Celebrating 21 Years of Notepad++: The Legendary Journey of Our Favorite Text Editor
Alright, folks, gather around because it’s story time about one of the most underrated yet indispensable tools in the digital world—Notepad++. This month marks the 21st anniversary of this amazing software, and that’s right, Notepad++ is finally legal to drink (if it were a person, of course). Can you believe it? 21 years of keeping developers, writers, and pretty much anyone who’s ever needed to write a chunk of text happy and efficient.
Let’s rewind to 2003. It was a simpler time. YouTube didn’t even exist yet, the iPhone was still a distant dream, and social media was nowhere near what it is today. Somewhere in that digital wilderness, a passionate developer named Don Ho (no, not the Hawaiian singer) decided that the existing text editors were just not cutting it. He wanted something more powerful yet lightweight, a tool that respected a user’s CPU and RAM, unlike some bloated software out there. So, he started developing Notepad++, and on November 25th, 2003, the first version saw the light of day.
Fun fact: It’s built on Scintilla, a free source code editing component, and written in C++ for ultimate performance. Even back then, Notepad++ was all about being efficient, just like the developers who use it.
