Notepad++ 6.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Notepad++ 6.0 Released

notepad-plus-plus.org

202 pointskefs101 comments

This personal favorite from their About page lives on:

"By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment."

Gotta love such bold goals from a text editor :)

Oh, come on, does text editing really use so many cycles that switching to Notepad++'s automations would really enable the CPU to throttle down? I'd think it'd be throttled down already for most text editing environments, if the user has that enabled.

Learn to enjoy a good joke, it'll help you enjoy life more.

I believe I have apparently demonstrated that I am too stupid to identify good jokes. :(

But noble enough to admit it. So everything's balanced out.

I'd like to use this joke as an opportunity for a more serious point. It's a thing that I actually always wondered. Why is the industry spending so much time advocating that we can write however unoptimal code we like, because it's always cheaper to throw in another server? Wouldn't spending time to optimize software be able to create serious savings in worldwide emissions, given that any given piece of software is likely to be used by 10k - 10M people?

I know that optimizing software for carbon footprint is probably going against The Economy itself, but isn't it the point where our current economy of consumption and growth is leading us to destruction? Maybe there is way to incentivize savings more?

Pick a random article about a data centre, and see what it is about. Presuming nothing awful has happened at that data centre, it's almost certainly about some way the company has found to save money, and that usually means doing something innovative with cooling. And that is saving a hell of a lot of money. I'd be interested to see a break down of the energy consumption of a data centre; I imagine cooling is the biggest output (though I'm happy to be proved wrong). And it's probably easier to halve cooling output than it is to halve the number of servers running, as improving the efficiency of a data centre seems like a much more isolated task compared to improving the efficiency of potentially thousands of programs written by several hundred teams.

I Agree, I understand that in some data centers power is the main bottleneck on sales, not heat, emissions or hardware cost, there is plenty of interesting stuff going on here which is sympathetic to environmental considerations. http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/24/google-opening-seawater-c... http://www.comms-express.com/news/server-racks/servers-don-t...

OK, so let's say you spend $10k of developer time (about 1 month at current salary rates) to optimize your code to save the environment.

You must be saving less than $10k in electricity over the next couple years (otherwise you would have done it already to save money, irrespective of the environment). So let's say you saved $8k in electricity.

But... what is the developer going to spend that $10k on? Well, he'll probably need a car to drive to work. And a nice apartment to go home to (electricity bill there now too!). And probably he eats out at a steakhouse every now and then, and beef is terrible for the environment.

Not every dollar spent is equal in terms of environmental carbon. But whenever you try to analyze something this complex it soon becomes impossible track all of this.

Which is why what's really needed is environmental taxes (or cap and trade) to remove the externality for carbon production in the first place. The controversy is, just how much damage does carbon do to the environment? There's just no indisputable evidence.

Notepad++ is one of the fastest and the best editors out there.

Products like these show that over a given period of time, people being to notice the subtle differences between the speed of simple things, like the time taken for the context menu to appear, or the drop-down for word completion to appear. This is primarily why my use of IDEs has decreased over time. It just takes a little too long for doing stuff in them, and hinders your natural flow.

By the way, their word completion (Settings -> Preferences -> Backup/Auto-completion -> Word Completion) is simply their killer feature and has spoiled me for any other editors.

I love Notepad++ but there must be 1000s of awesome features like this that I'm still not aware of. Thanks for the tip.

The Compare plugin is one such feature. It highlights the deltas between two files.

edit: forgive me if you're already aware of it.

M-/ in Emacs. ;)

+1 for the speed. Not many IDEs seem to care for that any more. Especially most java based IDEs. They feel so sluggish even for the most rudimentary of tasks (opening menus, launching, closing, autocomplete etc)

FWIW the Zeus editor has a lot of IDE like features yet it still feals like a fast text editor.

I switched from zend studio to phpstorm almost entirely due to speed, with product quality being the other part of what drove me. Fundamentally, an ide is still a code editor, and it has to do that at least as well as notepad++ or i will not use it.

Wow, I've been using n++ for years and never realized that feature was there. It'll save me so much time. Thanks!

I never realized this either. Thanks!

What a great product, free or otherwise. It's always one of the first applications I download and install when I log into a Windows machine.

