Programmer’s Notepad Review

(c) 2008, Gary Fletcher

Summary: This 500 word review describes the features of Programmer’s Notepad 2 for SW developers.

Programmer’s Notepad is a free text editor with features designed for software developers. It offers a simple and intuitive GUI for working with popular programming languages and text formats. It is actively developed and supported and new features are released regularly.

Developer Features

Programmer’s Notepad will be especially appreciated by developers working regularly with different programming languages. Instead of learning differences between IDEs you can concentrate on writing code. Text editing features are described further on but let’s start with some of the special features for developers.

Programmer’s Notepad has built in syntax colouring and folding for over forty programming languages and text formats. You can modify the built-in formats or create your own formatting schemes. New schemes are described by an XML configuration file, a scheme editor is planned for a future release.

Customizable text clips for several languages and formats can be instantly inserted. You can also add your own text clips for snippets of code or text that you use frequently. To help you further while writing code Programmer’s Notepad can automatically complete keywords, identifiers and function names.

A very useful feature is the support for running external tools. You can use this to run applications such as compilers, code checkers or your own custom scripts from the editor. Text from open files or projects can be passed to the tools by command line or standard input.

Tool output such as error messages can be captured in a separate, dockable window with hyperlinks back to the source code. Tool output can also be inserted into the edited file. This last feature provides a very flexible means of inserting information from other files, tools, or scripts into your documents.

Finally, Programmer’s Notepad projects are a convenient way of working with multiple files. As well as quick and easy access to related files they can be configured with specific tools and settings for compilers, code checkers, etc.

Editing Features

As well as the developer goodies described above Programmer’s Notepad provides plenty of useful standard text editing features.

- Multiple file editing via a tabbed MDI interface.

- Fast search and replace across multiple files and folders with good support for regular expressions.

- Built-in CTags and bookmarks support for easy file navigation.

- Support for Windows, Macintosh and Unix file formats.

- Customizable keyboard mappings for all editing commands.

Conclusion

Programmer’s Notepad 2 is great for software developers looking for a powerful, lightweight editor to work with multiple languages and file formats. It will save you time learning your way around different IDEs so you can concentrate on writing code.

Developers will also appreciate the easy integration with build tools and other command line utilities. All in all Programmer’s Notepad 2 is an excellent text editor at an unbeatable price.

About The Author

Gary Fletcher writes articles for web sites, newsletters and blogs. Visit http://www.writescribe.com to learn more about buying articles for your site.

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