usbwarez.com: A site about all things relating to usb lightweight, stand-alone apps.

Here is a great application that replaces the traditional notepad that ships with your OS. Its called Notepad ++ or Notepad PlusPlus. This handy app has become my default editor for most of my coding, as well has some of my friends.

Bookmark
Click to Enlarge

More pix follow

Brace Highlighting
Click to Enlarge

Find All
Click to Enlarge

HTML
Click to Enlarge

Multi_view
Click to Enlarge

Listed below are some of the useful features included in Notepad ++

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding

WYSIWYG

User Defined Syntax Highlighting

Auto-completion

Multi-Document

Multi-View

Regular Expression Search/Replace supported

File Status Auto-detection

Bookmark

Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting

And lastly here are the instructions that allow you to replace your current notepad with Notepad ++.

...
Installation Instruction:

Backup your original Notepad.exe (we never know...).
Copy notepad.exe which comes with this package into 3 directories (in given order) :
c:\windows\system32\dllcache
c:\windows\system32
c:\windows

When you replace notepad.exe in c:\windows\system32 and c:\windows, a "Windows File Protection" message box appears, click Cancel. Then another message box appears, click OK.

Modify you registry (if you use installer to install your Notepad++, you don't need to do this step): Create key \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Notepad++, then add your Notepad++ full path as the default value of this key. In my case, it's C:\Program Files\Notepad++.
Now Notepad++ is your default Notepad.

...