Windows Developer Power Tools

6.5 Handling Small Tasks with Notepad2

Sometimes you just don’t need a full-blown IDE for your work. Why pop open Visual Studio and suffer through its long startup time when all you want to do is change a value or two in a .config file, or show an example of some C# code for a review or presentation? A text editor would meet your needs just as well. But on the other hand, plain old Notepad is pretty grim, since it has no support for syntax highlighting or regular-expression-based searches and replacements, among other limitations.

Notepad2 is a lightweight, simple text editor that can easily serve these purposes and many others. Florian Balmer’s tool, released under GPL terms, is perfect when you need a text editor for quick uses. Notepad2 supports syntax highlighting for most popular languages and has terrific editing features.

Notepad2 at a Glance
Tool	Notepad2
Version covered	1.0.12
Home page	http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/67
Summary	A lightweight, powerful text editor offering syntax highlighting for many different languages
License type	GNU Public License
Online resources	FAQ, mailing list
Related tools in this book	Snippet Compiler

Getting Started

Notepad2 is available as source code, or as a separate .zip with the compiled executable. Both versions come with a .reg file for controlling Notepad2 options and a readme with extensive ...