Notepad++ was my first text editor of choice when I decided I wanted to do web development. I've since moved on to VIM, but I'm very glad to hear Notepad++ is still going strong.

Same story here! But I still use Notepad++ for quick tasks that I might otherwise have to spend a few thought cycles on in VIM. Also, I really like Notepad++'s Python Script plugin.

everyone seems to be talking about how great notepad++ is. don't get me wrong, i love it too, in fact it is my primary editor. But why isn't anyone talking about the changes that came with the update? There seems to be no changes from UI perspective. They could have just released another small update. One expects major changes with a left-most version number change. Or am i missing something?

plus if my view counts, i would like a UI overhaul. Its still very XP-eyee.

Perl style regular expression support is a big thing! I use notepad++ a lot, but the search has always reminded me of vim.

It is not only that it is Perl-style; this version also supports multiline regular expressions.

I do not like that it requires you to know a file's line endings to use them, though:

    Mac.   : a\rb
    Windows: a\r\nb
    Unix.  : a\nb

I was able to do this in the previous version.

But is such a change worth a major version number increase?

Google Chrome Team started this kind of "bigger version" war, now Firefox/IE/Linux, they are all in it :-)

Nothing new. I remember Slackware 3.6 (?) jumping to version 8 in order to be closer to the other Distro's numbers. thought it was sorta stupid at the time.

They added a code minimap?

I come from a Windows background and recently switched to Mac at work. I'm a pretty heavy user of Notepad++ but so far all the good text editors I've found for Mac are shareware.

What good free text editors do you recommend on Mac that have similar features, like syntax highlighting, auto-indent, and regular expression support?

gedit: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/mac/gedit/3.2/

text wrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

redcar: http://redcareditor.com/

but you're really not gonna get any better than textmate or sublime text 2

Text wrangler is particularly nice.

Another vote for Text Wrangler. I use Sublime 2 and Texmate a lot but if someone wants a free solution and not interested in Vim or Emacs then I always recommend Text Wrangler. It's from the same people that make BBedit.

TextWranlger (BBEdit's free version) is one option -- http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/.

MacVim or Emacs for OS X are both great editors and free. I recommend learning at least one of them. You'll never look back.

Just a note to let mark_up and chevas know that they've been hellbanned. I don't think you're trolls, so I thought I'd let you know (I can't respond to your posts directly).

mark_up and chevas: Looking at your comments history, it doesn't look like you post inappropriate comments, and have most likely been banned by mistake.

You can make new accounts, but I would suggest getting your current accounts unbanned. A short mail to pg(you can guess the email address) on the lines of "I believe my hn handle http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_up is wrongfully banned" does the trick.

An excellent free and open source native Mac editor is Fraise, though I'm not sure if it is still maintained, but it still works great in Lion.

Another in development is Kod ( http://kodapp.com/ ) that I've not used much yet. My daily editor now though is Sublime Text 2 (free to try out).

Kate from KDESC http://kate-editor.org/about-kate/ http://mac.kde.org/

This was the first decent GUI text editor I ever used. Prior to using it I had only ever seen Notepad and pico. I was amazed that you could interact with the terminal right from the app's user interface! To this day I still have a soft spot in my heart for Kate.

Doesn't get better than Sublime Text 2 - cross platform too.

oopps - not free though.

still worth a mention. been using sublime text 2 since the early beta and bought it almost right away, it's that good. i've been a big notepad++ fun in the past, but since for some now i've been working on both osx and win, it had been a pain to switch between different editors. sublime text 2 is cross platform and supports all kind of extensions. cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Yep. The only thing I miss from Notepad++ is the File Compare tool.

As already mentioned, TextWrangler is a pretty good free alternative. I used it and liked it enough to support the team by buying BBedit, which I recommend if you're looking to purchase one.

Komodo Edit runs on Mac and Windows and Linux too and is very nice. I use Komodo IDE which adds debuggers and other goodies, but the free version is well worth trying out.

The one thing I miss from windows, Notepad++.

There is not a lot of incentive to create a free Notepad++-like text editor for OSX. OSX already ships with two excellent free text editors for the commandline (Emacs & vim) and there's GUI versions of both.

