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Alignment of characters in Notepad++

I just wondered why my m-files from MATLAB look so different when I open them with Notepad++ instead of the built-in MATLAB Editor.

It seems that in the MATLAB Editor each character has the same width. Not so in Notepad++ (even I change the language to "M").

Here's a screenshot from a file opened in Notepad++ (left) and in the MATLAB Editor (right).

enter image description here

In the MATLAB Editor all the characters in column X are exactly one below the other. They aren't in Notepad++.

I just played a bit with the tab preferences, without any success.

Is there a way to get the alignment of columns in Notepad++ the same as in the MATLAB Editor ...at least for m-files?

Solution

  • It's because your MATLAB Editor is set to use a monospaced font such as Courier (i.e. a font where all the characters are designed to have exactly the same width), but your Notepad++ is not.

    In Notepad++, you can set the font with the menu Settings -> Style Configurator. Select "MATLAB" from the language list (or in fact you may like to select "Global Styles", to do this for all languages), and set the font to a monospaced font such as Courier.

    Alternatively, you may like to download a more modern programming font such as Consolas, ProFont, Monofur, Proggy, or Inconsolata. These are all monospaced, and nicer than Courier. You can use the in both Notepad++ and the MATLAB Editor.

    It's possible that another issue might be that you have tab characters in your code, which are displaying with a variable width in Notepad++. You can make sure that MATLAB replaces tab characters with spaces in the MATLAB preferences (MATLAB->Editor/Debugger/Tab). To check whether you have tab characters, open the file in Notepad++ and select View->Show Symbol->Show All Characters. Tab characters will display as a short arrow, and space characters will display as a little dot. If you need to change all the tabs to spaces in an existing file, Notepad++ can do this with Edit->Blank Operations->Tab to Space.

    Hope that helps!