It is based on the Scintilla editor component, and is written in C++ with only Win32 API calls using only the STL to increase performance and reduce program size. Notepad++ was first released on SourceForge on 25 November 2003, as a Windows-only application. Notepad++ was built as a Microsoft Windows application the author considered, but rejected, the idea of using wxWidgets to port it to the Mac OS X and Unix platforms. He developed it in his spare time since the idea was rejected by his company.

Ho first used JEXT (a Java-based text editor) at his company but, dissatisfied with its poor performance, he began to develop a text editor written in C++ with Scintilla. Notepad++ was developed by Don Ho in September 2003.

Notepad++ uses the Scintilla editor component. The project was hosted on TuxFamily from 2010 to 2015 since 2015, Notepad++ has been hosted on GitHub. At first, the project was hosted on, from where it was downloaded over 28 million times and twice won the SourceForge Community Choice Award for Best Developer Tool. Notepad++ is distributed as free software. The product's name comes from the C postfix increment operator. It supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in a single window. Notepad++ is a text and source code editor for use with Microsoft Windows. Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Aragonese, Aranese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Brazilian portuguese, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Extremaduran, Persian, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Ligurian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Mongolian, Norwegian, Nynorsk, Occitan, Piglatin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samogitian, Sardinian, Serbian, Serbian Cyrillic, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish Argentinian, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik Cyrillic, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Uzbek Cyrillic, Venetian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Zulu

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