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Introduction
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There are lots of text editors. Some of these aspire to just be Notepad replacements, while others are full-on programming editors. This review will focus on the first group which is Notepad replacements, saving files in plain text (txt) format. Some applications reviewed here are better than the standard Notepad in that they extend the features to include saving files in rich text (rtf) or other formats, tabbed interface, spell checker, etc., which are needed by most average users. If you are looking for a text editor with programming or source code editing features, such as Notepad++, please take a look at Best Free Programming Editor. Or if you are searching for a text editor that is good for editing html codes, you might want to check out Best Free HTML Editor. |
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Discussion
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Other features include the ability to insert pictures and objects, open as many documents as the user likes, no file size limitation, and unlimited undo capability, WordWeb support, etc. Even though some extra features are restricted to the commercial version, the standard features in the Lite version are sufficient and suitable for most average users. |
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This program supports binary files encrypting with compression and allows saving of files in protected text format (prt) with a user's password. Other features include multi-language interface, integrated e-mail client with an address book, clipboard viewer, drag-and-drop and other advanced editing functions. Spell Checker requires a separate download of dictionaries available at the download page. Supported dictionaries include English, Russian, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. |
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WordTabs allows users to insert pictures and objects with rich text formating requirements. Saving of files in both txt and rtf formats are supported. Other useful features include drag-and-drop text editing, case conversions, find-and-replace, etc. This program is developed by Skip Bremer. It is no longer maintained or supported but still available for download from other alternative websites. |
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The program comes with tabbed interface for switching between open files easily and allows user to set the application window on top of other windows. Some other useful features include block functions, no file size limitation, unlimited undoes and redoes even after saving the file so long as it remains open. On the down side, the spell checker is not included in the free version. |
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Basic features such as redo/undo, find/replace and word wrapping are included. The program also supports lines numbering, display whitespace, own text snippets, sending documents via email and so on. No installation of the program is required. Just download, extract the zip file and run the executable. The program does not come with a spell checker. |
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Other Text Editors
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These are other text editors which were brought up in comments here or noted from other sources. As they are not rated in this review, I am listing them here with brief descriptions and links to their sites for ease of reference.
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5.4 
Restricted Freeware (full commercial version available) 
Win98 to Win7
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Editor
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This article is maintained by volunteer editor Jojoyee. Registered site users are allowed to edit and improve this article wiki-style. |
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Tags
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| text editor, plain text editor, notepad replacement, basic editor, windows text editor, program editor, best editor |
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Please rate this article
Does anyone know any of above notepad editor or any other which is better than notetab light. Particularly I am looking for another better notepad editor (not for programming) but with a feature called quick list which is very convenient.
Thanks
N Trivedi
I'm surprised that NoteTab Lite (which has been around since 1995), has not been mentioned. It has most of the functionality of all of the mentioned editors combined plus a whole bunch more. It has multiple tabs of course, unlimited files up to 2 GB each, spell checker, customizable toolbars, clipbars and drop down menus (over 90 built-in commands), block/column edits, math expression & column sum calculator, outlines, global editing for both open tabs as well as on-disk files, full PCRE RegEx (http://www.pcre.org/), search and search & replace, upper/lower/reverse case, text sort, split/join text, pasteboard (automatically collect all text sent to windows clipboard - very useful) and file encryption to name just a few. In addition, it has a built-in macro language for creating and executing scripts to perform very complex actions (not just text editing), at the click of a (custom) button. It comes with an extensive clip library and there is are many more available from the user forums. It supports multiple languages, multiple character sets and Unicode. However, it only has single level undo. The actual program is not overly large (at about 1.5 MB) but the support files (help files, clip files, dictionaries, language files, icons, templates, etc), can bulk the installation out to 3 - 4 MB. It can also be installed on a USB stick. There are commercial versions available with additional features but the freeware version is very capable on its own merits.
http://www.notetab.com/features.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoteTab
Thanks for your comments. I see this will be a contender in the category of HTML Text Editor.
Well yes & no. Although NoteTab comes with clips for facilitating HTML coding (such as fill in menus and automatic tag pair generation), it has no syntax highlighting or indentation such as NotePad++ or PSPad. I use NoteTab as a text editor on steroids and do my serious HTML coding on NotePad++ or PSPad.
