Description
Notepad2 is a light-weight, free and open source Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting for a few commonly used languages. It's based on the Scintilla source code editing component and works on NT-based versions of Windows.
Why replace Windows Notepad with It, even though it is not maintained anymore?
Because it shows line numbers and has syntax highlighting. It's also just as fast as Windows Notepad.
Features
- Syntax highlighting
- Drag & drop text editing inside and outside of the app
- Regular expression search and replace
- Rectangular selection (Alt+Mouse)
- Brace matching, auto indent, long line marker, zoom
- Support for Unicode, UTF-8, Unix and Mac text files
- Open shell links
- Mostly adjustable
- New in Version 4.2.25 (released May 06, 2011): 64-bit version (Updated Assembly scheme with x64 and SSE4 instructions)
Regular Expression Syntax
Note: searches are limited to single lines.| Operator | Description |
|---|---|
| . | Matches any character |
| (...) | Marks a region for tagging a match |
| \n | Where n is 1 through 9, refers to the first through ninth tagged region when replacing. For example, if the search string was Fred([1-9])XXX and the replace string was Sam\1YYY, when applied to Fred2XXX this would generate Sam2YYY. |
| \< | Matches the start of a word |
| \> | Matches the end of a word |
| \x | Allows you to use a character x that would otherwise have a special meaning. For example, \[ would be interpreted as [ and not as the start of a character set. |
| [...] | This indicates a set of characters, for example, [abc] means any of the characters a, b or c. You can also use ranges, for example [a-z] for any lower case character. |
| [^...] | The complement of the characters in the set. For example, [^A-Za-z] means any character except an alphabetic character. |
| ^ | Matches the start of a line (unless used inside a set (see above) |
| $ | Matches the end of a line |
| ? | Matches 0 or 1 times. For example, a?b matches ab and b |
| * | Matches 0 or more times. For example, Sa*m matches Sm, Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on |
| + | Matches 1 or more times. For example, Sa+m matches Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on |
| *? | Causes * and + to behave non-greedy. For example, <.+> matches all HTML tags on a line, whereas <.+?> matches only one tag. |
| \d | Any decimal digit |
| \D | Any character that is not a decimal digit |
| \s | Any whitespace character |
| \S | Any character that is not a whitespace character |
| \w | Any "word" character |
| \W | Any "non-word" character |
| \xHH | Character with hex code HH |
Credits and Special Thanks
Here I would like to say "THANK YOU" to the developers of the great Scintilla source code editing component [1], which is the core of Notepad2. Without Scintilla, the rich features found in Notepad2 wouldn't have been possible!