14 ms·

Notepad++ v8 release

226 points by gainsurier 5y ago

arkitaip 5y ago
I love Notepad++, it's the app I use most after Firefox. It's super fast, convenient and open source. V. 8 introduces dark mode, distraction free mode and many other things [0]. [0] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8/
- arkitaip 5y ago
  One thing I think N++ could do better is plugin support. The current UI feels very outdated and overall plugins lack the community that, say, Visual Studio Code has.
  - jptech 5y ago
    The UI might look outdated, but on the other hand it's light weight and fast. There are a bunch of fancy text editors out there that are simply a resource hog.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I had a similar thought reading that comment: "Outdated? You mean because it is lightweight, responsive, and native?"
      - Zarel 5y ago
        I mean, you don't have to be uncharitable, the UI can be lightweight, responsive, and fast, but they're most likely talking about the usability aspects. The "huge row of inscrutable icons" school of design fell out of favor for good reason – while a few icons (like "Back" or "Close") can be immediately recognizable, when you get to that many, most of them are icons people haven't seen before, and people end up mostly not using the buttons at all. Even if they _are_ recognizable, who wants to hunt for icons in a huge list? So they just sit there, taking up space.
        hyperman1 5y ago
        I'm now looking at that bar of icons. It fills about half of my horizontal width, so there is plenty of place for more. The first 20 are the usual suspects. The last 10 I don't care about, half of them has to do with macros. Hunting for them is no problem, after a few hours your muscle memory takes over. In fact, now I look at it, I like how this small amount of color provides a bit of recognizability and identity to the application as a whole. All of this is tiny compared with just about any other application. Vertical pixel size is small. Horizontal size has plenty left over for more icons. You might have a point when talking about ms office around 2000, but not notepad++
        zozbot234 5y ago
        > while a few icons (like "Back" or "Close") can be immediately recognizable, when you get to that many, most of them are icons people haven't seen before You can get a description of the icons by hovering with the mouse pointer. The actual reason this style has fallen out of favor is to enable touch interfaces, which demand physically larger targets and do not generally support hover.
        MiddleEndian 5y ago
        You can hide that row of icons, it doesn't show up on mine. There's a checkmark for it in General preferences.
      - twobitshifter 5y ago
        It looks native but not windows 10 native. We have a similar problem with an MFC application at work? Microsoft no longer provides MFC with the ability to update your app to use the system look and feel. The newest we can go to is “Office 2007”
    - conradfr 5y ago
      Well they updated the icons, now they're more modern but worse ;) (but resizable)
  - richardcrossley 5y ago
    Nope, I think the UI is fit for purpose, doesn't need a flatso look and feel or massive space used for static text. Thanks for building an awesome tool that runs for weeks at a time on my desktop.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      Can't agree more. Notepad++ is a great tool, that does what it's supposed to do. Maximal milk for minimal moo. I wish there were more tools like this. winscp, 7-zip, all having the same win32 look, and I like them. I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is the new round. Why? Personally, I liked the Win95-Win2K era best. A machine optimized for letting me work.
      - radmuzom 5y ago
        Strongly agree with you and parent. Unfortunately, lot of Windows settings are now available by default only using a "modern" UI whereas the old style was fast, consistent and extremely user-friendly.
      - jptech 5y ago
        > I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is the new round. Why? Funny thing is that like fashion it has a repetitive cycle too. Flat with basic colors back to colorful and shaded, back to flat, ... . Probably to look innovative by setting a new trend.
Grazester 5y ago
I read this as V8(js engine).As in it's now an Electron app. I panicked!
- dlsa 5y ago
  Not the only one! I wonder what the difference would actually be?
  - akmittal 5y ago
    Slow startup and more memory consumption
- nemasu 5y ago
  Same here. I had to make sure it wasn't April 1 again.
geenat 5y ago
Dark mode, brilliant. NP++ is what I used to use before going all in on Sublime. Still glad to see it going strong.
rgry 5y ago
dark mode is not supposed to mean "full white on full black" :( monochrome icons also not really helping in readability/recognition so it's a "no" on both those most visible changes... but hey an update is an update and npp still rocks
- Grumbledour 5y ago
  That's the thing though with well developed apps: I think I also dislike the new icons. But it doesn't really matter, since the old ones are still there and I can continue using them.. The dark mode seems a bit buggy still and the contrast really is to stark, but I am hopeful these problems will be addressed with time. Not everything is always right at the beginning, but I am never afraid to update notepad++, which is a huge compliment these days.
  - adzm 5y ago
    > dark mode seems a bit buggy Please let us know any bugs you encounter. A lot of dialogs and etc still do not support dark mode due to manual changes needed for each of them, unfortunately.
- thrower123 5y ago
  I'm surprised that there is any need for an explicit dark-mode, and that Notepad++ wouldn't just pick up the system colors; it's old enough that it was customary to do that, and use the system named colors instead of specifying RGBs for control colors.
  - Grumbledour 5y ago