Actually I use both: the HTML editors for checking syntax, auto indenting, pairing tags, etc and NoteTab for moving code around, renaming, annotating, tweaking, etc. Since all these apps are aware of external changes to open files I can safely have the same file open in multiple editors.
ATPad looks promising and seems to allow plain text cyrillic character input...
So many editors... most of them I did not even knew. Have to read more about them, and maybe try them. Thanks for mentioning them.
Anupam
This review has been re-structured and updated with new freeware products. The programming text editors will be grouped under a new category Best Free Programming Editor.
Hope that this is helpful and welcome more comments.
It's not the "best" text editor yet despite all the comments here the only "NOTEPAD REPLACEMENT" is "NotePad2"...
Simply compare its size versus others to see this. It is also feature rich. But not as much as its size 'bloated' brothers...
I agree. It should be mentioned at least!
See Best Free Programming Editor.
polyedit lite is a terrific wordpad/notepad replacement. Lightning quick with tabs, crypto, multiple formats, alternate GUI's, wordweb support, sorting and a bunch of other features, it's the best alternative that I've found. The shareware version adds syntax highlighting and a few other esoteric features, but the freeware (lite) version does most of what you're likely to need for most tasks.
http://download.cnet.com/PolyEdit-Lite/3000-2079_4-10915969.html
Many thanks for the feedback.
It is a pity that Notepad++ don't have the hex plugin anymore -- that is one reason I like it more than crimson editor. Now it is getting weight very fast. I am considering to using pspad as replacement now.
NP++ 5.4.5 for some reason deletes the hex plugin on install, but I downloaded it again from the plugins site and it seems to work.
nice tip. I've notice previous version will delete the plugins during installation and during startup -- this 5.4.5 is different.
EDXOR:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/edxor.htm
Don't forget about Kate. Has nice syntax highlighting for tons of languages, a nice configurable interface, and comes free as part of KDE. I installed KDE 4 on my Vista computer, and just typed Kate and yep, it's in there :)
Just a note. TextPad appears to be more like "trustware": "There is no charge for the download, but you must pay for the software if you decide to keep it."
I accidently forgot to pay and the program still works fine, except for a nag popup. (Needless to say I am going to uninstall it immediately, when I get the time.)
EditPad Lite is very nice, but you should read the license that comes with it. The upshot is that if you use it for personal use, like at home, it is free. However if you are using it at work, where you get paid for using it, you are supposed to buy a copy.
Over the last year or so I've really been impressed by notepad++. It has no special licensing agreements, and is freely available for either work or home. It has several plugins available. Some come with it, a few can be downloaded. I have found the hex edit plugin especially useful.
PSpad hands down, even has column mode...
Notepad++ is an amazing little tool.
It has a clean interface and is user-friendly for the non-programmers, but still offers advanced text eidting features like find/replace, case conversion, macros, etc.
It has advanced coding features like syntax and brace highlighting, code folding (awesome!).
In the newer versions the basic plugins like spell checker, FTP client come bundled.
It is open-source and has a portable version too! (http://portableapps.com/)
What more could one want?
The only problem I faced was replacing the Windows notepad. I guess that's the problem with most text editors because Windows has some sort of protection for the 'notepad.exe' file and replaces new files with the original binary.
Regards,
ViHAR
With only having tried Gizmo's recommendations, I have to agree with Editpad lite being the best and for those reasons listed above:
open as many documents as you like,
no file size limitations
,
and unlimited undo capability.
When you have to open text files of
500 meg
, and do search/replace, this is the one that gets it done.
Thanks Gizmo
try and try and try and ..... every editor i found ,and i always go back to scite and vim.
100% agree. SciTe is THE choice! It supports tabed interface, many different languages, and most important (for me at least) - regular expressions in find and replace.
AFAIK, Notepad++ is based upon SciTe
Thank you very much.
Some people here asked for the download links for Emeditor / emeditor / em editor (whichever it is). You can find it here:
www.emeditor.com/modules/download2/rewrite/tc_3.html
www.download.com/EmEditor-Free/3000-2352_4-10493299.html
www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Text-editors/EmEditor-Free.shtml
The only thing is, the file at the author's site is 1.77MB and at the download sites it's 1.25MB, and the same filename. But on the author's site it's not mentioned as freeware - but on the download sites it's definitely FREEware. So I guess I'll install the download.com version.
