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Comment by jongalloway2 | Hacker News Reader

I've been a long-time fan of Notepad++, but it's a text editor. You can extend it to make it work better with specific programming languages (e.g. here's a post I wrote 10 years ago about adding language support http://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/creating-a-user-defined-l...) but it's fundamentally a text editor.

VS Code is a code editor. It has IntelliSense (not text-matched autocomplete, IntelliSense), debugging support, git integration, parameter hints, go to definition, code peek, etc. (http://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/editingevolved). The goal is to give you code editing features with the speed and simplicity of a text editor.

They're both free and lightweight, so I use them both pretty much daily.

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Notepad++ is very useful but I wish some features would be updated. The dialogs are awkward to use at times. The XML for defining custom syntax highlighting is atrocious. It's like they took a pre-XML config file and shotgunned tags into it without planning a rational format. Keywords are specified using long strings delimited by CR/LF entities for no good reason other than to destroy readability. It would be nice if an more modern hightlighting engine could be inserted as an alternative to the clunky ad-hoc design it currently has.

As you say, both are useful for different things. They complement each other if you use the right tool for the right job.

I find Notepad++ is great for handling really large files and changing UTF encoding or line endings. VS is good for pretty print formatting code/XML to be more readable, among many other non-text things such as debugging.

>and changing UTF encoding or line endings

If you need to do those things often, there are specialized tools, including in the command line, and for batch processing.

No need to do it in an editor.

I don't need to do this often but occasionally you'll need to fix inconsistent line endings, change encoding to UTF-8 or remove a BOM [0] (to stop ï»¿ being prefixed by some old software).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Yeah, I know, had to do it some time or another.

In OS X and Linux (and Windows with Cygwin etc) there are several command line programs such as unix2dos (line ending conversion), iconv (encoding conversions) etc for doing just that, so that you don't need to do it in an editor and can even automate the work.

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