    Do System colors even exist in windows 10? The option to set global color schemes seems to be long gone and Microsoft needed to spend extra effort to adapt a dark color scheme in explorer (It didn't support dark mode for a long time and then took some updates to work well across the board). I always find it kind of funny and sad at the same time, that something windows could do 20 years age now needs to be implemented by each application separately.
_Microft 5y ago
"39. Remove Microsoft Bing from Notepad++ for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability." That's in response to the tankman problem btw. They now redirect people who have used Bing so far to DuckDuckGo. I am not sure what I should think of this. On one hand, it is understandable, on the other hand it shows disregard for the choice of their users. I would have understood if they had simply removed it from the default list and let current users continue using it but forcefully redirecting existing users seems encroaching.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  To censor Bing for an infraction is not a consistent free speech position. It has clearly become a political, and extreme (becoming user-hostile), position. [Edited to note: the parent's claim is confirmed by the link on the page]
- erk__ 5y ago
  If you look at their previous release names it is really not surprising https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/ Notepad++ is also pretty much the reason that GitHub added tools to deal with massive scale abuse iirc as the repo was spammed with issues and prs for days after the first "Free Uyghur" release https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/
  - richardcrossley 5y ago
    I wonder if this was being planned for June 4th?
- shawnz 5y ago
  Didn't DDG have the same issue?
  - fnord123 5y ago
    DDG uses Bing results.
cm2187 5y ago
I wish they would remove the update addins modal you get every time you open it.
Aerroon 5y ago
One thing I wish Notepad++ could do is to create a table document instead of the regular text document. Kind of like excel. It doesn't have to have any fancy formulas or anything like that, simply a grid with writeable cells. I love how lightweight it is and I like collecting notes in it. Data is better in a table rather than a text document though. I haven't checked recently whether such a thing might exist, but last time I checked I couldn't find anything like it. I have no idea how easy or hard something like this would be to add. Then again, perhaps it's better without it.
- gainsurier 5y ago
  emeditor can help you.
- planb 5y ago
  > I love how lightweight it is Probably because it does not allow feature creep like adding support for a table format. I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm just trying to state the obvious contradition that many software products face.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Let's start officepad plus plus
- account-5 5y ago
  Sounds like you would like TreeSheets. http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Just the screenshots on the home page have me curious. I’ll have to poke around with this after work today. Thank you for sharing the link.
    - toss1 5y ago
      Looks quite interesting indeed! Thanks also to GP for sharing the link So good to find focused, lightweight software that doesn't squander gigabytes to load.
PedroBatista 5y ago
Instead of wishing or tell them what they should or shouldn't do, I would like to thank all the people behind Notepad++ for consistently making and maintaining an awesome piece of software and product for more than 15 years for FREE.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I've become a lot more accustomed to paying for software - often after using the free version. My biggest emotional aversion to paying for software remains paying for something that I ultimately never use. I'm also extremely hesitant to subscribe to anything. Those often come with emotional regret when I realize I haven't been using it and my CC has just been getting charged. Software like WinSCP, NotePad++, Typora, Firefox, etc... are all software that I use on a daily basis, that I happily pay for, or donate to. It just feels better to buy something with a one-time payment because I walk away with the perception of owning an asset, rather than am running a subscription liability. Similarly donations make me feel better (often made with feature requests). I think a lot of open source projects should revisit the one-time pay monetization strategy for additional convenience features. I think the people are becoming a lot more comfortable with spending money for software.
spapas82 5y ago
The main missing feature of Notepad++ for me (which unfortunately seems to still not be available) is the "Fuzzy File Finder" i.e press a shortcut (usually ctrl+p), display a checkbox in which you can write a part of the full filename and immediately get suggestions of the file with an option to open/edit it using enter. This is a well known feature which I use all the time and is implemented in most editors (for example in VS Code using ctrl+p or using the ctrlp plugin in vim). Until it is implemented I can't really use notepad++ for anything more than a quick edit like notepad :( The other notepad++ missing feature (for me) is the "quick return to previous editing buffer" (like the <C-^> ctrl+shift+6 shortcut in vim). Actually I have implemented this particular feature in a plugin for VSCode for people missing it (like me): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Serafeim.goto-previous-buffer https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Serafeim...
- roelschroeven 5y ago
  CTRL+TAB does that, if it's enabled and configured to do so in the settings (Settings -> Misc -> Document Switcher; check "Enable" and "Enable MRU behaviour").
  - spapas82 5y ago
    Yes you actually are right! ctrl+tab returns to previous buffer in notepad++! Thank you this is really useful for me!
formerly_proven 5y ago
Is there a way to get decent indentation handling with Notepad++? It always seems to do "the wrong" thing (using tabs in a file using spaces, leaving whitespace-only lines, trailing whitespace etc.)
boboche 5y ago
