Website Tutorial — Why Notepad++ is a Great Editor for Building and Tweaking Websites

If you are still using a plain old generic text edi­tor to sup­port your web­site or blog, I strongly encour­age you to use the freely avail­able Notepad++ avail­able here or do a Google search for “Notepad++”.

Notepad++ has many pow­er­ful fea­tures that will make your life eas­ier.  It sup­ports tra­di­tional edit­ing func­tions you would expect, plus:

• It is a nice envi­ron­ment for edit­ing mul­ti­ple files at a time
  • You can open one or many files at a time by high­light­ing them in Win­dows Explorer and drag­ging them into Notepad++.  Each file will be opened in a sep­a­rate tab in Notepad++.
  • You can also open mul­ti­ple files, fil­tered by the type of file, in the open dia­log.  For exam­ple, to open mul­ti­ple stylesheet CSS files at once, use File->Open and set your fil­ter to be .CSS and Con­trol click all the files you want to open and they will open in sep­a­rate tabs
  • You can Save all open file tabs at once by choos­ing “File->Save All”
  • Use your mid­dle mouse but­ton to close a tab, or right-click a tab to close the tab or all but the cur­rent tab.  Intu­itively, the File menu also con­trols the open­ing and clos­ing of tabs.
  • Only one tab is active at a time, click on a tab to edit a par­tic­u­lar file.  CTRL-TAB and CTRL-Shift-Tab to switch thru active files or use right mouse but­ton and scroll wheel.
  • Ses­sions are a pow­er­ful fea­ture in Notepad++.  You can save the state of the all the files you are work­ing on as well cur­rent lines you have high­lighted and where the cur­sor is.  File->Save Ses­sion and File->Load Ses­sion will do this for you.  When you close Notepad++, it saves cur­rent state using ses­sions auto­mat­i­cally, so that when you reopen Notepad++, the files are just as you had left them.

• Auto-completion – in Settings->Backup/Auto-completion” you can enable Auto-completion to per­form “Func­tion com­ple­tion” or ”Word com­ple­tion”.  If set to “Word com­ple­tion”, Notepad++ will auto-complete any word you type that is already in your file, sim­i­lar to the way MS Word or Excel oper­ates.   If set to “Func­tion com­ple­tion”, Notepad++ will auto-complete any word you type that cor­re­sponds to a key­word for the par­tic­u­lar type of file; for exam­ple, if you start typ­ing the let­ters “ba” in a .CSS file, auto-complete will prompt you to com­plete with the words “back”, “back­ground”, etc. asso­ci­ated with each match­ing CSS function.
• Stream and Block Com­ments — Notepad++ offers the con­ve­nience func­tions to com­ment out high­lighted lines of a file — using the com­ment tag appro­pri­ate for the type of file (for exam­ple, with a CSS doc­u­ment, if you high­light a group of lines in the doc­u­ment and select Edit->Stream Com­ment the set of lines will be com­mented out using the “/*” and “*/” mark­ings appro­pri­ate for a CSS document).
• Enhanced Search Capa­bil­ity – Notepad++ gives advanced capa­bil­ity to do search and replace func­tions.  It even has the abil­ity to use reg­u­lar expres­sions to match the string to be found.   Searches can also be con­ducted on all open tabs in Notepad++.  The search dia­log can be made more trans­par­ent via the trans­parency checkbox/slider in the lower left cor­ner of the dia­log box so you can con­tinue edit­ing while the find dia­log is still vis­i­ble.  Spe­cial char­ac­ters can be searched for and high­light­ing of found entries is very handy while editing.
• Color Cod­ing – Node­pad++ fea­tures color cod­ing that really helps when edit­ing files to help ensure you are edit­ing them cor­rectly.  For exam­ple, when edit­ing a CSS file, with default col­ors turned on, com­ments are green in color and HTML items are blue.  The color cod­ing in con­junc­tion with auto-completion reas­sures you while edit­ing that your syn­tax is ok.
• Plu­g­ins —  Per­haps some of the most impres­sive fea­tures of Notepad++ are included in the “Plu­g­ins” menu.  The plu­g­ins that I have had the most expe­ri­ence include:
  • Doc­u­ment Mon­i­tor – If you select the “Start to Mon­i­tor” sub­menu, Notepad++ will watch for any changes to the cur­rent doc­u­ment and reload as nec­es­sary.  This is par­tic­u­larly use­ful if you need to keep an eye on files that change fre­quently such as log files.
  • Com­pare – This plu­gin will show the dif­fer­ence between two files in side-by-side tabs, which can be very help­ful for deter­min­ing dif­fer­ences between a file that works and one that does not.
  • FTP_Synchronize – (FTP stands for file trans­fer pro­to­col) This plu­gin gives you the capa­bil­ity to do file trans­fers between your local com­puter and a remote com­puter (such as your Inter­net Search Provider where your web­site is hosted).  It is easy to set up and is much more con­ve­nient than using a sep­a­rate FTP application.
  • If these plu­g­ins are not avail­able under your Plu­g­ins menu or you want to add addi­tional plu­gin func­tion­al­ity, select “Get more plu­g­ins” on the Help Menu (the menu on the far right with a “?) and down­load to the “plu­g­ins” folder where Notepad++ is locally installed on your com­puter.  If you find other plu­g­ins you find be use­ful, please leave a com­ment here, since I am always look­ing for ways to be more pro­duc­tive in my work.

Oh, did I men­tion that Notepad++ is FREE?

If you find Notepad++ to be use­ful or dis­cover other func­tion­al­ity that I have not men­tioned here, please drop a com­ment here…

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