I've been a long-time fan of Notepad++, but it's a text editor. You can extend it to make it work better with specific programming languages (e.g. here's a post I wrote 10 years ago about adding language support http://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/creating-a-user-defined-l...) but it's fundamentally a text editor.

VS Code is a code editor. It has IntelliSense (not text-matched autocomplete, IntelliSense), debugging support, git integration, parameter hints, go to definition, code peek, etc. (http://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/editingevolved). The goal is to give you code editing features with the speed and simplicity of a text editor.

They're both free and lightweight, so I use them both pretty much daily.

Notepad++ is very useful but I wish some features would be updated. The dialogs are awkward to use at times. The XML for defining custom syntax highlighting is atrocious. It's like they took a pre-XML config file and shotgunned tags into it without planning a rational format. Keywords are specified using long strings delimited by CR/LF entities for no good reason other than to destroy readability. It would be nice if an more modern hightlighting engine could be inserted as an alternative to the clunky ad-hoc design it currently has.

As you say, both are useful for different things. They complement each other if you use the right tool for the right job.

I find Notepad++ is great for handling really large files and changing UTF encoding or line endings. VS is good for pretty print formatting code/XML to be more readable, among many other non-text things such as debugging.

>and changing UTF encoding or line endings

If you need to do those things often, there are specialized tools, including in the command line, and for batch processing.

No need to do it in an editor.

I don't need to do this often but occasionally you'll need to fix inconsistent line endings, change encoding to UTF-8 or remove a BOM [0] (to stop  being prefixed by some old software).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Yeah, I know, had to do it some time or another.

In OS X and Linux (and Windows with Cygwin etc) there are several command line programs such as unix2dos (line ending conversion), iconv (encoding conversions) etc for doing just that, so that you don't need to do it in an editor and can even automate the work.

Coming from OS X, there are a bunch of minor things missing in Notepad++ that I'm used to having on OS X. Like the ability to drag tabs between windows with the mouse, to move new tabs to a new window, or to create a new file and immediately save it. The scrolling in Notepad++ is also a little buggy. Just to give you a perspective about what the other side thinks, since you inevitably develop different habits in different editors, and those habits break when you switch.

That said, I use too many editors for my own good. (I'm active in both main churches.) Neither Notepad++ nor TextMate are competitive with VS Code, Emacs, or Vim, IMO, and I use all five regularly.

> Coming from OS X

Also, do Windows editors have that Alt+drag rectangular text selection feature that most/some OS X apps have?

No, it is implemented by each editor/ ide independently with their own modifier.

On the contrary we have mostly consistent ctrl/shift + arrow behaviour over the last 15 or more years(I don't know before that). :-)

> On the contrary we have mostly consistent ctrl/shift + arrow behavior

Are you saying Windows has consistent Control/Shift + arrow behavior?

OS X is pretty consistent about this too, though Control+Arrow moves between Desktop Spaces, not related to text, but you can modify a lot of system/app shortcuts from Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts.

When I had a Mac (2009 - 2012) what modifier to use for different text movement operations varied wildly, even between the built in applications.

Mac using colleagues explained that it was because the applications where written using different toolkits.

Ctrl arrow in Windows jumps by word. In os x, it's option arrow. I believe it's widespread but not global.

I know.

Problem is: until at least 2012 not even Apple was consistent about it.

My most used editors (Sublime Text and Notepad++) have this.

Notepad++ is a great text editor, but it has no clue about your code base. It can't do searches of all functions, or Ctrl+Click on the method to go to its definition, etc.

I dropped Notepad++ for SublimeText a while back (partially because it supports both Windows and Mac). VS Code is slowly winning me over though!

I love ST, but the hotkeys are so different between Windows and Mac and it drives me up the wall. I feel like I'm abroad in the UK and now fries are chips, chips are crisps, crackers are biscuits, Ctrl+H is Cmd+Shift+F, etc... It really gets in the way of my ability to work in my editor fluently, which is ultimately all a text editor is good for.

You're aware that you can change them right?

On OS X, download TextWranger -- it's free and close to Notepad++ than TextMate.

And the best feature of TextWrangler: if it crashes, or the computer shuts down, it remembers unsaved changes in files. Start it up and it restores everything to the last keystroke.

Not sure if other editors do this too.

I'm always surprised that PSPad [1] doesn't get mentioned much in these conversations. I find the built-in utilities are more numerous and work much better than Notepad++. It also handles large files much better IME.

It may be that the customisation is a bit less polished (eg, no way to quickly set themes) and the user community is less developed. But it really does everything and much better than the others IMHO.

[1] - http://www.pspad.com/en/

edit: words

I prefer to install Notepad2, it uses the same engine as Notepad++ (Scintilla), but I have turned off most options to resemble the stock Notepad:

http://imgur.com/vFu51NV

So, apart from the icon, how does that resemble Notepad?

one instance per file, no tabs, no toolbars and a simplified menu (all of that configurable)

I like Notepad++, but I prefer one that works in Windows and in my linux home computer.

Notepad++ does work on Linux and also Mac's using WINE.

Seriously try gvim. Not vim where you need a long ass cheat sheet just to create a new tab or move between splits. But gvim where you can be productive and use the mouse and menus when necessary.

The one thing that kills gvim for me is the inability to have one session with multiple windows. I use it anyway.

Try Emacs with vim bindings and you'll have it, its GUI is a client that connects to a server

How would that be better than opening multiple gvim processes?

I want to type :wa in one window, not four windows. I don't want to get an error message when I try to open a buffer that's already open somewhere else, I want it to just move the buffer to the new window (or alternatively, raise the window containing the buffer). I want to move buffers across windows and keep undo history and register contents. TextMate / Emacs / etc. have this capability, but I can't figure out how to do it in vim.