Thank you to the team for making a perfect balanced app greater. Notepad++ is part of my basic OS install routine and I use it on a daily basis. Perfect example of balancing a lot of features while remaining snappy and relevant over the years. Jira should take a page from your note…pad!
radmuzom 5y ago
I wish we move back to the days when most software was like utorrent, notepad++, etc. The standard response to this statement is "but today's software does so much more" - to which I don't agree. As someone who has been using computers since 1994 - including machines which did not have a hard drive - modern software is very very frustrating to use in every way I can think of.
- zuhsetaqi 5y ago
  Can you give a few examples? I’m not using computers that long and don’t know in which way modern software is so frustrating.
  - arsome 5y ago
    Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted. Try comparing Spotify to Amarok/Foobar/Clementine. Even Firefox seems to just keep stripping out useful functionality for power users for some bizarre reason, no more full themes, limited extension APIs, poor UI customization and less advanced features like "view image", it's like they're trying to alienate their most dedicated fanbase in an attempt to steal some marketshare back from Chrome. Microsoft Teams runs so poorly on my work laptop that it's barely usable and lacks simple features like Push-to-Talk.
    - Jonnax 5y ago
      Spotify is a music streaming service. These other apps are for curating your own audio files. Also what does "bloated election app" mean? Because it seems like it's just a meme at this point. I'm using the desktop app right now. It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive. Teams is just a bad application. A lot of shitty "enterprise" software is written in Java. If I started saying Java = Bad software. I'm sure many people would disagree.
      - HideousKojima 5y ago
        Winamp 5.0 worked on a 400 mhz Pentium II with 64 MB of memory (total) and was crazy responsive, while also being capable of much more than the modern Spotify app
unixhero 5y ago
Love Notepad++
daveoc64 5y ago
My only wish for a new Notepad++ release would be to handle multi-monitor high DPI properly. https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/6284 https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
ghosty141 5y ago
I'm really happy that they implemented a dark mode. Hopefuly it will get a bit more customization so we can adjust the colors since the contrast is pretty harsh right now.
- adzm 5y ago
  I made sure to leave everything configurable in code so customization is really just a UI issue to configure and serialize the settings.
mstwntd_g 5y ago
I remember starting out to code.. npp was a breath of fresh air.. due to my line of work I now do everything in vim via prompt.. but npp is the first thing I open when I work in gui.. can't express how happy I am to see its still flourishing..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adzm 5y ago
Dark mode was fun to implement. A combination of some undocumented interfaces for the title bar and an entirely previously undocumented approach for customization of the menu bar. The rest is the usual subclassing of standard windows controls.
unfocused 5y ago
Notepad++ with the XML plugins was amazing when I had to maintain 43 XSLT files and massive amounts of XML data. Glad to see they are still doing well.
lnl 5y ago
While I am happy that Notepad++ added a dark mode, I am frustrated that Microsoft forced Notepad++ (and all Windows programs) to add hacky workarounds for a dark mode. Notepad++ already obeys the Windows system colors, and I have been using it in dark mode by changing Windows colors. Microsoft, presumably to sabotage classical programs and to push modern UWP apps, no longer allows changing system colors. There is a Windows 10 Dark Mode instead, and all it does it notify programs about its configuration, so that they redraw all their colors. A vestige of customizable system colors that remains is the (ugly) High Contrast Mode (activated with Alt+Shift+PrtSc); but if one can put up with its ugliness, it works much better than the Windows 10 Dark Mode, changing the theme for all well-written Windows programs, including all versions of Notepad++. With the UWP mostly dead, I was hoping that they would start caring about "legacy" programs, but nope. Notepad++, as well as many other programs I use and contribute, saw that Windows was not fixing this and started adding their own patchy dark modes, which often don't work that well. I tested the new Notepad++ dark mode, to see maybe I can start using Dark Mode instead of High Contrast Theme. Unsurprisingly, many places (settings, dropdowns etc.) remain with white backgrounds; it is difficult to change all backgrounds as it was written with obeying system colors in mind, rather than manual theming. High Contrast Theme, however, works perfectly. Presumably those remaining white patches will be fixed as Notepad++ has an active community, but dozens of other old Windows programs I use will probably never bother with explicitly adding a dark theme, so I guess I will have to stick with the High Contrast Mode.
- Joeri 5y ago
  I have a friend who maintains the gui components of a 25 year old windows application suite continuously developed using delphi. The stories he has told me of the epic battles to achieve multimonitor, high dpi, font scaling, theme and dark mode support on a legacy codebase are both impressive and depressing. It is software like that which keeps windows entrenched in enterprise, but microsoft seemingly cannot be bothered to care.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  Microsoft's Windows strategy is baffling to me. They have gone out of their way to fix a lot of their problems (in fact they fixed almost every single nitpick I had about Windows 7 coming from OS X and Linux), and they add a lot of new powerful features, but at the same time they actively seem to be sabotaging themselves at every step. I really don't know what to make of it.
thatKaran 5y ago
The new Dark Mode looks fugly.

