Notepad++ is a handy text editor and source-code editor for Windows. It is useful when making quick changes to your source code files, editing configuration files and creating new plain text files. It supports color syntax highlighting for many programming languages. It has support for opening very large size files without much delay. We can add more features to Notepad++ using plugins which are freely available on the internet.
One feature in Notepad++ which I find very useful is the ability to search for any selected text easily. We can right-click on any text in a file and choose to search for it on the internet. By default, Notepad++ uses Google as the search engine but we can change the search engine to DuckDuckGo too.
Here is how you can change the search engine used by Notepad++ to DuckDuckGo:
- Launch Notepad++ from its desktop or Start menu shortcut.
- From Notepad++ menubar select Settings and then Preferences.
- In the preferences window, select Search Engine from the list of options.
- From the list of available search engines, select DuckDuckGo and then click on the Close button asdisplayed in the following screenshot.
Now whenever you right-click on any word or phrase and choose to “Search on Internet”, it will send the query to the DuckDuckGo search engine. If you want to turn back to the default search engine, then you can repeat the same steps as above but select Google this time instead of DuckDuckGo. Notepad++ uses Google as its default search engine.
Some users prefer DuckDuckGo because it offers more privacy than any other search engine. Using these easy to follow steps, we can change the search engine used by Notepad++. In a similar manner, we can switch to some other popular search engines such as Yahoo!, Google or Stack Overflow and disable the search engines altogether too.