XML Editor

Introduction
Notepad++ is a great choice for editing XML files. It displays XML with colour coding and you can install the XML Tools plugin for additional features. However, I found a dedicated XML editor that's excellent, it's called First Object XML Editor or "Foxe" for short. Here are a couple of screen shots to show an XML file in Notepad++ and Foxe. Both programs can be downloaded and are free! Links are provided below:


Notepad++

Notepad++ is a great general purpose text editor, you can download it here:
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/


Foxe (First Object XML Editor)

In Foxe you can see the structure of the XML File on the left, when you click on an attribute you can see the value highlighted in the text editor to the right (in our case "Bob Dylan").

The Foxe website has lots of help including a Youtube video tutorial. Here's a link:
http://www.firstobject.com/xml-editor-format-xml-customize-treeview-program.htm

Foxe can be installed on your Windows PC or you can download the standalone exe file! This is great, you can put it on a USB flash drive and take it anywhere.


Conclusion
It's a simple editor, easy to use and it makes XML files understandable (mostly!). It's great being able to see the structure of the XML file and navigate through it. I must admit that I have not used it extensively, if over time I find any issues then I'll update this blog post. But as far as I can see now, it's excellent.

Recommended 9/10


References

Notepad++
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Foxe
http://www.firstobject.com/xml-editor-format-xml-customize-treeview-program.htm

Learn about XML here:
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/

Thanks to w3 Schools for the cd_catalog.xml sample file I used in my screen shots above :-)

Compare two text files with Notepad++

Introduction
Often you may need to compare two text files to see the differences. Notepad++ is a very useful free text editor and you can easily add a free plug-in called 'Compare' to add this functionality:


Download
Download Notepad++
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Install Notepad++ if it's not already installed.


Check in Notepad++ that the Compare plugin is installed
With Notepad++ on the screen:
Click Plugins | Show Plugin Manager
Click Compare in the list and click Install
Accept the prompts...
Notepad++ will restart

Now on the Plugins menu you'll see the Compare option.


NOTE:
Normally the above is fine but in the past and possibly if you are troubleshooting, the following manual installation method might be useful:
Download the Compare plug-in for Notepad++
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-compare/?source=dlp
The download file is a zip, open it and extract the DLL inside. Copy this DLL file to:
C:\Program Files\Notepad++\Plugins
Start Notepad++ and now on the Plugins menu you can find the Compare option.



Using Compare in Notepad++
Let's say for example we have two text files - here's what to do:

Open both files in Notepad++

Click Plugins | Compare | Compare (or press Alt-D)

You'll see something similar to the following:

In our example it shows that in file1.txt on the left one line is present that is not there in file2.txt. Also in file2.txt on the right an additional line was added. Of course this is a very simple test but if you have a larger file you can use the Nav Bar to jump to where there are differences.

In the above I was comparing large files. After running the Compare I saw in the Nav Bar that there were two lines (see the orange arrow in the image above) indicating two differences. I clicked and it took me to where the difference was. You can see some text is missing from one line in file2.txt.


Conclusion
It's very fast, even with very large files. It's also easy to use especially if you are already using Notepad++ for other work. Of course this can be used to compare all kinds of data such as log files, programming code or maybe CSV data files, etc. Compare for Notepad++ is excellent!
Recommended: 8 /10

If you want to compare two Excel worksheets please see my previous article on this subject which explains about using an add-on for Excel to compare files inside Excel:
http://mgxp.blogspot.ch/2013/07/excel-2010-compare-two-worksheets-using.html




Updated: August 2015
Notepad++ has a plugin installer built into it now. I updated this document to reflect this but I also left the manual download and installation steps just in case they are needed by anyone.