Notepad++ is definitely one of the best text editors for Windows, and pretty soon it will be getting even better. The new Notepad++ 5.0 is currently in Beta, and it includes a feature I’ve been waiting a long time for: auto-completion! As you can see in the screenshot above I was writing a bit of HTML, and as I started to close the “center” tag it offered to auto-complete it for me. Simply pressing the Tab or Enter key would have inserted the current recommendation.
This feature is disabled by default, but a quick trip to the Preferences will get you using the new auto-complete feature in no time at all. Go to Settings -> Preferences, and switch to the Backup/Auto-competion tab. At the bottom of that screen you’ll see where you can enable auto-completion, and you can optionally turn on the “show function parameters” feature as well. What’s that do? Here’s an example of me using a PHP function, and you’ll notice that it gives me a friendly reminder of the parameters the function takes:
From a coder’s point of view this text editor just got taken to a whole new level. Let us know in the comments if you’re as excited as I am to see this feature.
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Ryan, you have no idea how excited I am! I use Notepad++ day in and day out. I have waited for this for a long time and so happy it is finally making its way in. I am definitely downloading it tonight. Thanks for the heads up.
Quote: As you can see in the screenshot above I was writing a bit of HTML…
Heh heh. You sure picked a good example for a demonstration of html. Ever hear of css?
That’s an awesome new feature! I used Visual Studio 5.0 or something in school for C# and that program has this feature. But that program is like a $300 piece of software, and it’s awesome to see the same feature come to N++!
That’s already in 4.9.2, and possibly earlier.
Peter: yeah, there has been some auto-complete stuff in a NPP plugin for quite a while now, so I don’t see what this news is really about?
*Unless* NPP has been extended to parse several languages and auto-pickup things like function arguments, instead of requiring manual word- and parameter-lists.
Hehe. Autocompletition is an old feature of Notepad++, since version 2.x! Not from the version 5.0. Kind of too hidden, but it’s been there for a long time.
Yes, the autocompletion of functions was there already, but it did not show their parameters.
SWEET! Make my day!
It is a great feature, and I’m sure you’ll be making good use of it!
I was just trying to keep it simple.
Notepad++ has this out-of-the-box now. It came with the word lists for both HTML and PHP which I tested, so there was nothing manual that you had to do.
Looks like I’m not the only one who didn’t know this was there then because there are surely some excited people in the comments here.
They’re definitely on the right way, but I still miss the way Dreamweaver is doing it. In Dreamweaver the code completion is much more polished and enables me to code even faster. I hope they will improve the auto-complete to match Dreamweaver’s
I agree that Dreamweaver’s is better, but this is definitely a good start. I have a feeling they won’t be adding a lot of polish to it though since it is supposed to be an advanced text editor.
Isn’t auto-completion something that could/should belong in an advanced text editor if it makes you code much faster (by hand)?
This is awesome! I have been using Dreamweaver mainly because I was able to see the parameters of functions in PHP. This will help take me one step close to cleansing myself of paid software and trying to go with all open source. Thanks for the post!
I’ve been wanting this for ages – its the one thing I’ve ever missed about coding in Visual Basic from all those years ago. When I saw that screen shot I practically wet myself.
It must be pretty important to you then.
5.0 is out now. its fukin lethal
i have this feature enabled in npp, however, i am finding the quality of the assistance a bit rubbish! i would expect it to: (when language set to html)
as i type “<” to begin to list all the options and norrow them down until i can use the arrow keys
and then when i hit space to add an attribute, to automatically show all the options. It doesn’t!
I would also like it to recommend html tags even if the language is set to php, as you always seem to need to add in some html into a php file!
have i got the settings wrong or is the function a bit overrated?
Code completion for .ASP files works fine. Notepad++ knows about the built in ASP objects like Response, Server ….
However, how can I teach Notepad++ to also recognize other objects like my own COM objects or VB script functions or VB script classes?
Is there a way to configure Notepad++ ?
Thank you very much.
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i hope they’d make a function for automatic validation for html.
That would be pretty useful. And maybe compression of CSS/JavaScript as well.
Now that would be a great idea! Perhaps you should send in a feature request.