Notepad++ is a popular choice on Windows devices when it comes to the replacement of the built-in plain text editor Notepad. The open source application improves plain text editing on Windows PCs significantly. It supports tabs, better search functionality, themes, plugins, auto-complete, programming languages and their syntax, and more.

Notepad++ 8.0 is the latest version of the text editor for Windows. It is a major new version that introduces new features and improvements as well as bug fixes. The release notes list 39 different changes to the application.

A visit of the download page reveals that Notepad++ is now also available for ARM64 systems, and no longer only for x86 and x64 systems. Just like the other builds, the ARM build is available as an installer and as several portable versions.

Once installed, the next main change is that Notepad++ 8.0 supports a dark mode officially. Select Settings > Preferences > Dark Mode > Enable Dark Mode to switch from light to dark mode in the application.

Another new visual feature is the new distraction free mode. The new mode can be enabled under View > Distraction Free Mode to get a fullscreen editing mode without most of the user interface. New Fluent UI icons for the toolbar are now also available.

The new version introduces several new features:

• Add 1 click action (SHIFT-click) on close button to close all tabs in dockable panel.
• Add ability of changing select text foreground color (optional).
• Allow Replace to stop after replacement (optional)
• Add ability to style only current instance of text.
• Add ability to reverse line order.
• Add Ada, Fortran, Fortran77 & Haskell in function lists.
• Add "Copy Pathnames" command to Search results context menu.
• Add MarkAll Preference settings for case and word.
• Add "Append extension" checkbox to Save As dialog.
• Add padding ability in the edit zone.
• Add command line parameter for adding specified string to app title bar.
• Add ability to avoid accumulating multiple search results.

The remaining changes are bug fixes for the most part. The developers have removed Microsoft Bing from the list of search engines that power the "Search on Internet" command. According to a commit, Bing was removed because of its censoring of results.

Closing Words

Notepad++ continues to evolve and introduce new functionality. The new feature is no exception, as it introduces new features such as the distraction free mode or dark mode support.