Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. Making for a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second the open it.

Notepad++ has built in support for syntax highlight for a wide selection of programming languages.

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained.

Notepad++ is licensed under GPL, which means it is free/open source software that you can use freely.

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on.

Vim and Emacs are not easily available on Windows. This is a great editor when stuck in that environment.

In Notepad++, the user can utilise regular expressions to quickly modify text across multiple files.

Console-oriented editors like Emacs and Vim would just show you confusing mojibake based on printing characters. N++ gives you dedicated little icons for them.

The user can open and edit files in multiple screens within the editor window.

If you close Notepad++ (npp), your documents remain even if you haven't saved.

Notepad++ sessions can just be left there without worrying about saving when work is interrupted. If the machine crashes or gets reboot then the exact state of open apps and all changes are "just there" when it's restarted (except the Undo feature).

You can define your own custom syntax highlighting rules (or add support for others) .

While it is disabled by default, when enabled, it is possible to edit more than one line at a time. This is helpful in many situations.