Notepad++ for Engineers — The Complete Guide: Free Editing of Input Files, Data and Scripts
Notepad++ is a free, open-source text and code editor for Windows: light, fast, and it opens instantly even with files of hundreds of megabytes. Many engineering programs work with text files — input, output and data — and Notepad++ is the most convenient tool for handling them.
Notepad++
Don Ho
A light text and code editor for Windows — input files for analysis programs, data files and scripts.
Get it from the vendorFeatures engineers use
- Column editing — Alt + drag: select a column in a data file and change, delete or number it in one go.
- Search and replace with regular expressions — across all files in a folder too, for example to change a parameter in dozens of input files.
- Syntax highlighting — for dozens of languages, and you can define highlighting for the input format of a program such as CalculiX or OpenSees.
- File comparison — with the Compare plugin: what changed between two versions of an input file.
- Macros — record repetitive actions and run them over the whole file.
What to know
Notepad++ runs only on Windows. For writing longer Python code with auto-completion and a debugger, VSCodium or Spyder is a better fit. To track changes to files over time — Git.
VSCodium
VSCodium project
The VS Code editor as a fully open build — Python, MATLAB, C, Markdown and more, without telemetry.
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Spyder
Spyder project
A MATLAB-style scientific Python environment — editor, variable explorer, console and plots in one window.
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Git
Git project
Version control for code, scripts and input files — who changed what and when, and return to any version.
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Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Notepad++ is one of the small tools every engineer who works with input and data files should install. Completely free, including for commercial use.