Notepad++ a great quick editor for Windows

I've been looking for a free (as a beer) good text editor for Windows, specially for quick editing or viewing a file while navigating. Notepad is "free", but too simple (I know Notepad is not free, but once you have Windows installed you don't have to pay for it separately) and there are really wonderful text editors like UltraEdit but they're not free. JEdit is very powerful and free, and with all the plugins you can download for it you can have almost all the functionality you need, but its startup is a bit slow (at least with the minimal set of plugins that I use); if I must work with an ant file for some hours it pays off, but if I'm only navigating through a directory and making very small and fast modifications to a file, it is too much for me.

Searching through the Internet I found this super text editor called Notepad++. It is open source (GPL), it is blazingly fast and it has a great set of features, from which I would emphasize:

• Syntax highlighting and syntax folding (syntax highlighting can also be user defined)
• Autocompletion
• Multidocument and multiview
• Powerful search/replace, including regular expression search
• Full drag and drop
• Bookmarks
• Macros (you can record sequences and play them back)

I've been using it for some weeks and I can say it rocks! It's my current Windows quick editor. It can even update quite frequently the view of a log file, not as smoothly as the Unix command "tail -f", but enough for my needs.

It is not such a discovery, though. Once I installed it I saw with surprise that some of my colleagues had been working with it for some time. So if you haven't heard about it and you need a quick editor for Windows, take a look at it!