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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

To help many here understand Notepad++, would someone introduce a curious Vim user to Notepad++? Please don't make it into what is better or worse, but what capabilities does each have that the other lacks (not an exhaustive list, of course), what do they both have but implement differently, what uses are in Notepad++'s wheelhouse, etc?

I've heard of it for years, of course, but I don't really know it beyond 'GUI advanced text editor'.

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I'm not sure if others have it. But notepad++ had a pretty neat way to mark lines from search and do various multiline editing that I've always enjoyed.

I enjoyed it's transient new file tab without needing to specify a file location.

I like its find and findall and count better than other editors.

> I like its find and findall and count better than other editors.

Do other editors miscount?

It’s not a vim alternative. It makes itself available to people who will never use vim. If you can use chrome you can use np++. And it’s discoverable unlike vim.

I think the most useful feature is the ability to create new files without picking a filename or location. Then having those files still open on application restart. It’s a workspace. That’s its killer feature.

Ability to record macros. Line operations, sorting and all. Marking and search operations on marked lines, much more powerful than it sounds. Plugins galore, write your own, or just run text through your own exe. BOM manipulation. User defined syntax highlighting.

But most importantly it’s the ease of use. I can explain complex operations to extremely casual users. Can’t do that with vim. I’ve been able to help people perform complex manipulations on crazy files that they never would have accomplished another way. NP++ literally opens a door to people who would never do these things otherwise.

If you don’t know vim, notepad++ is fast on big files and has syntax highlighting for many languages. But vim does both better.

Notepad++ is more windows in style with clipboard etc than base vim is.

It depends on how big 'big' is. Years ago I was working with large CSVs - several hundred MB - and Vim took forever. I found some other text editors that specialized in extra-large files (I wish I remembered the names now), and the one we tried worked like magic.

UltraEdit is really good with large files.

At some point you’re in grep/sed/awk/duckdb/streaming data land.

> duckdb

Not sqlite, out of curiosity? which do you use when? I'm going to need one of them soon, which is why I'm asking ...

FWIW, the aformentioned text editor working with the 200+ MB file could edit the entire thing almost immediately (at the UI level; I don't know what happened in memory). Each record was less than a screen-length, so maybe 100 char/line conservatively, so maybe 2 million lines. iirc I could insert a character on every line without problematic latency - my memory says mabye 10 seconds, but unless it was a dirty operation, that can't be true?

Duckdb is better at ingesting big tables and interacting with parquet, arrow, pandas etc directly. Better for analytics workflows. Better = faster and less boilerplate / data conversion code.

Thanks!

Sqlite is better for applications / transactions though.

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