What Is Notepad++? It Still Beats IntelliJ and Vim

Millions of programmers still keep the same free text editor pinned to their taskbar. One developer built it alone in 2003, after the company he worked for turned down the idea of making it in the first place. That backstory is honestly a better answer to what Notepad++ is than any feature list could give you.

It’s free, it’s open source, and it’s built specifically for Windows. Runs on the Scintilla component under the hood, with syntax highlighting for something like 90 different programming languages.

Two decades on, it still outranks IntelliJ IDEA and Vim in daily use, according to Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey.

No marketing budget behind it, no parent company either, and it still has that kind of staying power. That tells you something about what the tool actually does well.

What is Notepad++

Somewhere between a plain text editor and a full IDE is where this thing lives, doing more than the first without dragging in all the overhead of the second.

Free, open source, built only for Windows, and it handles syntax highlighting plus code folding across dozens of programming and markup languages. That’s the technical definition, if you need one for a spec sheet.

Under the hood it runs on the Scintilla editing component, and it’s written in C++ using the Win32 API instead of pulling in something heavier.

That’s exactly why the program stays small and fast, and probably why it still turns up across so many corners of software development more than two decades after it launched.

Small is meant literally here, for the record. The 64-bit installer is under 7MB. Editors built on Electron ship installers in the hundreds of megabytes.

Wikipedia’s 2026 entry on the project notes it won the SourceForge Community Choice Award for Best Developer Tool twice during its years on that platform.

No company owns it. No subscription, no seat license, nobody from a sales team is going to call you about it.

Who Created Notepad++ and When Was It Released

Don Ho put Notepad++ up on SourceForge on 25 November 2003, per Wikipedia’s 2026 project history page.

He’d actually started writing it a few months before that, back in September 2003, while he was living in France.

Ho studied computer science at Paris Diderot University. Before building his own editor he was using JEXT, a Java-based text editor, and got tired of waiting on it.

He asked his employer about building something faster in-house. They said no. So he built it himself, on his own time, using the Scintilla component as the base.

That side project from 2003 is the same lineage still running on people’s machines right now.

Where the code actually lives has moved around over the years too:

Ho is still the primary author and maintainer more than twenty years on, and he’s still shipping releases through that same GitHub repo.

The whole thing runs under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0 or later, which is the reason nobody pays for it and anybody can go dig through or change the source code.

What Does Notepad++ Do

Most of what Notepad++ does is the everyday programming and text editing work a plain notepad app was never built to handle.

Developers use it to work straight inside a project’s codebase instead, editing config files, scripts, and source files without firing up something heavier.

Syntax highlighting and code folding come standard, along with macro recording and playback, auto-completion, auto-indentation, and a handful of cleanup tools like line sorting, case conversion, and stripping out stray whitespace.

It opens fast, too. No splash screen, no loading bar sitting between you and the file you actually wanted to open.

Tabbed Editing and Split-Screen View

Every open file gets its own tab, part of what Notepad++ calls its multi-document interface, so jumping between a dozen scripts is one click and nothing more.

Split screen handles comparing or editing two files side by side, with scrolling synced between the two panes, and there’s a document map panel off to the side for finding your place inside long files.

Session files bundle up an entire group of open tabs as one unit too, so you can close everything down and pick the exact same set back up later.

Search, Replace, and Regular Expressions

Regular expressions in Notepad++ are Perl-compatible, and they work across a single file, every tab you’ve got open, or an entire folder at once, as the official searching documentation lays out.

That one feature alone is a big reason sysadmins and data people keep it installed, even after they’ve switched to something else for daily coding.

It searches across open documents or whole directories, handles capture groups and backreferences inside replace patterns, and comes in handy for locating special characters buried somewhere in a file that’s otherwise a mess to read.

You can bookmark lines while you’re searching too, then hop between the marked results without losing your spot.

Column Mode and Multi-Cursor Editing

Hold Alt and drag, and the selection stops behaving like text and starts behaving like a rectangle. That’s column mode, and it’s the feature people quote when they explain why Notepad++ is still on their machine years after they moved to something else for actual coding.

