Still, Notepad++ is not just an open-source project but, more specifically, “free software,” which gives people the legal right and freedom to modify the code.Īllowing the community into the creative process has driven the program’s success, and in 2011, the influential blog Lifehacker crowned Notepad++ as “The Best Programming Text Editor for Windows.” Developing an Open-source Mentality Inspired by the FSF, Notepad++ has been open-source since day one. Still, features like autosave, tabbing, and find & replace – elements that make a developer’s job so much easier were not commonplace at the time. The ideas that set Notepad++ apart at the time might sound obvious now. It also lacked the functionality that Don wanted in a genuinely needs-based source code editor. The issues with the old editor the company was using were not just related to the limitations of Java. Hosting and Distributing World Beating Software.Nearly twenty years later, it is one of the world’s most popular source-code editors and boasts around eighty thousand daily downloads. Don continued to work on the prototype, and on the 25th of November 2003, he made it available on Sourceforge as Notepad++.

He did what any FSF-minded developer would do and proposed the prototype to his boss as a way to sidestep the problems he saw. The idea stuck, and in 2003, as a young developer working for another company, Don developed a prototype source code editor written in C++ to substitute the Java-based tool the company was using that was underperforming. To achieve this, FSF came up with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Developers would be able to build programs around their own needs without getting caught up in copyright infringements. It suggested that software would work better if the code were accessible to the people that used it. In 1999, Don Ho, a computer science student at the University of Paris, heard about the Free Software Foundation (FSF) movement. Notepad++ founder’s award-winning open-source text and code editor has been downloaded over 28 million times.

Source code for notepad