I really, really like Notepad++ as a drop-in replacement for the standard Windows Notepad.
It’s fast, light-weight, can open just about any file format, regardless of encoding or byte-order marks. And best of all, it’s free!
There are a couple of plug-ins that I consider almost essential when developing, especially when working with Xml and Xslt files:
- XPatherizerNPP – Supports ad-hoc testing of xpath queries against your current document. Also provides standardised reformatting of an Xml file for readability
- XML Tools – A host of simple tools, including reformatting, validation against schemas, escaping/un-escaping xml to HTML encoding
- Regex Helper – Useful for testing out Regular Expressions. Yes, I know, now I have 2 problems, but when used, and documented, well, a single RegEx can save a lot of coding effort
Notepad++ plug-ins are now fully integrated into the application itself, and these 3 can be installed simply by selecting the master “Plugin Manager” plugin from the drop-down menu. It’s usually the first thing I do when setting up a new development environment.
Essential++
