Notepad++ vs Beyond Compare

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

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

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained.

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.

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

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

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

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

Very easy to use and personalize.

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.

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

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin.

Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.

Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color).

So parts you don't want to see in your comparision can be hidden with ignore masks. Parts that are okay to be changed can be set with change-lists so beyond compare knows what's the replacement value and skips displaying this. So you can focus on the for you important changes. For example with the ignore mask I was able to compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content. (beginning with timestams the first x characters adding to ignore)

Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.

This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.

Compare archive to directory or to another archive, update ZIP archives by copying files from other side or by editing them directly in compare view.

Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3.

You can compare Registry vs Registry or Registry vs .REG file, both local and remote. You can copy values and keys between sides or edit them.

You can run a script or executable based on file extension before showing a file. Great for beautifying XML, extracting text from MS Office documents, running dis-asm etc.