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Comment by bitigchi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

No need for a "stable channel". Just download the updates on the background, apply them on launch, and stop showing the notification.

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 :)

[0] https://www.emeditor.com/

EmEditor is so much better than Notepad++ it's not even close.

Does it save unsaved files?

That’s a great feature, brings a lot of peace of mind.

Yes.

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.

Yeah it's utterly useful. That said it needs some lazier redesign when files are on network shares, cause it will hang

That's pretty much a hard requirement if you use Windows 10 with it's update-reboot madness.

??? EmEditor has this.

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 is also a pleasure to use, and works on both Linux and Windows.

And Mac!

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.

I moved from Notepad++ to Sublime Text over a decade ago, its been my day to day for both Systems / Network Engineering and Web Development.

Have you ever tried AkelPad [0]?

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.)

[0] http://akelpad.sourceforge.net/ [1] http://www.firstobject.com/dn_editor.htm

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?

Have you tried unchecking "Menu > Options > [x] Save file time"? Is seems it actually means Keep file time.

Hah, that works! I blame it on the author being Russian.

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 more lightweight. Efficiency is about personal config and habits, though.

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...

For just text I find Notepad2 far superior. The shame of it is (or not, because it’s excellent as-is) it’s not been updated in years.

Microsoft engineers rewrote the notepad.exe app. You can load a 10GB text file. Something you can’t do in almost any other text editor.

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.

>text file, not binary files

there is a difference?

For most intents and purposes, yes.

Some editors choke on long lines. A binary file can have long stretches without newline.

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.

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.

Does it support more than one undo step now?

Source? Disclosure I work at soft-micro

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 will look into it when I am back next week. Thanks!

Notepad, at least the version included in Windows 11 on an up to date install, refuses to open any text file bigger than 1,073,741,823 bytes.

The error is cute:

> The test_1073741824_bytes.txt file is too large for Notepad.

> Use another editor to edit the file.

followed by:

> The operation completed successfully.

Check out EditPad Pro. I really like it.

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