Windows uses two characters to mark a line break: \r\n (#13#10). \r is a line feed and \n a carriage return: think back to typewriters; to create a new line you first fed the paper up a bit before shifting the printing head back over to the left.

Linux and Mac OS just uses \n to mark linebreaks, and there’s a tendancy in programming to move toward just using this. Every decent text editor will recognise \r\n or \n as a line break (in fact, some linux native ones recognise either \n or \r as a line break and so render \r\n as two line breaks), except Notepad, which only recognises \r\n.

There’s no end of slimline editors that will open a file like this for you, syntax highlight it, display line number, and do everything Notepad should do. You might want to check out a decent resource thread on this over at CodingForums.

Hope that helps.

Sweet! Thanks for the info, that is one nice little program. I use Notepad all the time at work, so this will come in very handy. I especially like the line numbering and formatting selections.

Features include:

• Syntax highlighting
• Word wrapping (which Notepad has a hard time with)
• Auto-close tags
• ..and much, much more!

It’s the best replacement for Notepad yet and I’ve used it extensively for web development.