In many ways, I enjoy minimalist software. It strips away bells and whistles that get in the way and lets me get things done faster. One of the tools included with Windows is the Notepad text editor. For many text editing tasks, it works great. Yet there are times you want a text editor that does more without complicating things too much. That’s where Notepad ++ comes into play. You might just call it Notepad on steroids. It is especially useful for those editing source code, but it can be used for any text editing tasks. Best of all, it is free!