Notepad ++ 8: What’s New, How to Download and Test

We have a multitude of alternatives that allow us to edit and create text files, some of them included in Windows itself. Then there are other specific third-party proposals for these tasks, as is the case with which we are going to talk to you now. In fact, an important new version has just been launched, we are talking about Notepad ++ 8 .

As many of you may already know first-hand, when we talk about Notepad ++, we are actually referring to a very popular proposal for years. This program is well known on Windows-based computers when it comes to replacing the plain text editor built in here, Notepad. Specifically, we find an open source application that significantly improves plain text editing on the PC .

Notepad ++ 8

There are many interesting functions that we are going to find here, for example that it supports working with tabs. In turn, we will have at our disposal a better search functionality, themes for its appearance, or the use of add-ons. To all this we can add the fact that Notepad ++ has an autocomplete function, support for programming languages and much more. Well, now its developers have just released Notepad ++ 8, the latest version of the text editor for Windows.

This is a major new version that introduces new features and numerous improvements, as well as some bug fixes. To start with all this we will tell you that the new Notepad ++ 8 is now also available for ARM64 systems, not only for x86 and x64 systems. Also, like the other previous versions, the ARM version is available as an installer and portable.

What’s New in Notepad ++ 8

Once we have installed this new version, we immediately realize that one of its main changes is that Notepad ++ 8 officially supports dark mode. This is something that we can change in a simple way from the menu option Settings / Preferences / Dark mode / Enable dark mode.

interfaz notepad

Changing the third, another new visual feature is the new way to work free of distractions in the program. In turn, this can be activated in View / Distraction-free mode to obtain a full-screen editing mode. This way, a good part of the user interface disappears to be able to focus on what really interests us. Now in Notepad ++ 8 new Fluent Design icons are also available for the toolbar to better adapt to Windows 10 . Therefore we can test this new version right now just by accessing here .

But this is not all, but there are other new features like these that we will talk about below:

  • One click action on the close button to close all panel tabs.
  • The ability to change the foreground color of selected text .
  • Now we can make the Replace function stop after the change.
  • We have the possibility to style the current element of the text.
  • We can reverse the order of the lines on the screen.
  • Support has been added for Ada, Fortran , Fortran77, and Haskell.
  • There is a command to copy path names to menu in the context menu of the search results.
  • We found an Add Extension box to the Save As dialog box.
  • We have the ability to add padding in the editing area.
  • There is a command line parameter to add a specified string to the application title bar.
  • There is the possibility to avoid the accumulation of multiple results of a search .