

Notepad++ 6.0 Released - kefs
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/notepad-6.0-release.html

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LVB
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 :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
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?

~~~
lclarkmichalek
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.

~~~
tudorw
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.engadget.com/2011/05/24/google-opening-seawater-
cooled-data-center-finally-glad-it-appl/) [http://www.comms-
express.com/news/server-racks/servers-don-t...](http://www.comms-
express.com/news/server-racks/servers-don-t-mind-the-outdoor-life-experiment-
claims-18800045/)

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vvnraman
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.

~~~
meow
+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)

~~~
Joeri
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.

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crusso
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.

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RegEx
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.

~~~
platz
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.

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Achshar
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.

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

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Someone
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

~~~
thewordis
I was able to do this in the previous version.

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Osiris
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?

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anthonyb
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).

~~~
irahul
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.

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pirateking
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++.

~~~
dkharrat
Same here, though I also miss WinSCP.

~~~
rndstr
I switched to Filezilla instead.

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

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blntechie
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?

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

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Karunamon
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.

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vinodkd
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!

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

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

~~~
pooriaazimi
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>

~~~
xpose2000
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.

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

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

~~~
rplnt
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.

~~~
jamesgeck0
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.

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

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gcp
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.

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

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electrotype
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.

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wenbert
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.

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demetris
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.

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mp3geek
I'm personally a PSPad user, performs fine, does what I need to do in windows

<http://www.pspad.com/>

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

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ittan
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.

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ale55andro
This is my editor of choice too. I love it and miss it everytime I have to
switch editors when not working on windows.

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

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

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

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

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paul9290
Can notepadd++ be directly connected to your server so you can code, save and
upload all from within the program?

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

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

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

    
    
      Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics
      unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
    

Also.

    
    
      Please don't submit comments complaining that a
      submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think
      something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its
      page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will
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      something, please don't also comment that you did.

~~~
derrida
Sure, I understand. :-)

