSPad is very similar in both regards! If you are looking for a lightweight editor on Windows, give both a try. Though I found that PSPad has become a bit more buggy in more recent versions since 64-bit support was introduced (which, I think, has lead to several components being exchanged or upgraded, which caused these bugs). I ought to give Notepad++ a try again.
PSPad used to be my editor on Windows until they added crapware to the installer. No idea if they still have it or not, as I immediately jumped ship to Notepad++ when I saw it.
PSPad was nice, but I switched to Notepad++ years ago because PSPad would crash every so often and I'd lose whatever work I had done since the last backup. Notepad++ has never crashed for me.
One reason why I like PSPad is that I can use it for three main tasks - editing text files, diffing text files and hex-editing files. Notepad++ seems to have a hex editor plugin, do you know if it's any good?
It seems fine as a basic hex editor, but I haven't used it that much. Not sure what would happen if you gave it a large file. I've been happy with HxD as a dedicated hex editor that works well with large files.
One thing unique to N++ IMO is how well it works with lots of files open, and how easy and fast it is to do search'n'replace across lots of files.
It has several modes (normal, regex, normal-with-multiline) so you can always choose easily the one that fits your scenario. The multiline one is IMO pretty useful - it allows multiline but allows to avoid clunkiness of regexes and escapings.
SciTE is super light, but has less functions. Notepad++ is based on the same engine (Scintilla), though. Both are infinitely lighter than Electron-based editors...
I just tried opening a 10 GB zip file in notepad.exe and it told me it can't open files this large. And then a second message box "Operation completed successfully." (lol). How can I tell whether I have the rewritten version?
(It also hangs on opening a 500 MB file, too. Version dialog just gives me my Win10 version.)
yardie said text file, not binary files. Not sure what text editor doesn't bark at a 10GB binary file. Probably Sublime would be alone in handling it, but don't have it in front of me right now to test.
How do you distinguish a text file from a binary file? It's just bytes. But for the sake of it, I created a 10 GB .txt file containing the same ASCII-only line repeated 100 million times. Unsurprisingly, notepad.exe still says the file is too large. And it also hangs with a 1 GB version.
A text file only contains data that represents characters on the screen, while “binary file” is used to refer to any other file that isn’t meant to be viewed or edited as text.
If you open a (small) image file with notepad you will see a lot of gibberish. This is what happens when you try to view a binary (in other words, non-text) file as text.
Presenter at the last in-person MS Ignite (so, 2019?). He mentioned to the audience they rewrote Notepad.exe and showed the memory usage of NP++ and Notepad.exe while opening a 10GB CSV.
But if you're saying it's not included in Windows 10 it might be a sysinternals branch.
I used to be a big time notepad++ user, but at some point decided to try to use VSCode as my go to text editor. The ease of use and the large number of good quality extensions more than makes up for the slight latency at startup. To my big surprise VSCode can easily handle files of the size of hundreds of megabytes, it’s just great. I like notepad++, but needless to say, nowadays I only start Notepad++ accidentally on my machine.
There's latency in every part of the VSCode experience, not just on startup. And the startup delay is bad enough that it needs a harsher word than "latency". I made the mistake of associating VSCode with *.txt files and had to quickly switch it to something else, as I was otherwise waiting each time I tried to glance at a text file. Programs like Notepad++ and Sublime Text come up instantly.
I agree that an electron-based editor is not as responsive as a native one, but the vscode devs have done a lot to make it as fast as it is. This talk [0] is a very interesting look into everything the devs do to make it startup quickly.
My workaround for the startup delay, since I use it so much, is just to autostart VS Code on OS login, and never quit. I basically treat it as part of the OS, which I've started to prefer: my computer boots up to the editor, like opening a notebook, rather than an empty "desktop".
Fair point. I honestly do not experience any noticeable latency after startup, but that is probably because my dev machine is so powerful (12 core intel core i7-8700 3.2GHz, 64GB RAM). Coincidentally I do have it associated with txt files, and as I said before I can’t complain, it works marvelously.
To be honest, I’m general I’m with the native app crowd whenever we discuss pretty much any other Electron app, but VSCode is an exception to me.
Sublime should (at least time I tried it in Sublime 2/3) be able to handle almost arbitrary large files. So should vim/neovim, but that's a bit more different from your regular text editor.
Yes, that's my experience as well, regarding Sublime. Although, for searching in large files, I prefer using ripgrep and if I know what I need to edit/replace, I tend to reach for sed.
