What the Notepad++ text editor can do

Notepad++ is built on the Scintilla editing component and written in C++ with the plain Win32 API, which is why it starts fast and stays responsive with very large files. The features below are the ones people use most.

Everyday text editing

Multi-line editing, column and rectangular selection, drag-and-drop of text and tabs, unlimited undo and redo, line operations (sort, split, join, remove duplicates), and conversion between UTF-8, UTF-16 and legacy ANSI encodings as well as Windows, Unix and macOS line endings.

Syntax highlighting and highlighted text

The editor ships with lexers for dozens of languages — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, PHP, SQL, C, C++, C#, Java, JSON, XML, YAML, PowerShell, batch files and more. Beyond language colouring you can highlight text manually: select a word and press Search > Mark to colour every occurrence in up to five styles, or use Style all occurrences of token from the right-click menu. Code folding collapses blocks so a long file stays readable.

Search and replace

Find, Replace, Find in Files and Find in Projects all support plain text, wildcards, escape sequences and full regular expressions with capture groups. Results appear in a dockable panel so you can jump between matches, and Replace in Files applies changes across a whole directory tree in one action.

Tabs, split view and sessions

Every document gets a tab; two view panes let you compare or edit two files side by side. Sessions restore the exact set of open documents after a restart, and the backup-on-save and periodic-backup options guard against losing work.

Macros and automation

Record a sequence of edits, replay it, save it with a keyboard shortcut, and run it a fixed number of times or to the end of the file — the fastest way to reshape repetitive data without leaving the editor.

Plugins

Plugins Admin, built into the editor, installs and updates community plugins such as Compare, XML Tools, NppExec and JSON Viewer directly from the Notepad++ plugin list.

Edit with Notepad++ from File Explorer

The installer can register an Edit with Notepad++ command so any file on your Windows PC opens in the editor from the right-click menu. On Windows 11 it sits under Show more options; see the Windows 11 guide.

Ready to try it? Download Notepad++, follow the installation guide, or grab the portable version.