226 points by gainsurier 5y ago

I love Notepad++, it's the app I use most after Firefox. It's super fast, convenient and open source. V. 8 introduces dark mode, distraction free mode and many other things [0]. [0] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8/

arkitaip 5y ago
One thing I think N++ could do better is plugin support. The current UI feels very outdated and overall plugins lack the community that, say, Visual Studio Code has.
- jptech 5y ago
  The UI might look outdated, but on the other hand it's light weight and fast. There are a bunch of fancy text editors out there that are simply a resource hog.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I had a similar thought reading that comment: "Outdated? You mean because it is lightweight, responsive, and native?"
    - Zarel 5y ago
      I mean, you don't have to be uncharitable, the UI can be lightweight, responsive, and fast, but they're most likely talking about the usability aspects. The "huge row of inscrutable icons" school of design fell out of favor for good reason – while a few icons (like "Back" or "Close") can be immediately recognizable, when you get to that many, most of them are icons people haven't seen before, and people end up mostly not using the buttons at all. Even if they _are_ recognizable, who wants to hunt for icons in a huge list? So they just sit there, taking up space.
      - hyperman1 5y ago
        I'm now looking at that bar of icons. It fills about half of my horizontal width, so there is plenty of place for more. The first 20 are the usual suspects. The last 10 I don't care about, half of them has to do with macros. Hunting for them is no problem, after a few hours your muscle memory takes over. In fact, now I look at it, I like how this small amount of color provides a bit of recognizability and identity to the application as a whole. All of this is tiny compared with just about any other application. Vertical pixel size is small. Horizontal size has plenty left over for more icons. You might have a point when talking about ms office around 2000, but not notepad++
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        > while a few icons (like "Back" or "Close") can be immediately recognizable, when you get to that many, most of them are icons people haven't seen before You can get a description of the icons by hovering with the mouse pointer. The actual reason this style has fallen out of favor is to enable touch interfaces, which demand physically larger targets and do not generally support hover.
      - MiddleEndian 5y ago
        You can hide that row of icons, it doesn't show up on mine. There's a checkmark for it in General preferences.
    - twobitshifter 5y ago
      It looks native but not windows 10 native. We have a similar problem with an MFC application at work? Microsoft no longer provides MFC with the ability to update your app to use the system look and feel. The newest we can go to is “Office 2007”
  - conradfr 5y ago
    Well they updated the icons, now they're more modern but worse ;) (but resizable)
- richardcrossley 5y ago
  Nope, I think the UI is fit for purpose, doesn't need a flatso look and feel or massive space used for static text. Thanks for building an awesome tool that runs for weeks at a time on my desktop.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    Can't agree more. Notepad++ is a great tool, that does what it's supposed to do. Maximal milk for minimal moo. I wish there were more tools like this. winscp, 7-zip, all having the same win32 look, and I like them. I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is the new round. Why? Personally, I liked the Win95-Win2K era best. A machine optimized for letting me work.
    - radmuzom 5y ago
      Strongly agree with you and parent. Unfortunately, lot of Windows settings are now available by default only using a "modern" UI whereas the old style was fast, consistent and extremely user-friendly.
    - jptech 5y ago
      > I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is the new round. Why? Funny thing is that like fashion it has a repetitive cycle too. Flat with basic colors back to colorful and shaded, back to flat, ... . Probably to look innovative by setting a new trend.