Type once and it lands on every selected line at the same time. Ctrl+click adds multiple cursors at arbitrary points in the file, each one editing independently, which the official editing documentation covers under multi-editing.

Where it earns its keep is bulk work that isn’t quite worth a regex. Adding a prefix to 200 lines, stripping a column out of a CSV, quoting a list of values, renumbering something by hand. Alt+Shift+arrow does the same selection from the keyboard if you’d rather not drag.

What Programming Languages Does Notepad++ Support

Built-in syntax highlighting covers around 90 programming languages in Notepad++, according to the official Notepad++ User Manual (2026), and the list leans toward what people actually use day to day rather than obscure stuff nobody touches.

C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Rust, and Go are in there. So are HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, and YAML, along with PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, and PowerShell.

It’s a common pick for front-end development work specifically, since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files all get full color-coded highlighting the moment you open them, no setup required.

Need to format JSON in Notepad++ so a config file actually makes sense to a human? That’s a built-in menu option. Not a plugin you have to go dig up somewhere.

Every supported language gets folding, coloring you can customize, and a function list for jumping straight to a method or class without scrolling through the whole file.

Files past 200MB skip syntax highlighting automatically as of version 8.3. The User Manual is upfront about why: it exists to stop the editor grinding to a halt on huge files. That threshold became something you could actually change from Settings starting in version 8.4.7.

If a language isn’t on the built-in list, the User Defined Language system lets you build your own rules for keywords, comments, and folding.

Worth knowing before you rely on it too heavily: the UDL system predates full Unicode support in the app, so it’s stuck at 255 characters pulled from the current ANSI codepage, per the official documentation.

How Does Notepad++ Differ From Windows Notepad

People confuse the names constantly, but these two have nothing to do with each other.

Windows Notepad is the plain text editor Microsoft has bundled with the operating system since 1983, per Wikipedia’s Windows Notepad entry (2026). Notepad++ is a separate, third-party application, built independently by Don Ho.

Microsoft has actually upgraded Notepad in recent years, just not all on the same schedule. Dark mode showed up in a Windows 11 update on 16 February 2022. Tabs came later, rolling out to Windows Insiders in January 2023 before reaching general Windows 11 users around March 2023. Spellcheck and autocorrect landed for general users in July 2024.

Worth noting on the dark mode point, since the timing tends to get remembered backwards: Notepad++ had shipped its own built-in Dark Mode in version 8.0, released in 2021, ahead of Microsoft adding one to Notepad. It sits under Settings then Preferences with three options, Dark, Light, or follow whatever Windows is set to.

Even with those additions the capability gap stays wide. There’s a full breakdown in this Notepad++ vs Notepad comparison if you want the details.

Comparison Table: Notepad++ vs Windows Notepad

Laid side by side, the gap is obvious:

Windows Notepad still wins on exactly one thing. It opens instantly and it’s already sitting there, which is genuinely enough for a quick note or a single small file. Structure is where it falls apart though, and the moment a file has code, config, logs, or anything worth searching more than once, Notepad++ takes over.

What Platforms Does Notepad++ Run On

There’s never been a native Mac or Linux build of Notepad++, and there probably never will be. It’s built for Windows, and that’s been true since the beginning.

Full support from the development team currently covers Windows 8.1, 10, and 11, according to the project’s SUPPORTED_SYSTEM.md file on GitHub (2026):

Windows 7 and 8 can still run the current build just fine, but the team stopped fixing bugs specific to those older systems a while back.

Mac and Linux users get around the gap through Wine, a compatibility layer, or by running a full Windows virtual machine instead.

Setup isn’t native either way, and performance takes a real hit compared to running it directly on Windows. A dedicated guide to installing Notepad++ on Linux walks through the Wine configuration step by step.

Running it through a compatibility layer isn’t the only option though, and often it isn’t the better one. Notepadqq was built deliberately as a Notepad++-style editor for Linux, and Kate covers a lot of the same ground natively with syntax highlighting, sessions, and split views. Either one avoids the Wine overhead entirely, which matters more than people expect once you’re editing files daily rather than occasionally.

