This might be something everyone already knows, and I was just not thinking, but I couldn't figure out why my .htaccess file wasn't working for hours. Then, I figured out that having word wrap on in notepad will prevent it from working alltogether. So, if you're having issues with a 301 redirect, or password protect, whatever, make sure you turn off word wrap on notepad.

You might want to give Notepad++ a try; it's open source, which means free, but also one of the best code editors out there. There are tabs for multiple documents, syntax highlighting, although it doesn't have .htaccess as a built in highlighting language, but that along with plenty of other code friendly features, it's worth the price...

So then I'm assuming Notepad++ doesn't have issues with inserting special characters for hard line breaks, as that was my issue with normal Notepad.

Well, it'll use line break characters ... cr, lf, or both, depending on the environment you want to write to ... but it can do word wrap on screen without actually saving it to the file that way. I'm shocked the regular Notepad got this wrong!

Anyway, I'm not associated with that project in any way, but I built my site by hand in Notepad++ because of the syntax highlighting, code folding, and other features like that. I'm writing a CMS to avoid having to do this, but I'd highly recommend it, especially for the price ( $0 ).

Wow - I didn't realize that notpad will create new lines for its wordwrap - thats a new one for me!

However, I agree above, I think its best to use a third party text editor in which you can control the line feeds.

DOS - CR LF (\r\n)
Unix - LF (\n)
Mac - CR (\r)