Grazester 5y ago

I read this as V8(js engine).As in it's now an Electron app. I panicked!

dlsa 5y ago
Not the only one! I wonder what the difference would actually be?
- akmittal 5y ago
  Slow startup and more memory consumption
nemasu 5y ago
Same here. I had to make sure it wasn't April 1 again.

geenat 5y ago

Dark mode, brilliant. NP++ is what I used to use before going all in on Sublime. Still glad to see it going strong.

rgry 5y ago

dark mode is not supposed to mean "full white on full black" :( monochrome icons also not really helping in readability/recognition so it's a "no" on both those most visible changes... but hey an update is an update and npp still rocks

Grumbledour 5y ago
That's the thing though with well developed apps: I think I also dislike the new icons. But it doesn't really matter, since the old ones are still there and I can continue using them.. The dark mode seems a bit buggy still and the contrast really is to stark, but I am hopeful these problems will be addressed with time. Not everything is always right at the beginning, but I am never afraid to update notepad++, which is a huge compliment these days.
- adzm 5y ago
  > dark mode seems a bit buggy Please let us know any bugs you encounter. A lot of dialogs and etc still do not support dark mode due to manual changes needed for each of them, unfortunately.
thrower123 5y ago
I'm surprised that there is any need for an explicit dark-mode, and that Notepad++ wouldn't just pick up the system colors; it's old enough that it was customary to do that, and use the system named colors instead of specifying RGBs for control colors.
- Grumbledour 5y ago
  Do System colors even exist in windows 10? The option to set global color schemes seems to be long gone and Microsoft needed to spend extra effort to adapt a dark color scheme in explorer (It didn't support dark mode for a long time and then took some updates to work well across the board). I always find it kind of funny and sad at the same time, that something windows could do 20 years age now needs to be implemented by each application separately.

_Microft 5y ago

"39. Remove Microsoft Bing from Notepad++ for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability." That's in response to the tankman problem btw. They now redirect people who have used Bing so far to DuckDuckGo. I am not sure what I should think of this. On one hand, it is understandable, on the other hand it shows disregard for the choice of their users. I would have understood if they had simply removed it from the default list and let current users continue using it but forcefully redirecting existing users seems encroaching.

teachingassist 5y ago
To censor Bing for an infraction is not a consistent free speech position. It has clearly become a political, and extreme (becoming user-hostile), position. [Edited to note: the parent's claim is confirmed by the link on the page]
erk__ 5y ago
If you look at their previous release names it is really not surprising https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/ Notepad++ is also pretty much the reason that GitHub added tools to deal with massive scale abuse iirc as the repo was spammed with issues and prs for days after the first "Free Uyghur" release https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/31/notepad_china_spam/
- richardcrossley 5y ago
  I wonder if this was being planned for June 4th?
shawnz 5y ago
Didn't DDG have the same issue?
- fnord123 5y ago
  DDG uses Bing results.

cm2187 5y ago

I wish they would remove the update addins modal you get every time you open it.

