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Lots of sites mentions Notepad++ as THE BEST general purpose text editor and the reasons that normally are exposed are funny because almost every decent editor has these features:

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Extensibility
  • Good manage of different encodings
  • Relatively fast (perhaps it slow with big files)

In consequence, I ask what are the so "great and uniques" characteristics that makes this editor "the Best"? Note that a I read the program features and I really don't find anything special.

I'm thinking in the incredible influence of the name. Apparently the ++ is seeing unconsciously as 'great and better'. Is this kind of thing something that attract more users no matter what features the program really have?

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I guess it being free helps a lot with the public opinion. – Oliver Salzburg Jan 27 at 15:11
Whether Notepad++ is the best general purpose text editor or not is entirely subjective. Also, unless somebody knows every single text editor there is, it's impossible to know which features are unique to this particular one. – Dennis Jan 27 at 15:16
It's free, and it's also been around for a LONG time. It was basically the first decent tool of its kind, so a lot of people fell in love with it and stuck with it, basically. It's inertia. Also, this question is 100% subjective and so is a bad question. – Shinrai Jan 27 at 15:21
@Shinrai maybe the second part, but the part of "unique features" not. There must be some kind of special thing this program has to offer, or maybe not, that is what I try to find. – voodoomsr Jan 27 at 15:27
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2 Answers

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First to free unlike most other editors in its class. There is nice and growing ecosystem of plugins. the regex based search and replace is great. You can create custom syntax templates for highlights. HTML pages could straight be launched into browsers from the editor. One can bind custom programs to run the code with. There are a few others but these are good enough for me to stick to notepad++

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mmm bind program to run with the code, that is something I didn't see too much, nice – voodoomsr Jan 27 at 15:23
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Extensibility and Fast. That pretty much sums up everything. To add to it, the main attraction point of this software is, I think, it comes inbuilt with most of the features users want a text editor to have. Everything is right there when you need them. Very few editors have that.

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