Notepad++ is a powerful, feature-packed text editor that more or less has everything Notepad needs but lacks (it can replace Notepad in Windows). It supports 27 programming languages, searches regular expressions, and supports syntax highlighting and folding, synchronized edits and views, and much more.
Notepad++ does document comparisons: You can see two documents at the same time, and have the differences highlighted. This could really be handy. Think about all the times when you have a newer version of an older file and need to see if you can safely ditch the old one. You need to compare the differences side by side. You can do this in Microsoft Word, but it’s kind of clumsy. Notepad++ can do this very easily, with .txt, .html, and .xml files.
I ran into trouble with Dual Mode (also called Compare Mode) because my version of Notepad++ did not have the compare function built in. I had to install it. But as an open source tool, Notepad ++ has benefited from the fact that lots of people have been creating cool plugins for some time.
Of course, I follow the best practice of saving all work before doing an install, which is helpful, because Notepad++ prompted me to restart the application after installing the Dual Mode plugin. After the restart, I opened a document, went to the View menu, then selected Move/Clone Current Document, and then clicked Clone to Other View. This displays the same document in both windows for comparison.