Aerroon 5y ago

One thing I wish Notepad++ could do is to create a table document instead of the regular text document. Kind of like excel. It doesn't have to have any fancy formulas or anything like that, simply a grid with writeable cells. I love how lightweight it is and I like collecting notes in it. Data is better in a table rather than a text document though. I haven't checked recently whether such a thing might exist, but last time I checked I couldn't find anything like it. I have no idea how easy or hard something like this would be to add. Then again, perhaps it's better without it.

gainsurier 5y ago
emeditor can help you.
planb 5y ago
> I love how lightweight it is Probably because it does not allow feature creep like adding support for a table format. I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm just trying to state the obvious contradition that many software products face.
agumonkey 5y ago
Let's start officepad plus plus
account-5 5y ago
Sounds like you would like TreeSheets. http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Just the screenshots on the home page have me curious. I’ll have to poke around with this after work today. Thank you for sharing the link.
  - toss1 5y ago
    Looks quite interesting indeed! Thanks also to GP for sharing the link So good to find focused, lightweight software that doesn't squander gigabytes to load.

PedroBatista 5y ago

Instead of wishing or tell them what they should or shouldn't do, I would like to thank all the people behind Notepad++ for consistently making and maintaining an awesome piece of software and product for more than 15 years for FREE.

koheripbal 5y ago
I've become a lot more accustomed to paying for software - often after using the free version. My biggest emotional aversion to paying for software remains paying for something that I ultimately never use. I'm also extremely hesitant to subscribe to anything. Those often come with emotional regret when I realize I haven't been using it and my CC has just been getting charged. Software like WinSCP, NotePad++, Typora, Firefox, etc... are all software that I use on a daily basis, that I happily pay for, or donate to. It just feels better to buy something with a one-time payment because I walk away with the perception of owning an asset, rather than am running a subscription liability. Similarly donations make me feel better (often made with feature requests). I think a lot of open source projects should revisit the one-time pay monetization strategy for additional convenience features. I think the people are becoming a lot more comfortable with spending money for software.

spapas82 5y ago

The main missing feature of Notepad++ for me (which unfortunately seems to still not be available) is the "Fuzzy File Finder" i.e press a shortcut (usually ctrl+p), display a checkbox in which you can write a part of the full filename and immediately get suggestions of the file with an option to open/edit it using enter. This is a well known feature which I use all the time and is implemented in most editors (for example in VS Code using ctrl+p or using the ctrlp plugin in vim). Until it is implemented I can't really use notepad++ for anything more than a quick edit like notepad :( The other notepad++ missing feature (for me) is the "quick return to previous editing buffer" (like the <C-^> ctrl+shift+6 shortcut in vim). Actually I have implemented this particular feature in a plugin for VSCode for people missing it (like me): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Serafeim.goto-previous-buffer https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Serafeim...

roelschroeven 5y ago
CTRL+TAB does that, if it's enabled and configured to do so in the settings (Settings -> Misc -> Document Switcher; check "Enable" and "Enable MRU behaviour").
- spapas82 5y ago
  Yes you actually are right! ctrl+tab returns to previous buffer in notepad++! Thank you this is really useful for me!

formerly_proven 5y ago

Is there a way to get decent indentation handling with Notepad++? It always seems to do "the wrong" thing (using tabs in a file using spaces, leaving whitespace-only lines, trailing whitespace etc.)

boboche 5y ago

Thank you to the team for making a perfect balanced app greater. Notepad++ is part of my basic OS install routine and I use it on a daily basis. Perfect example of balancing a lot of features while remaining snappy and relevant over the years. Jira should take a page from your note…pad!

radmuzom 5y ago

I wish we move back to the days when most software was like utorrent, notepad++, etc. The standard response to this statement is "but today's software does so much more" - to which I don't agree. As someone who has been using computers since 1994 - including machines which did not have a hard drive - modern software is very very frustrating to use in every way I can think of.

