Latest Notepad++ v5.0 for Windows

Notepad is a common text-only (also referred to as plain text) editor. The resulting files are typically saved with the .txt extension with no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files that are to be used in a DOS environment.

Notepad can edit files of almost any format. However, it does not treat Unix- or Mac-style text files correctly with missing line breaks. Another feature it should have is tabs. If 5 text files are to be edit, 5 notepads should be opened and that messes up the taskbar. There are many free text editors, easily more than 15 of them but one of my favorite is Notepad++.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

The features of Notepad++ include:

 Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding

Supported languages are:

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

 User Defined Syntax Highlighting

 Auto-completion

 Multi-Document

 Multi-View

 Regular Expression Search/Replace supported

 Full Drag 'N' Drop supported

 Dynamic position of Views

 File Status Auto-detection

 Zoom in and zoom out

 Multi-Language environment supported

 Bookmark

 Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting

 Macro recording and playback

The latest version of Notepad++ v5.0 has an improvement in startup and exit performance. But Notepad++ is slightly slower from the Windows default Notepad.

Installing Notepad++ doesn't replace the original Windows Microsoft Notepad. It only gives you an extra text editor which you can run from Start Menu or Desktop shortcut icon. To replace the original Windows Microsoft Notepad with Notepad++, just follow the few simple steps below.
1. Go to C:\Windows and backup notepad.exe. Just copy it to another location.
2. Download Notepad++ v5.0 setup and install.
3. Download Notepad++ launcher and extract.
4. Copy notepad.exe which comes with this package