The Free Text Editor That's Still Ahead Of The Others [1]

If you need to edit plain text files, you're probably still using the basic Notepad program that comes as standard with Windows. While Notepad is fine for tiny files, it has a number of drawbacks. All of which are fixed if you upgrade to a program called Notepad++.

Notepad++ has literally hundreds of features that plain Notepad doesn't. It knows about loads of different programming languages, for example, so it'll format your code nicely if you use it for programming. It's fast. It prints nicely. You can totally customise the way it looks. It'll record and play macros. It zooms, and has bookmarks, and the search/replace feature is incredibly powerful.

The program is a 4 MB download from https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ [3] and it's free. The program is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust, and works under all recent versions of Windows.

The most recent version was launched at the end of February 2016, so if you're a long-time user and haven't upgraded for a while then you should definitely consider doing so.