This personal favorite from their About page lives on:
"By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment."
I'd like to use this joke as an opportunity for a more serious point. It's a thing that I actually always wondered. Why is the industry spending so much time advocating that we can write however unoptimal code we like, because it's always cheaper to throw in another server? Wouldn't spending time to optimize software be able to create serious savings in worldwide emissions, given that any given piece of software is likely to be used by 10k - 10M people?
I know that optimizing software for carbon footprint is probably going against The Economy itself, but isn't it the point where our current economy of consumption and growth is leading us to destruction? Maybe there is way to incentivize savings more?
Pick a random article about a data centre, and see what it is about. Presuming nothing awful has happened at that data centre, it's almost certainly about some way the company has found to save money, and that usually means doing something innovative with cooling. And that is saving a hell of a lot of money. I'd be interested to see a break down of the energy consumption of a data centre; I imagine cooling is the biggest output (though I'm happy to be proved wrong). And it's probably easier to halve cooling output than it is to halve the number of servers running, as improving the efficiency of a data centre seems like a much more isolated task compared to improving the efficiency of potentially thousands of programs written by several hundred teams.
OK, so let's say you spend $10k of developer time (about 1 month at current salary rates) to optimize your code to save the environment.
You must be saving less than $10k in electricity over the next couple years (otherwise you would have done it already to save money, irrespective of the environment). So let's say you saved $8k in electricity.
But... what is the developer going to spend that $10k on? Well, he'll probably need a car to drive to work. And a nice apartment to go home to (electricity bill there now too!). And probably he eats out at a steakhouse every now and then, and beef is terrible for the environment.
Not every dollar spent is equal in terms of environmental carbon. But whenever you try to analyze something this complex it soon becomes impossible track all of this.
Which is why what's really needed is environmental taxes (or cap and trade) to remove the externality for carbon production in the first place. The controversy is, just how much damage does carbon do to the environment? There's just no indisputable evidence.
Oh, come on, does text editing really use so many cycles that switching to Notepad++'s automations would really enable the CPU to throttle down? I'd think it'd be throttled down already for most text editing environments, if the user has that enabled.
"By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment."
Gotta love such bold goals from a text editor :)