zuhsetaqi 5y ago
Can you give a few examples? I’m not using computers that long and don’t know in which way modern software is so frustrating.
- arsome 5y ago
  Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted. Try comparing Spotify to Amarok/Foobar/Clementine. Even Firefox seems to just keep stripping out useful functionality for power users for some bizarre reason, no more full themes, limited extension APIs, poor UI customization and less advanced features like "view image", it's like they're trying to alienate their most dedicated fanbase in an attempt to steal some marketshare back from Chrome. Microsoft Teams runs so poorly on my work laptop that it's barely usable and lacks simple features like Push-to-Talk.
  - Jonnax 5y ago
    Spotify is a music streaming service. These other apps are for curating your own audio files. Also what does "bloated election app" mean? Because it seems like it's just a meme at this point. I'm using the desktop app right now. It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive. Teams is just a bad application. A lot of shitty "enterprise" software is written in Java. If I started saying Java = Bad software. I'm sure many people would disagree.
    - HideousKojima 5y ago
      Winamp 5.0 worked on a 400 mhz Pentium II with 64 MB of memory (total) and was crazy responsive, while also being capable of much more than the modern Spotify app

unixhero 5y ago

Love Notepad++

daveoc64 5y ago

My only wish for a new Notepad++ release would be to handle multi-monitor high DPI properly. https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/6284 https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...

ghosty141 5y ago

I'm really happy that they implemented a dark mode. Hopefuly it will get a bit more customization so we can adjust the colors since the contrast is pretty harsh right now.

adzm 5y ago
I made sure to leave everything configurable in code so customization is really just a UI issue to configure and serialize the settings.

mstwntd_g 5y ago

I remember starting out to code.. npp was a breath of fresh air.. due to my line of work I now do everything in vim via prompt.. but npp is the first thing I open when I work in gui.. can't express how happy I am to see its still flourishing..

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

adzm 5y ago

Dark mode was fun to implement. A combination of some undocumented interfaces for the title bar and an entirely previously undocumented approach for customization of the menu bar. The rest is the usual subclassing of standard windows controls.

unfocused 5y ago

Notepad++ with the XML plugins was amazing when I had to maintain 43 XSLT files and massive amounts of XML data. Glad to see they are still doing well.

lnl 5y ago

While I am happy that Notepad++ added a dark mode, I am frustrated that Microsoft forced Notepad++ (and all Windows programs) to add hacky workarounds for a dark mode. Notepad++ already obeys the Windows system colors, and I have been using it in dark mode by changing Windows colors. Microsoft, presumably to sabotage classical programs and to push modern UWP apps, no longer allows changing system colors. There is a Windows 10 Dark Mode instead, and all it does it notify programs about its configuration, so that they redraw all their colors. A vestige of customizable system colors that remains is the (ugly) High Contrast Mode (activated with Alt+Shift+PrtSc); but if one can put up with its ugliness, it works much better than the Windows 10 Dark Mode, changing the theme for all well-written Windows programs, including all versions of Notepad++. With the UWP mostly dead, I was hoping that they would start caring about "legacy" programs, but nope. Notepad++, as well as many other programs I use and contribute, saw that Windows was not fixing this and started adding their own patchy dark modes, which often don't work that well. I tested the new Notepad++ dark mode, to see maybe I can start using Dark Mode instead of High Contrast Theme. Unsurprisingly, many places (settings, dropdowns etc.) remain with white backgrounds; it is difficult to change all backgrounds as it was written with obeying system colors in mind, rather than manual theming. High Contrast Theme, however, works perfectly. Presumably those remaining white patches will be fixed as Notepad++ has an active community, but dozens of other old Windows programs I use will probably never bother with explicitly adding a dark theme, so I guess I will have to stick with the High Contrast Mode.

Joeri 5y ago
I have a friend who maintains the gui components of a 25 year old windows application suite continuously developed using delphi. The stories he has told me of the epic battles to achieve multimonitor, high dpi, font scaling, theme and dark mode support on a legacy codebase are both impressive and depressing. It is software like that which keeps windows entrenched in enterprise, but microsoft seemingly cannot be bothered to care.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
Microsoft's Windows strategy is baffling to me. They have gone out of their way to fix a lot of their problems (in fact they fixed almost every single nitpick I had about Windows 7 coming from OS X and Linux), and they add a lot of new powerful features, but at the same time they actively seem to be sabotaging themselves at every step. I really don't know what to make of it.

thatKaran 5y ago

The new Dark Mode looks fugly.