Notepad++ is 21 years old

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment & role

  • Very strong positive sentiment; many call Notepad++ a daily driver or the first thing installed on a fresh Windows machine.
  • Commonly described as “no‑nonsense,” fast, lean, and more than sufficient for most text‑editing needs.
  • Several say it’s the one Windows app they truly miss on macOS or Linux.

Primary use cases

  • Quick edits, config tweaks, and ad‑hoc notes/todos that persist across restarts without explicitly saving.
  • Heavy use for log files, data cleanup, complex find/replace (including regex), and column/line operations.
  • Often used as a secondary “toolbox” editor alongside heavier IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains, etc.).

Features users especially value

  • Autosaved unnamed tabs and session persistence; ability to rename unsaved buffers.
  • Powerful search/replace, including “find in files,” marking lines, and operating only on marked lines.
  • Macro recording and replay for repetitive edits.
  • Syntax highlighting, user‑defined languages, and plugins (XML/JSON tools, compare, hex editor, etc.).
  • Convenience touches: seamless elevation when saving to admin‑only locations, “show all characters,” BOM/EOL controls, project files collecting arbitrary paths.

Performance & limitations

  • Praised for speed and responsiveness versus many Electron editors.
  • Mixed reports on large files: good for tens of MB; some find VS Code smoother, others the reverse.
  • Fails or becomes unusable for truly huge files (1–2 GB); users switch to specialized editors in that range.
  • Some criticize that it still loads whole files into memory rather than using chunked/streaming models.

Platform and ecosystem

  • Officially Windows‑only; many lament lack of native macOS/Linux versions.
  • Users mention Wine, Scintilla‑based tools (SciTE, Geany), and various alternatives (CudaText, Kate, Sublime, CotEditor, etc.), but most see them as imperfect substitutes.
  • In locked‑down corporate/school environments, it’s often one of the few allowed tools; people share workarounds and highlight its value there.

Critiques & missing features

  • Desired but weak/absent: robust LSP support, integrated terminals, remote filesystem features, markdown rendering.
  • Some dislike the popup search window behavior and limited markdown support without plugins.
  • A minority distrust it after the disclosed CIA‑targeted DLL backdoor (even though others stress that was an external attack vector, not shipped code).

Meta reflections

  • Seen as an example of “classic” long‑lived software built carefully over decades.
  • Thread drifts into broader praise of durable tools (C, Emacs, Linux) and the value of software that can be learned once and used for many years.