Any Cocoa/OSX specific GUI editor will suffer from being less powerful, less well tested and less portable (whereas vim/emacs are available on any imaginable platform, allowing you to keep your editing muscle memory).

Vim and emacs are not for everyone. This may come across as sacrilege to some, but I personally don't like keyboard-driven interfaces. I want a mouse-based ui, with shortcuts for the stuff i do often enough. I want to move textblocks via drag and drop. I want to trigger a refactor command by navigating a menu with the mouse. And fundamentally, it's because my memory for remembering keyboard commands isn't good enough. A mouse-driven ui lets me focus on the code, instead of "what was that sequence of keys again?"

Sure, I'm just pointing out that their existence greatly diminishes the motivation to write a good (free) text editor for OSX. There are plenty of nice GUI editors for OSX, but most (all?) seem to be paid editors.

The end result is that you either fork over the money (not entirely unreasonable for a tool you use so often) or learn to work the excellent free editors that exist.

Sublime Text 2, it's cross platform, beautiful, and has wicked shortcuts.

TextMate gets a lot of love and supports regex: http://macromates.com/

Geany is very similar to Notepad++ and is available for MacOSX.

http://www.geany.org/Main/About

If you don't mind going the Emacs route, there's http://aquamacs.org/

It is probably a bit friendlier, out of the box, than vanilla Emacs, at least from an OS X perspective.

Ahh Notepad++. My editor of choice when I first got into programming. After switching to Mac years ago, I have been using TextMate/Xcode/Emacs.

There are only 3 things I look back on fondly from Windows: MSPaint, Winamp, and Notepad++.

Same here, though I also miss WinSCP.

I switched to Filezilla instead.

There's Winamp for Mac http://www.winamp.com/mac ! It doesn't look the same, though.

Paint-like program: http://paintbrush.sourceforge.net/

I love Notepad++, but when I started using Sublime Text 2, I purchased it, and never looked back.

Mind elaborating on why?

The biggest reasons are being able to open projects and view all of the files in the project (and search through all of them) at a quick command. I really liked the themeing functions. Multiple OS compatibility (I regularly switch between macOS and Windows), so I needed a client that is used basically the same on both OS's. And one license is for all of the computers you use, and on all operating systems.

The more I use it the more I like it. Sometimes I have files that still open in N++ and I quickly switch out of it into sublime. Oh, did I mention at the command line (in OSX) you can open files using the subl command (Very awesome).

Searching through files in my project is one of the few reasons i keep terminal windows open next to N++. A quick `find . | grep "php$" | xargs grep "search_term" -isl"` or even `grep -Ilir "search term"` is never too far away, but it would be great if it were closer.

My other nitpicks with N++ are the lack of a "yes to all" on the change-detection dialog when you do a hg update, and the way gedit seems to do ctags so much nicer. Seems like low-hanging fruit, maybe i should try to get a patch in..

Still, hard to beat and easy to recommend. I use it every day (it bought me a car!).

>> the way gedit seems to do ctags so much nicer.

The Zeus editor has ctags support that is effectively automatic..

All the user has to do is create a project/workspace and add files to that workspace.

I'm little curious on their no time limit evaluation and a license to buy for continuous use model. Is it just a good faith agreement to buy it if you intend to use continuously or it can be enforced later if it's detected it's used regularly?

It is a good faith agreement, plus a nag dialog that pops up once in a while if you're running unlicensed.

I believe it is just a nag window that pops up on file save sometimes. I used it for about 4 months before buying with no other interference.

Ditto. There are many computers that are not under my exclusive use, so I can't put Sublime Text 2 on them in good faith. And they're invariably Windows machines. I can throw Notepad++ on them fairly harmlessly, and the utility it provides is awesome. In a plant environment, its search functions are darn near magic for parsing SCADA logs.

I love N++ for some of its XML handling features (being able to hit a menu item to get an xpath readout is handy), but I still find myself using GVim more often than not.

No love for Textpad on HN? Its been running strong for ages and has the "just works" feel about it - always. Install it, switch to windows keybindings and you're good to go. And, it has editable macros.

I live in the knowledge that I'm going to hell for not paying for that awesome piece of software!

