hi, I'm Joe James. In this video, I'm going to give you a short introduction to Notepad++. Notepad++ is a free text editor. So, you can download this online. Just do a Google search for Notepad++ download it and install it. It's a lightweight application, so it doesn't take a lot of computer resources. It's very similar to Microsoft Notepad if you've used that or any other text editor, but it adds a lot more features for computer programmers. For example, you can see the syntax highlighting in this file. Different keywords are highlighted. Parentheses, brackets, and braces are all highlighted so you can see the opening and closing braces. And you also have this feature of being able to collapse different blocks of code. So, like a function, you can collapse and hide that if you're done working on that section of code, which makes it much easier to navigate the program. And it supports most leading programming languages. And by that, I mean about 50 different programming languages. It's completely customizable. It supports multiple documents open at a time, as you can see.

these tabs across the top. Each one of them is a separate document. You can easily flip between different documents. It also supports multiple panes, which I'll demonstrate in a minute. For this video, I'm going to assume that you're already have it installed there using notepad plus plus or just starting to use it. So one of the first features I'll show you is how to create a new document. There are three different options for this. You can use the file menu and then new. You can also just click this icon up here on the toolbar to create a new document. Or my favorite is the keyboard shortcut ctrl n for a new document. When you open a new document, usually the first thing you want to do is choose what language you're going to program in. So let's start a Python program. So we'll select Python. I've already written some code. I'll just paste it in so you can see the code. Since I've already selected the language, it's already highlighted in different colors for the Python code. And then we'll want to save this again. We

have multiple options for save. We can choose to save icon on the toolbar here. If you want to save the latest updates of all the files that you have open, you can choose to save all. Or you can do control s, which I'm going to do, and then we'll call this temp.py. To open an existing document, we can choose open from our menu bar, or we can use file open, or we can just do ctrl o. And let's just choose file ops. We can see some of the details of this program down around the bottom line. It gives you some information on it. So this is a Python file. It tells us how many characters are in the file, and also how many lines are in the file. 53 lines. We can see where our cursor currently is, and if we have any code selected, and then also what the encoding is for this. We can also drag and drop these tabs across the top. So if we want to move these tabs into different order, we can easily do that by just grabbing it with the left mouse button.

dragging it. You can close a file by just clicking on the X. Now, some of the other nice features. Let me go to a longer file. So, if you have a much longer file like this one, I'll scroll down. This one, as you can see, is 197 lines. What a nice feature for long files is that you can show the document map. When you click on this document map, it shows you on the right-hand column here what area of the document you're currently in. Alright, now we can see we're in the top 20 lines of the document. We can easily click to another section of the document by clicking on the map. So, if we want to click back and forth between the top and the bottom of the document, you can do that very easily without using the scroll bars. So, I'll close this document map. Another thing is worth knowing about is the function list. So, you can see there's a button on the toolbar to show you the function list, which is a little bit flaky. I find sometimes it is not

showing all the functions here. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it works, it's a really handy feature to have because you can see a nice list of all the functions that you have in your program, all summarized over here on the right. So, if you can't get that to work, what I like to do is use these collapse buttons so you only work on one function at a time. You can collapse the other ones. Another nice function of Notepad++ as a code editor: you can highlight a block of code. You can use Ctrl+Q to comment out that entire block if you want, or Ctrl+Q to uncomment it. So, Ctrl+Q toggles commented or uncommented for a whole block of code at once, which is very handy. You can also highlight a block of code, and you can adjust the tab on it. So, if you want to increase the tab, you just tab, or to decrease the tab, Shift+Tab. So, I can change the tabs for that whole block of code at once. Another function that's useful on the toolbar here is to

show all characters or show hidden characters. Really, this is nice because in Python you need to sometimes see whether you have spaces or tabs that can sometimes cause problems. In Python, these arrows are tabs, and a space would just be a dot. So, they look the same when you don't see the character because they're hidden characters. But when you show all characters, you can usually spot problems with a mix of dots and tabs. So, I'd like to use this hidden characters, especially when I'm working in Python. Next function I'll show you that I use quite often is Ctrl+F. This is the find function. So, if you have a block of text highlighted or copied here, I can highlight self. I'll just double click on self, do Ctrl+F, and it's going to find every instance of self. It highlights them for me on the screen, and it can also do a count. There are 79 instances of the word self in this document right now. I have it set to wrap around, so if I click find next, it jumps the cursor to the next instance of

self and when I get to the bottom of the document, it'll go straight back up to the top, which means what to wrap does. You can also choose to match or ignore case, so if you only want to get ones that match the case, you can highlight that. You can also search for regular expressions. I don't use that a lot, but sometimes that's useful. And you also have in this tab here, you can do the replace. So if you want to replace every instance of self with something else, let's say myself, you can replace all of them at once. That's useful for refactoring variables. So here I've just replaced one instance, but if I replace all to replace every instance of self with myself, and you can see in the document here is also as myself. So that's the find and replace function. I'm actually going to close this and do Ctrl Z to undo. Ctrl Z for undo. You also have these green arrows here for undo and redo. You can use those on the toolbar if you prefer. I like to Ctrl Z for the

shortcut key, and I'll show you a summary of some of the essential keyboard shortcuts that we just covered. Ctrl + N gives you a new document, Ctrl + S to save document, and Ctrl + O for open document, which I didn't put on here. Ctrl + Z is undo, Ctrl + F for Find and Replace, Ctrl + Q for comment or uncomment a block of code, a single line, or a block. Ctrl + A gives you select; also, you can select all the text in a document by clicking Ctrl + A. Ctrl + C is for copy selected text, Ctrl + X to cut selected text, and Ctrl + V for pasting from the clipboard. So these are pretty much universal across most Windows applications. That wraps up this short introduction video on Notepad plus plus, which is really my favorite tool for text editing and code editing as a computer programmer. I hope you like this video, and if you do, I hope you'll subscribe. I'm also going to have a couple more videos coming out on Notepad plus plus, some of the more advanced features, so I hope you'll watch those when you get time. I'm Joe James. Thanks.

Notepad++ Text Editor: Intro for Beginners

Notepad++ Text Editor: Intro for Beginners