Notepad++

Overview

The sweet spot between Notepad and an IDE. Notepad++ has been my rough draft text editor and scratchpad for over a decade. Simple to get started with but with surprisingly deep supplementary functionality you can dive into at your own pace. It's also extremely performant, even with huge text files, and has a plethora of built in tools for text manipulation.

Review

What I use it for: Notepad++ is where I go to take quick notes when I need to jot something down, store some copied text, or do any sort of text manipulation such as find and replace or run regular expressions to clean data. It's one of a handful of apps that is perpetually open on my computer.

Pros:

• Solid, fast, easy to use
• Lots of built in functions and plug-in options for everything from changing text cases or sorting lines to using regex to find and replace or modify data
• configurable appearance let's you build a UI that works for you
• rock solid state and save handling. As far as I can recall, in ten years of using it, I don't think I've ever lost data
• free

Cons:

• default UI is a bit dated

Buy/Try if:

• You need a basic text editor thats vastly superior to windows Notepad
• you want to delve into IDEs and VS studio and VS Code are too daunting
• You need to do data cleanup or remediation and are comfortable with Regular Expressions