I was using Notepad++ as my primary code editor for python some years ago. It was working good (still does) but missing one crucial feature: Fuzzy file find. It would be great if Notepad++ could somehow detect a .git file in the same or a parent directory of the file I was editing and allowed me to quickly open files from this project by searching their filenames. Similar functionality to the Ctrl+P keyword in VSCode or the ctrlp plugin in Vim. I don't know how difficult this is to implement but it will really improve the Notepad++ code editign expierience much more!
I used to hack away in N++ as Freelancer. At some point, I landed in a team for the first time, after hacking away solo for decades. It was like visiting a different planet. Fun experience. I got to see IDE's and even learned about NPM for the first time.
Even though I was way more productive (...solo) they looked at me like I came from a distant tribe, with just Notepad and no formatting, code coloring, code completing, packagemanager etc.
I use Notepad++ with NppFTP and TextFX, but I think TextFX is 32bit only and that most TextFX tools are integrated now anyway.
I love it, and in my current investigation into the viability of switching to a Linux Desktop it's something I haven't found a good replacement for yet. Notepadqq looks like a Notepad++ clone but I'm wary of its use of Javascript and would have to convert my custom UDLs to CodeMirror modes. I'll probably end up just using Notepad++ with Wine.
Plug, but if you're into Geany you might have a use for my "Gitbrowser" plug-in [1].
It's very light-weight (at the cost of features, it's really a browser and not a GUI for Git) and suits Geany just fine in my opinion. I especially like the "Quick Open" feature, which uses Levenshtein distance sorting to help you find a file from a few characters in the name. :)
I used to use it with Wine on Lubuntu on my laptop a few years ago[0]. As I recall the only problem I ever had with it was that context menus had a titlebar. I presume this was a quirk of the Window Manager.
[0] before Lubuntu switched to Qt and, for reasons I still can't put my finger on, became a lot less enjoyable to use.
I use N++ along with NppFTP and PHP Autocompletion.
I have NppFTP pointed to the `www` dir on my dev webserver, and it's so convenient to just be able to edit files in N++, and whenever I Ctrl+S, it automatically uploads and updates content on the server.
A similar experience can be achieved with the VSCodes feature called Remote Development where it connects via SSH to a remote machine. Its quite convenient.
when i started programing notepad++ was my go-to editor while sumatrapdf was my go-to pdf reader. today however i use emacs for everything except the browser and reading pdfs. i would still use sumatrapdf if it was available on gnu/linux
I used Notepad++ for almost 10 years, just for viewing text files because of its right click context menu option and performance. but few weeks ago I decided to try sublime which is good but still notepad++ if faster. (sublime takes a few seconds more to load)
Used to use Notepad++ a lot, but these days I mostly use VS Code.
One of the things that really frustrates me about Notepad++ is the way it does updates, even though the app's auto-updater initiated the installer, I still have to click through all the steps of the installer as if it's the first time it's being installed, quite tedious.
I would ideally like it to be done silently in the background, but I would still be very happy if after clicking a confirmation dialog in the app to do the update, the installer would just run unattended and re-launch the program automatically.
That, and the fact that it asks you immediately on program start (which is probably the worst time for an interruption!) and there is no easy way to come back to the update option if you answer "no".
It is fast, lightweight, uses a native Win32 GUI and by the time i have released the mouse button to launch it via right click in a file or the F4 key in Total Commander (which launches it to edit a text file) the UI is already open.
Also it has a neat feature where when you exit and open it again it "remembers" changes you made to files if you don't save them and new files you created and didn't save (basically saves modified/unsaved files to some temp place i guess) which i find useful to take quick notes.
I actually am using it via Wine on Linux, it works ok though there are some issues like shortcut keys not always working properly (e.g. Alt+F1 or Alt+F2 do not focus the "drive" letter properly, i need to do Alt+Alt+F1/F2) and for some reason trying to connect to an FTP/FTPS site hangs the entire program (i'm using gFTP as an alternative that has a sort of similar two-panel UI while being native, so not a big problem but still). Also for some reason whenever i browse the external HDD the file display happens very slowly.
So i don't use it as much as i did under Windows (and other alternatives i've checked -including Double Commander which is supposedly a TC clone- just aren't there) and for some simple stuff i use mc, but TC-under-Wine still has a lot of useful functionality (e.g. i really like how its Synchronize Directories functionality works) so i have it permanently in Window Maker's dock since i still use it daily.
