Congratulations to Notepad++ for 21 Years and Counting

Saw an interesting link today to a blog post proclaiming that Notepad++ has been existence for 21 years now:

 

 

https://learnhub.top/celebrating-21-years-of-notepad-the-legendary-journey-of-our-favorite-text-editor/

Having used it as my primary text editor for nearly a decade (i.e. starting roughly sometime around 2005-ish, and no later than 2006, until roughly 2014-ish), it has certainly been an invaluable tool for me personally.

 

Among other things:

* It was the text editor I used to code most of my Blender work (notably doing the 2.5 Animato refactor, and initial implementation of Grease Pencil)

* It was also the text editor I used for all my undergrad, and a big chunk of my honours project work (with Geany on Linux doing the rest of the heavy-lifting when I was using the department Linux machines)

 

I only really migrated to Sublime Text in 2014 after moving to a new laptop running Windows 8, and finding that the old version of Notepad++ I'd been running didn't work as well there, the new ones breaking a few of the key plugins I used for my workflow (i.e. the Function List plugin, which displayed a permanently visible panel on the right side of the monitor, allowing me to visualise the structure of files + jump around to bits of interest), and many of the bigger source files in Blender increasingly causing problems with syntax highlighting and other stuff breaking.

 

Oh, and these days, after a few years away, I'm back using it (albeit only sometimes now) on my work machine, as it's the only fully-powered text editor that IT allows me to run on there, so I use it for munging / viewing any text-files that I need to quickly deal with that I don't want to bother dragging out my phone for the 2FA dance needed to get them onto our Linux dev boxes.