There’s also a portable build, packaged as a 7z or zip file, that runs straight off a USB drive with no installation and no admin rights needed.

How Do You Install and Configure Notepad++

There’s exactly one safe place to download it from: notepad-plus-plus.org, the official site. Anywhere else is a risk that isn’t worth taking, and the security section further down explains why.

You’ve actually got a few different ways to get it onto a machine these days. The standard exe installer is the route most people take. There’s a portable 7z or zip archive if you don’t want to install anything at all, plus a smaller mini-portable build. IT departments deploying across an organization got a new option in version 8.8.8 too: an MSI installer built specifically for that kind of rollout.

Pick 32-bit, 64-bit, or ARM64 depending on the machine. Most modern PCs want the 64-bit build, for what it’s worth.

Installer Version vs Portable Version

The installer writes itself into Program Files, needs admin rights to run, and registers so you can set it as the default text editor across the whole system.

Portable works differently. Unzip it anywhere you want, a USB stick included, and it keeps every setting inside that same folder instead of touching the Windows registry at all.

If your work laptop is locked down, portable is what you want. Setting it as your actual system default, though, means running the installer.

Neither version needs a license key or an account of any kind. Unzip it, or click through the installer, and it’s ready to go.

A few settings are worth changing the moment it’s open: theme, the default language for new files, and tab width, all tucked under Settings then Preferences.

The interface itself gets translated too, which is a separate thing from the programming languages covered earlier and gets mixed up constantly. Notepad++ ships with 80+ interface languages, handled through XML files that the community contributes and maintains. Switching under Settings then Preferences then Localization swaps every menu and dialog immediately, no restart involved.

Setting Notepad++ as the Windows default text editor takes one more step after that, through the “Open with” menu in File Explorer.

From there, this guide on how to use Notepad++ covers the day-to-day workflow once setup is actually done.

Keyboard shortcuts speed everything up past that initial setup stage. The Notepad++ cheat sheet keeps the full shortcut list in one place if you just want to memorize the important ones.

What Plugins Extend Notepad++

A built-in Plugins Admin panel handles finding and installing add-ons, or pulling ones you decide you don’t want anymore, all without leaving the app.

Inside that panel are tabs for Available, Updates, Installed, and Incompatible plugins, covering the whole lifecycle from discovery through removal, according to the official Notepad++ User Manual (2026).

It’s linked directly to the official Plugin List repository on GitHub since version 8.4.6, which keeps that whole catalog separate from the core editor itself. That curated list runs to 140+ compatible plugins, a deliberately smaller number than the marketplaces attached to bigger editors.

NppExec and PythonScript are the two that change what the editor is capable of rather than just adding a viewer. The first turns it into somewhere you can actually build and run things, and the second automates repetitive edits across a whole set of files at once.
Need to diff two versions of a file side by side? A walkthrough on comparing files in Notepad++ covers the Compare plugin specifically.

Plugins that aren’t in Plugins Admin can still get added manually, by dropping the DLL straight into the plugins subfolder. A full guide to installing plugins in Notepad++ covers that route in detail.

One thing worth flagging early. Plugins load with the exact same privileges as the editor itself, so sourcing them from outside the official list carries real risk.

Is Notepad++ Free and Open Source

Yes, on both counts. It costs nothing to download, and the source code is sitting out in the open for anyone to look at.

The GNU General Public License covering it does more than just make it free. You can redistribute the software as it is or after changing it, modify the source for anything personal or commercial, and run it across an entire company without anyone auditing seat licenses or chasing you for a fee.

That last part matters most for businesses specifically. No royalty, no enterprise tier, no usage cap anywhere in the terms.

The project’s GitHub repository backs that up with real numbers too: more than 29,000 stars and 5,300 forks, per the repository’s own page (GitHub, 2026).

Don Ho doesn’t run this as a company. Development happens through community pull requests, reviewed and merged before each release goes out.

People can support the project through donations if they want to. Nothing about the download or the feature set sits behind a paywall regardless.

Why Do Notepad++ Releases Have Political Names

Download a copy and you’ll notice the version isn’t just a number. Releases carry codenames, and a lot of them are political statements rather than anything technical.