I use both VSCode and Notepad++, for different purposes.
Notepad++ is great when only working on a few files, or just needing to edit something quickly. It's light, doesn't use a ton of memory and can open huge files quickly.
VSCode has a lot more functionality, like advanced code editing (suggesting function names, showing parameters, refactoring, etc.), and is an actual IDE where you can also debug code, even on remote machines or inside containers. The downside is that it uses a lot of memory, and it doesn't react as fast as Notepad++, especially on low-end hardware.
VSCode is heavy and slow. Not so much by IDE standards, but as a text editor, it is awful. It is what keeps me on Sublime Text.
On a decent computer, VSCode is completely usable, but it is slow enough to be felt, especially when compared to a more lightweight editor. On the old, underpowered and bloated corporate laptop I have to use from time to time, VSCode is slow enough to impact productivity. On the same computer, Notepad++ is fine.
I like it because it’s super fast, but the main reason is familiarity - I know how to do everything with it, and I haven’t seen a strong need for me to pick up another tool.
I’m not interested in jumping on the VS Code hype train, and I already use Visual Studio.
Do you believe everyone should use the same editor and no alternatives have any reason to exist anymore?
I used several editors (not Notepad++ since I moved away from windows many years ago), as they all have their own strengths and use cases where they are best at something.
I can't be classified as a developer (though I'm occasionally write some code), but VSCode on my external monitor is unusable because it plainly ignores ClearType hints. All GUI text in it looks like I had a 24h marathon and didn't clean my glasses for a week.
Everything else (including Notepad++, lol) on that monitor looks just fine. It works on integrated display, but thanks, I prefer 38" to 14".
I don’t use it for development, but it’s free, super fast, as everyone else says. In particular it will let you work with quite large text/data files and is also super simple to use. I recommend it for people who work with «medium data» and don’t know what to use. It’s got regex search, menus, toolbars etc. (But vim is better in the terminal.)
Unlike VSCode and most modern IDEs, Notepad++ has no concept of a workspace. I can use it to open any file anywhere on my filesystem or on a remote server, and Notepad++ won't balk about those files belonging to different projects or try to index every file on the disk.
I usually have a whole bunch of small things going on at the same time, and having them all open in a single Notepad++ window is much easier than juggling a half dozen VSCode windows. (I do use VSCode heavily for a couple of major, ongoing projects with clearly defined workspaces.)
It's just rock solid, super responsive and takes no memory.
Sometimes all you need is an editor for editing text. No sidebars, consoles, widgets, tree views or anything. Notepad++ serves that purpose perfectly.
Sure, you can configure VS Code to behave like that. But then you have to undo all that again when you want to actually use it as an IDE. And what for?
Rarely do I see a mention of Ultraedit. Although it is a paid software, it was nice and polished as expected. However, I have very limited experience with it. Any thoughts?
Oh my. I used to have a license at some previous work. I was able to read two 2GB text files and do a graphical diff on those, while using a 4GB laptop on Enterprise Windows Vista.
That thing was polished as hell! But "never" versions broke a bit that experience.
I found it horrible to work with proper syntax highlighting and modern things like that, though. At least back then.
I tried it a couple years ago, but the only reason I saw to use it over other options is the support for loading massive files. Opening up a gigabyte+ log file is easy for it. But that's not all that compelling since I'm not looking to edit logs. I can use BareTail or similar programs for that.
jEdit,gEdit,Kate,Npp, and even nagware like sublimeText were rage just a decade or two back because of the huge plugin ecosystem and they were quick heavy lifters. Even the plugin authors were responsive using some heavy php/java forums.
Hackathons and Competitive programming at CodeForces was a feast for us. We were timed and teamed. The setups were above editors or very simple IDEs like Zeus or Leo with almost zero additional cognitive burden. Some even used some esoteric inbuilt editor + FarManager + ConEmu because that is how they were developed for, it seems. It was as if their extended hand, one of them said. What?!!
Used UltraEdit for years but for a couple of years my economy has been so bad I could not pay for the updates so I tested N++ and found it started up so much faster and had pretty much everything I used in UE.
Can't live without it. Now if only the Markdown heading outlines in the function list panel stopped breaking after every upgrade I'd have no complaints.
Could be tricky. As I understand correctly it uses Scintilla for the core text editing functionality, which is cross-platform, but the UI is written using native Windows APIs.
