Whoa, thank you for the elaboration. As I said in another comment, I was vim user for a short time but it may take a long time to use it again. I don’t rule out vim from my OSS life. Who knows what will transpire :)

Yes, great times for us. It takes time to get up to speed, but the important thing is to keep at it.

VS Code has gotten really fast recently but it is more of a combination of having the right plugin (TextFX in this case) and the general fastness. Someone should ideally just port that TextFX. I thought about doing that a lot of times, but it was a lack of time + lack of skill issue :)

Again I do use VS Code for the occasional frontend work. It is great but for all heavy duty manipulation sometime really is off in VS Code. It could be that I haven’t out of inertia tried too much.

I don’t know if I can qualifiedly explain what it is about the plugins, they work well and have sane defaults. Notepad++ with all its custom panels, that plugins create a quite a clunkiness in there, but having those separate panels sometimes gives it a unique and flexible usage experience.

About the edit thing, there are just so many options that sometimes I forget that TextFx plugin exists. There are 100 or so options in that edit menu neatly categorized into sub menus like Insert, Copy, Indent, Line Operations, Blank Operations, Auto-completion, Paste Special, On Selection, Multi-select All, etc each having 5 to 7 operations.

Line Operations for example has these:

Duplicate Current Line
Remove Duplicate Lines
Remove Consecutives Duplicate Lines
Split Lines
Join Lines
...
Reverse Lines
Randomize Lines
...
Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascendlng

and 10 or more 

Another great thing is the whole design and the options around managing bookmarks while searching. I should write a blog post on it :)

Thank you and I wish you a similar or better success soon. Yes, I do wish to share the writings on this here slow and steadily.

Agree on all counts about Notepad++ “oldness”

• slower when we have 100 files open
• clunky
• rigid
• old GUI paradigms ( settings modal, find modal etc)
• inflexible and less customizable UI chrome area

Few things I like about Notepad++ enough to actually keep on using it on work workstations:

• Plugins ecosystem. I am too entrenched into it.
  • PoormansSqlFormatter
  • Tidy2
  • JSTool
  • XML Tools
  • ComparePlus
  • TextFx2
• great built-in editing operations Edit > EOL
• great bookmarking operations
• Very active development
• Way faster than VS Code for text manipulation tasks

Geany with Plugins with is great but misses out on the above stuff

Sublime is the only one and I could use it for a serious amount of time. I only went back because I could not often get it installed in some enterprises.