Notepad++ has support for macros and plugins, and has been marked for its robust plugin architecture which enabled various new features to be integrated into the program. Notepad++ was built as a Microsoft Windows application the author considered, but rejected, using wxWidgets to port it to the Mac OS X and Unix platforms. He developed it in his spare time since the idea was rejected by his company.

The developer used JEXT (a Java-based text editor) at his company but, dissatisfied with its poor performance, he began to develop a text editor written in C++ with Scintilla. Notepad++ was developed by Don Ho in September 2003. Notepad++ natively supports the following programming languages: ASP, Ada, ASCII art, Assembly, AutoIt, BAT, C, C#, C++, Caml, CSS, doxygen, FORTRAN, HTML, Haskell, Java, javascript, KiXtart, Lisp, Lua, makefile, Matlab, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PostScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Unix Shell Script, Smalltalk, SQL, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, VHDL, VB/VBScript, XML.

It also supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in a single window. As such, it may properly highlight code written in a supported schema, but whether that code is a working masterpiece or pure junk is not verifiable. Notepad++ features syntax highlighting, code folding and limited autocompletion for programming, scripting, and markup languages, but not intelligent code completion or syntax checking. The project’s name comes from the C increment operator. Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) for Microsoft Windows environment.

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