Textpad's "Constrain the cursor to the text" feature is what I miss the most. I have never seen it present elsewhere.

Hands down my favorite editor for Windows, but when I'm using it, I still wish I was using gedit or TextMate.

Try Sublime Text 2. It's fantastic (just like TextMate):

http://www.sublimetext.com/2

It's free for now.

Be sure to check Sublime package Manager. There are hundreds of Sublime extensions, many of which were ported directly from TextMate (and have .tmbundle suffix!):

http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control

List of packages: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community#sort-installs

+1 for Sublime. It is awesome... and for someone like me who switches b/w Windows and Linux, it's the perfect IDE.

Definitely not free, but non-self-crippling.

"Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation."

SublimeText 2 isn't really free. You have to pay for it, even now - just that it doesn't nag you too much.

That said, it's a great editor.

I just tried out Sublime Text 2. I can see the reason why its users like it.

As for me, it seems to take somewhat easy tasks and makes them more difficult. Installing packages was a head-scratcher at first, even with your guidance.

I'm just going to stick with Notepad++. It may not be pretty, but its straightforward and gets the job done.

Yeah, packages by default are hard on sublime. I recommend installing package control: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control

Can I navigate files and folders by pressing keyboard keys without triggering an edit in the current open file in Sublime Text, np++ explorer plugin seems to do that seamlessly

The only two things I miss from Windows are Notepad++ and Total Commander (Ultima Prime). Killer combo.

I also miss Winamp (although not that much) and Miranda (IM client). When I'm on Linux I rather don't use any dedicated IM client at all. Just IRC + something web based.

As with text editor, I never used Notepad++ too much but at the moment I use Komodo Edit. It seems fine to me and it is cross platform.

Winamp? Bah, Foobar2000 is where it was at. Tiny resource usage, infinitely customizable, and an arcane UI. Switching to anything else feels like that cold, uneasy feeling you get when you run your favorite editor on a machine without your personal config file and try to use one of your custom keybindings.

Was the same for me. For a Total Commander replacement give Forklift a try. It's not quite the same, but pretty good. I'm pretty much not touching Finder at all any more.

I like notepad++, but have switched to geany because its cross platform :P

Does "Enhance the loading performance for the large file." mean it can edit files larger than your RAM now?

UltraEdit could do this. I always find it unfortunate Notepad++ can't.

I use EditPad Pro instead of Notepad++ because of this. I'll try this new NotePad++ version today!

Sadly I just tested it and it's still not that good with large files.

I created a 185MB text file. It opens well, but:

1) Scrolling to the end is very slow

2) Finding a keyword which is near the end is very slow too

I'll stick to EditPad Pro for now.

Does it have "smart" word wrapping like Sublime Text 2? I think it is one of the killer features for me. I sometimes need to work with a small screen and need word-wrapping on.

If by smart wrapping you mean indented wrapping, yes, it does. Set you preferred wrap mode to Indent in Settins, Preferences, Editing, and then toggle Word Wrap from the View menu.

SciTE, with which Notepad++ shares the scintilla editing component, has quite a few settings for wrapping:

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDoc.html

(Search for “wrap” in the page.)

I haven’t looked into how many of those are supported in Notepad++, as I don’t use word wrap myself.

I'm personally a PSPad user, performs fine, does what I need to do in windows

http://www.pspad.com/

Always preferred jEdit, vim, and Notetab over Notepad++.

my favoritest editor 1. Love the way Notepad++ handles drag and drop with hundreds of files.

2. Also love the way it opens large files.

This is my editor of choice too. I love it and miss it everytime I have to switch editors when not working on windows.

Even though I don't use it, because it's not cross-platform, it looks like a great text editor for all Windows users.

I don't know if I will get flak for this but I really wish they made a Mac version.. :'(

Why updating existing version shows "no update available" message?

Nothing like a text editor post to get the emotions going..:-)

Can notepadd++ be directly connected to your server so you can code, save and upload all from within the program?

This makes the top of HN? What a sad day.

But Notepad++ requires a binary blob called "Windows".

Hi, sorry, I downvoted you. The Guidelines say:

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Sure, I understand. :-)

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