Notepad++ is a great free solution for people who need a text editor that is lightweight but offers more functionality than Notepad.

Everyone who has programmed anything since the 90's has come across the program Notepad. Notepad++ has multiple syntax type highlighting and allows multiple pages/documents to be open at once, particularly very useful when it comes to web development and editing. There is also an option to open previously edited files when the program is opened, recently opened files accessed from the menu, and a whole host of tools like Macros and plugins are supported.

People who hack or edit files that would otherwise not be editable will be happy to know Notepad++ doesn't insert any special characters at the beginning of a file like WordPad or Word does that often-corrupt files for future use. If you like to edit your code or program in an environment that does not have all the over-head of an IDE, notepad++ is an easy solution. This can run along side a more resource heavy editor as well, if you just need to change one or two things, the startup sequence is very quick, whereas some editors can take longer to load. It’s worth checking out if you use Notepad and it is highly possible that will replace it entirely.