Now the developer has to know a bunch of different technologies, systems and libraries. And each day you start your favorite IDE, HTML editor, XML editor, a couple of utilities along with Outlook Express program and run a server. The computer is as slow as hell and you start cursing the developers and the computer.

I am in the development of the presentation tier for the large contract management application writing some java code, composing some HTML & JSP pages and writing some crazy client-side JS components, writing and fixing long XML and .property files.

We use an excellent Eclipse IDE along with a set of plug-ins known as MyEclipse. This is a very powerful system, however most of time (I mean always) the only plug-in we use is the nice syntax highlighting of JSP, JS & XML files.

Once I asked the colleague to help me fix some annoying bug in JSP code. He logged in to my server, opened the page in IE, right-clicked it and opened the HTML source in a notepad. No, it was not a standard grey ugly windows notepad. A nice editor highlighted the source code. We used its folding option to find the bug – I forgot to insert the closing JSP tag. The HTML source looked great!

I asked to give me this editor (Notepad++) and installed it on my computer. A couple of seconds to create proper file associations using the Notepad++’s convenient menu and it is ready to go!
Notepad++ highlights many file formats, it starts very fast as it was written in C++ and is very small (less than 1 Mb). Each new file is opened in a new tab, and when you close the notepad and reopens it – it loads the files that had been opened!

There is a number of text processing plug-ins, some TextFX plug-ins. I did not look into it, but at a glance, I liked the HTML/XML auto-closing feature.

Now I use it on daily basis and let me tell you this is the only program I really like 

Here are the features of Notepad++ (taken from the web site):

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding
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

View Screenshot

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under General, Programming, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.