Which hidden feature/plugin of Notepad++ is the most important productivity booster for you? [closed]

Question

The answers to this and this question shows that Notepad++ is a productivity booster. But maybe we - notepad++ users - do not know every trick of the application or its plugins. Are there anyone you think someone may miss.

As an example I found an autosave plugin and it is awesome.

Answer 1

Not a lot of people seem to know about this, but Notepad++ has autocompletion and it's a very big productivity booster in any editor.

Settings -> Preferences -> Backup/Auto-Completion

I personally just use function completion.

Answer 2

The XML plugin has been a godsend for me. (Gotta love its ability to validate files against an XSD.)

Answer 3

I always use the Ruby Blue Style. Not really a time saver, but I find that it's the first thing I install after np++.

Another trick I learned is to use the portable app version of np++ with Dropbox. That way all my styles/settings get synced between computers.

Answer 4

Where I work, we have a couple hundred classic ASP pages we still maintain that are very slowly moving over to ASP.Net to the tune of only 1 or 2 a month, because converting working code isn't a priority. That means I have to unravel old ASP code on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a modern IDE for Classic ASP. We do still have Visual Studio 6 available, but Notepad++ works just as well for me, and even a little better for many things. Plus it starts up faster.

If I could get a plug that automatically resolved method names, right down to checking include files to any depth find the source of the method for me, I'd almost be in heaven.

But there are still a couple things that could use improvement

• The "Find in Files" search is better than it was even a year ago, but it's still slower than it needs to be and can prevent you from editing.
• I like and use the tabs, but you also need to be able to start up multiple instances, to group different sets of related files or have side-by-side compare.

Answer 5

Just posted in another question, though it suits this more: Favorite Notepad++ plugins

Answer 6

I personally enjoy the text editing shortcuts. Primarily ctrl+d which duplicates selected text or (current line) and ctrl+shift+up/down, which moves the current line up/down. In recent versions it works on all selected lines too! It's like copy+paste on steroids.

I dislike the instability of n++ (the very reason I found this site is a solution to a particular crash) and it's lack of project management, but the aforementioned functionality keeps me coming back.

There's also the rarely needed, but once used - invaluable - block selection mode. Hold alt and select text. Multi line editing becomes a breeze.

As for plugins, WebEdit, when properly customized is a godsend, as is nppExec and PluginManager, both of which come in-built.