Multiple tabs

Emacs has various ways to display tabs, but I don’t use tabs in emacs, because it doesn’t scale well to, say, dozens of tabs; normally, each additional buffer I have doesn’t normally have any visual indication onscreen that it exists. I use a couple of other buffer-switching software packages.

keeps track of lines

Defaults to being shown in the minibuffer. By default, C-h = will run what-cursor-position and will also explicitly show the byte offset, line number, column number, and percentage of way through the file.

One of the most invaluable parts of it, is that you can close it or a update happens or maybe your PC will get knocked offline. You can come back to Notepad++, open it, and everything will be retained.

This is called desktop-save-mode in emacs. C-h f desktop-save-mode will show documentation. You can have a single global saved instance, or multiple concurrent instances of emacs saving desktop state for separate projects.

Emacs. Emacs is the true answer

Vim or NeoVim

Probably the terminal. Im cheating a bit.

I don’t know about “all that you’ll need to use”, and this might arguably considered cheating, but I’d take emacs. I think that it’s safe to say that there isn’t another software package that has the same degree of coverage of functionality. I use it for doing statistics notepad work, as a word processor, as a spreadsheet, as an email client, could use it as a web browser if necessary, as a version control client, for interactive diff merging, can use it as an LLM chat client, IRC client, text editor, IDE, orthodox-file-manager-style file manager, media player, etc.

Unless you’re going to take a broader sense of “piece of software” that would let, say, a Linux distro be taken, I think that it’s pretty hard to compete with.

Vim. I suppose, technically, I’d need a kernel and filesystem drivers to run it, but Vim is the one true way. (and none of that neovim heresy either!)

For Notepad++, make sure you’ve installed the latest version using a download from the official website. Their automatic update feature got hijacked to package in malware within the past few months and the only way to shift to the newer secure update “source” is a reinstall from the site, as far as I’m aware.

The linux kernel. All the software I need, I’ll just key in the syscalls I want to make in binary.

PowerPoint.

My work won’t pay for fancy graphic editing software, so I’ve learned how to make some impressive graphics and signs using only PowerPoint. It’s surprising good at it!

Kate: https://kate-editor.org/

notepadd++ is very impressive in windows but kinda par for the course in linux land.

rustup

emacs if I can have two

Blender if I can have three