Notepad++ is awesome, and OneNote not so much…

I use Notepad++ since a couple of years now, just yesterday I found another awesome feature and reason to love NotePad++ more!
Ctrl+K (without the Ctrl+C) works in Notepad++ (as expected like Visual Studio) on editing autohotkey files and batch files (.bat) and a lot of other file types!!

Note
: Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C is the shortcut for commenting code

image
Figure: Commenting lines in NotePad++ with Ctrl+K

 

I would love to use OneNote, but I have following problems with it

  1. Where are the OneNote files stored?
    If we reformat drive because of system update, this is important to me!
  2. Onenote files can be opened only with Onenote :-(
  3. The UI is confusing to me, there are 3 tabs on 3 borders of the UI

clip_image002
Figure: BAD – What is the difference between the 3 different tabs? Is there a difference?

ap--check
The big PLUS for Onenote is the OCR feature “Copy Text from Picture”!!!!!
That is the only thing I use from Onenote

 

The big features I like from NotePad ++

  1. Syntax Highlighting in many different languages and file types (C#, html, … list is HUGE)
  2. Regular Expression Search/Replace
  3. File Status Auto-detection
    If you modify or delete a file which opened in Notepad++, you will be notified to update your document (reload the file or remove the file)
  4. Easy to use
  5. Auto Show last opened files

All features can be found here http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

11 comments:

John Guin said...

By default, your notebooks are in \My Documents\OneNote notebooks.

You can see this by right clicking a notebook (in the left pane) and selecting properties.

Think of the left bar as being eqivalent to a spiral notebook. YOu can have several of these.

the top are 'sections' and are equivalent to the tab dividers in each notebook.

Lastly, the individual pages are on the right.

Peter Gfader said...

Hi John,
Thank you very much for that info.

#1 Regarding the location of the OneNote notebooks, that is not easy to find in the actual app. I expected the notebooks to be somewhere in My Documents, that's good. And almost all companies are backing up this folder.

#2
With your explanation and looking at the UI again, it makes sense. The little icons help a bit.

The right hand side tabs (=pages) could be displayed differently so that its more obvious that these are actually pages...

Question: Is it important to browse to individual pages?
Why not just have multiple sections?

THANKS
Peter

Anonymous said...

You can also now sync up with SkyDrive if you have a Microsoft Live account.

Anonymous said...

goddamn it. you are just confused as hell. notepad++ is for programming and coding and onenote is for general note-taking.

Anonymous said...

@Abhijit
>> notepad++ is for programming and coding
What is Visual Studio then for? :-)

SagChiq said...

I don't know why you're comparing notepad++ to onenote. oh my god.

Peter Gfader said...

Both tools are used to take notes by lots of people

Peter Gfader said...

Both tools are used to take notes by lots of people

Anonymous said...

What? you are comparing an text editor with an notes organizer.
Isnt it obvious. One note is like a tradicional notebook, left tabs are notebooks, top tabs are like notebook`s section and right tabs are actual pages.
Notepad++ is just a text editor with sintax highlight, it is not even an IDE.
What matter is the purpose, notepad++ and notepad serves to edit texts, where onenote purpose is to save and organize notes.
Of course you can use notepad++ to create notes, but then you need to use file system to organize it.
Perhaps intead of notepad++ it must be called edit++, but i think it was taken from original windows notepad program name, that suposedly replaced DOS edit program.

Peter Gfader said...

>>Notepad++ is just a text editor with sintax highlight, it is not even an IDE.
Would you call OneNote an IDE?

>>you need to use file system to organize it
is OneNote not using the filesystem to organize notes? Ok you get a better search of the notes with OneNote.

BTW: I use Evernote since 1 year and love it.

clod said...

Codelobster editor works better for me

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