Don Ho has been doing this since 2014, and he’s never been quiet about the fact that it’s deliberate. The release announcements on the official site spell out the reasoning behind each one.

The reaction has been part of the story too. The Free Uyghur release drew DDoS attacks against the project’s infrastructure and a wave of coordinated hostility on its GitHub issue tracker, and several Chinese platforms including QQ, WeChat, and UC Browser ended up blocking links to the site.

None of this changes what the software does. The binary is the same editor either way, and the naming has no bearing on the license, the feature set, or the code.

It’s worth knowing about anyway, for two reasons. Anyone rolling Notepad++ out across an organization will eventually get asked why the installer is called what it’s called, and it’s better to have an answer ready than to be surprised by it. And it explains something about the project’s character that a feature list never would, which is that it’s one person’s tool rather than a company’s product, run accordingly.

What Security Risks Are Associated With Notepad++

Being popular and free cuts both ways. It also makes Notepad++ a repeated target for attackers who go after the download itself rather than bothering to attack the software.

State-sponsored hackers hijacked the project’s own update infrastructure for months in 2025, according to developer Don Ho’s own disclosure. Rapid7’s investigation traced the campaign back to Lotus Blossom, a China-linked espionage group, and the targeting concentrated on government, telecom, and critical infrastructure sectors. Kaspersky’s follow-up analysis published the execution chains and indicators of compromise.

The plugin-based attack CERT-UA documented came from a different direction entirely, linked to the Russia-aligned UAC-0099 group. It didn’t exploit some traditional bug. Instead it abused Notepad++’s normal plugin-loading behavior, an issue now tracked as CVE-2025-56383, though the development team actually disputes that classification.

Ho’s team responded by dropping the self-signed certificate altogether. Only GlobalSign-issued certificates sign official release binaries now, a change that started with version 8.9.

The official-source download rule mentioned earlier applies doubly here, honestly. It’s the one defense that blocks most of these campaigns outright, before they even get started.

How Does Notepad++ Compare to Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text

All three of these run on Windows. Only two of them run natively on macOS and Linux too, and Notepad++ isn’t one of the two.

It still beats IntelliJ IDEA and Vim in raw usage though. 27.4% of developers reported using Notepad++, according to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. VS Code sits far ahead of everything else in that same survey at 75.9% usage, making it the most-used editor for the fourth year running.

Comparison Table: Notepad++ vs VS Code vs Sublime Text

The Notepad++ vs VS Code comparison goes deeper into setup time and startup speed if you want the fuller picture.

Microsoft’s VS Code extension marketplace crossed 100,000 extensions as of May 2025, which dwarfs Notepad++’s curated plugin list in sheer volume, not that volume is really the point of Notepad++ to begin with.

Sublime Text charges $99 for a personal license that comes with three years of updates, a one-time cost instead of a subscription.

Startup speed still favors the two lightweight editors here. Neither Notepad++ nor Sublime Text carries the Electron-based overhead that VS Code runs on.

The install footprint puts real numbers on that gap. The 64-bit Notepad++ installer is under 7MB. The equivalent VS Code installer for Windows runs to roughly 230MB, which is somewhere north of thirty times the size before a single extension gets added on top.

There’s a privacy difference sitting underneath that too. VS Code collects usage telemetry by default, something you can turn off but have to know to go looking for. Notepad++ collects nothing, sends nothing, and needs no account, which is a large part of why it keeps showing up on locked-down machines in regulated environments.

When Does Notepad++ Not Apply

Text and code editor is what Notepad++ is, not a full development environment, and that distinction actually matters for certain kinds of work.

Debugging is the clearest gap. No breakpoint system, no variable inspector, nothing built in that lets you run a compiler and step through the result.

That rules it out for compiled-language projects that genuinely need a real debugger attached, and it’s not much good either for large codebases that expect built-in version control panels, or for teams that want one all-in-one web development IDE instead of a lean text editor.

Cross-platform teams hit the wall covered earlier too. Standardizing on one editor across Windows, macOS, and Linux machines rules Notepad++ out as that single shared tool, since it simply doesn’t run natively on two of the three.

