Notepad++

A decent text editor is one of the most important programs on your computer. I use it for coding, for looking at the results of computations, and sometimes simply for taking notes. Since Windows still only comes with crappy Notepad, you need to find something else. Luckily, there’s Notepad++, a free text editor that I have used for many years now. It offers everything that you need in a text editor: line numbering, syntax highlighting, macros. It can deal with larger files, at it remembers all the files that you had opened when you close the program, even those unsaved notes you took in a temporary file. Highly recommended!