Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment.

This project, based on Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component) are written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL License.

Another Notepad! Well this might be the genuine reaction of many. We can understand, why not, with a notepad which MS has handed(bundled) down over the ages we have hardly asked for more. Notepad++ is - I should say state of the art notepad. We have had better (!) and better (!!) Windows every year but what happened to the small and always used notepad? Notepad++ does exactly that. I definitely think the "++" captures the idea well. Its a neat little very big on features notepad(++) making the MS notepad literally obsolete. With features like macros, highlights, tabs, plugins, regular expressions, auto complete and much much more this is the cutting edge in text editing.
I know I have mentioned about Cream/Vim before and I still say that Vim is a very powerful editor, it can be rather said as a programmers editor to some extent. But notepad++ takes up where others have left off. It is very fast, feature rich easy to use and definitely light on the eyes too. I have already replaced my old Windows notepad with the new Notepad++ and I can assure anyone that it is a breeze to work with it. Some observations I made about Notepad++ is it takes close to 8MB of my RAM for a blank tab which does not increase (much) with 20 more blank tabs. Yet the time it takes to start is amazingly fast. Another test I tried out was trying to open a huge file - I opened a avi file of approximately 700MB and it was successfully able to open it and best of all did not crash. But surprisingly for a smaller file of around 300MB it did crash. Now I am not sure who will have a 700MB/300MB text file (other than system log files which we all don't use yet I think) but then if you have one go ahead and use Notepad++ to open it.
Check out some of Notepad++ screen shots.
Enjoy editing!