This edition is about a new editor for programmers – Programmer’s Notepad.

There are many programmers who prefer to use Notepad++ (an open-source text editor) while doing coding. The sole reason for this choice is the advanced features that the editor offers that  goes in parallel to the slight weight of the application.

An IDE, though offers more features, may not be light weight. So if you running the application in a system having a low end configuration, this may cause the system to become unresponsive.

Programmer’s Notepad tries to solve this problem by offering some of these advanced tools and still retaining itself as a light weight application!

The editor offers support for a wide range of regular expressions. It also supports ‘explorer view’ and syntax highlighting. The smart highlighting of a selected character or work is very catchy. The developers claims that the application is relatively bug free in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

They also claim that the application performs various ‘vista-behaviour improvements’ (which I have not tested yet).  The program also offers API file auto-complete feature and macro/script recording with PyPN. You can also use SDK for making  extensions.

The following snapshot illustrates some of  the IDE like features of Programmers notebook:

The latest version supports bookmarking, code outlining etc. There is an improved docking tool window in the latest release. You can export your code to HTML and RTF using this. You may also find a good file association manager and tabbed MDI interface in the latest release.  Word-wrapping  and user-defined schemes (as XML) are supported by the application.

One of the main issues associated with earlier release was that there was a file size limit (on the size of the file that you are importing / opening for editing). In the latest release this has been removed. But it is found that loading of bulky files takes quite some to load. You can also find a search option in the toolbar so that you can Google your queries from the application itself. In-file definition navigation using Ctags is another feature that you can see in the latest release.

The developers have also extended support to different font widths and incorporated a very effective ‘search and replace’ tool into the application. ‘Tag’ support is another interesting feature that you can find in this solution. The snapshot shown below illustrates this:

Just like an IDE, you can group your files into projects with multi-level folders. You can input any Unicode character (file) in this application.

This application is a very promising editor for programmers. You can go to the project website and download the latest stable release (Please note that there are different download options for Windows, Unix/Linux and Macintosh platforms).