Large files raise a separate problem entirely. That 200MB syntax-highlighting cutoff mentioned earlier only turns off coloring, it doesn’t actually speed up loading a multi-gigabyte log file, which can still stall the editor no matter what that setting is doing.

For that kind of job, a dedicated log viewer or a streaming text tool built specifically for huge files does the work faster.

FAQ on What Is Notepad++

Does Notepad++ Support UTF-8 and Other Text Encodings

Yes, and it’s handled well. ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-8 without BOM, and UTF-16 in both byte orders all work out of the box. The current encoding shows right there in the status bar, and switching it converts the file without losing formatting or content.

Can Notepad++ Be Launched From the Command Line With Custom Switches

It does. Command line arguments like -multiInst open separate instances, -nosession skips session restore, and -n jumps straight to a specific line number. IT teams lean on these switches to script deployments, or to get files opening automatically from other applications.

Are Keyboard Shortcuts in Notepad++ Customizable

Every single one, through the built-in Shortcut Mapper under Settings. Conflicts with existing bindings get flagged before you’re able to save changes, which helps. Developers coming over from another editor usually remap a handful of commands right away, just to match old muscle memory.

Does Notepad++ Recover Unsaved Work After a Crash

There’s a built-in Periodic Backup setting that saves snapshots of open files at set intervals. After a crash, the next launch offers to restore that session automatically. It’s not full version history or anything like that, just protection against a sudden power loss wiping out unsaved work.

Is There an Official Notepad++ App for Phones or Tablets

No, and there’s never been one. iOS, Android, any mobile OS, none of them have an official Notepad++ build, and Don Ho has publicly disavowed unofficial ports that use the name anyway. It stays a Windows desktop application, built around a keyboard-and-mouse workflow through and through.

Can Notepad++ Connect to an FTP or SFTP Server Directly

Not on its own, no, but the NppFTP plugin adds that in. Once it’s installed through Plugins Admin, it opens up a sidebar panel for browsing remote directories and editing server files as if they were sitting locally, saving changes straight back over the connection.

What Does the ++ in Notepad++ Actually Mean

It’s a nod to C++, which took its own name from the increment operator to mean one step beyond C. Applied here, the ++ means basically the same thing: a step beyond the built-in Windows tool, with syntax highlighting, tabs, and features actually built for code.

Can Notepad++ Run External Programs or Scripts From Inside the Editor

Yes, through the Run menu. External commands, compilers, or scripts can all get launched against whatever file’s currently open, and shortcuts can be assigned to the tasks you run often. A common setup is wiring it to run a Python interpreter or a linter without ever leaving the editor window.

Does Notepad++ Need an Internet Connection to Work

No. Once it’s installed, Notepad++ runs entirely offline, it’s a local text and source code editor after all, not any kind of cloud service. The only time you actually need a connection is to download the program in the first place or grab a new version update.

Why Does Antivirus Software Sometimes Flag Notepad++ as a Threat

Legitimate copies rarely set off real detections. Fake installers from typosquatted sites often do though, since attackers have bundled malware with the Notepad++ name more than once. Sticking strictly to notepad-plus-plus.org for downloads, and checking the file’s digital signature while you’re at it, avoids nearly all of these false alarms.

Conclusion

Anyone who’s read this far already has the practical answer to what Notepad++ is: a free, lightweight editor for people who want more than Notepad but way less overhead than a full IDE.

Grab the 64-bit installer from notepad-plus-plus.org, skip the plugin marketplace for the first week or so, and learn regex find-and-replace before touching anything else. That one feature alone does more for daily output than every plugin combined, honestly.

One constraint worth planning around ahead of time: if a team spans Windows, macOS, and Linux, Notepad++ can’t be the shared standard across it. It just wasn’t built for that, and no plugin fixes it.

Its real edge was never a feature list to begin with. It’s that one developer’s 2003 side project still outpaces tools built by entire companies, mostly by staying out of the way.

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Bogdan Sandu

Bogdan Sandu is a front-end developer at TMS Outsource with 8+ years of experience in web technologies. He writes about developer tools, software platforms, and web workflows based on daily hands-on use.

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