[see forum post in I Want An App That.... >> ...finds & replaces double spaces in text]
chris.p
It looks like the links for ConText editor are not valid anymore.
TED Notepad also not bad. http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/
Very recommend AkelPad for the Notepad Replacement.
http://akelpad.sourceforge.net/
Does anyone know if there's a simple editor that runs in DOS and is just the same as Edit (which I really like) but has color coding of keywords?
vim can be a great choise,in windows or doc or linux or anything else
ATPad is great, too. http://atpad.sourceforge.net/
For me, it all depends upon what kind of file you are editing ...
TEXTPAD
I would give another vote for Textpad. Excellent product good for column blocking and hence search and replace in a blocked column (which I use to massage text files for upload into databases). Also good for regular expression search and replace, comes with customisable syntax highlighting for coding.
VI | VIM | GVIM
Good for editing long files of code (well over 1000 lines), the nifty command line features of vi (gvim | vim) cannot be surpassed especially / (search) and . (repeat command)
Once installed, ConTEXT installed files can be copied and run without installation on other PC's.
Another candidate in this class is PFE.
emeditor free 6.04 is the best.
small but powerful.
unfortunately 6.04 is the last free version.
Do you have a dl link?
I downloaded and used notpad++ and crimson Editor from 2 years ago,
Notpad++ in a full comparison is the best ( especially with some of plug-ins ) which exists on this page
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
and crimson which is not bad, exists on this page
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
I found PSPad several month ago in c|net , it's very well; which exists on this page too
http://www.pspad.com/
and I found GNU Emacs and Geany in wikipedia almost 1 month ago
GNU Emacs is very powerfull text editor , but also is very heavy; but I think if we skip size of the app; it will be the best; When I cheked comments see it in comments
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/
and Geany :
http://geany.uvena.de/
is other good text editor and is not very heavy; almost a full IDE, I think no one not it yet
Seeing here for information :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors
EDXOR
http://freezip.cjb.net/freeware/
http://editra.org/
here is another very good editor.
Is anyone aware of a editor (preferably unix based other than emacs) which is capable of version control.
The purpose is to have multiple versions created for multiple save operations and being able to take a diff (difference) of them.
I call this section the "programmers corner": what about notepad replacements for the rest of us?
OK, I guess that seems fair...what are the features that you would like to see that NotePad doesn't give you? If you simply want a duplicate of NotePad itself, then why not use NotePad?
I would like a free lightweight notepad replacement that gives me an outline, tabs, enhanced style and paragraph format features, tables, a good search utility, and if possible a portable app... I don't need a program that speaks in c, c++, etc, etc.
In short, you are asking for a wordprocessor. So go for free wordprocessor softwares like abiword, not for notepad replacements.
Um, your links for Vim point to crimson. Copy/paste error? Actual links are:
http://www.vim.org/
http://www.vim.org/download.php
Also, Vim is portable by default. You can turn off all the shell integration features in the installer and the only thing it will do is try to do some OLE registration, otherwise it leaves your registry untouched as far as i can tell. You can also combine "vim71rt.zip" and "gvim71.zip" or "gvim71ole.zip" an get a no-install version. Thing will use your %home% directory for .vimrc, or the program directory if there's no %home%.
And since you mentioned emacs and I used to use it back in the day, the links are:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/
This is the NTEmacs varient, there are a few other GNU emacs windows varients apparantly, see http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html .
That other major fork of the thing which I never really looked at is here:
http://www.xemacs.org/
http://www.xemacs.org/Download/index.html
I'm sure they can all be instaleld portably too, but I'm not going to try to figure it out. (I might have to look at elisp again ^_^). IMO they're like a two-ton sledgehammer, otoh, if you're into the extentions, modes and plugins, you probably don't really NEED any other software on your portable :D.
Fixed the links--Thank you! I'll add the other editors to the list...I'm slowly learning emacs, so it may be a bit before I get to them...please bear with me :)
PNotepad is also a very nice and fast editor. I use it more and more
http://www.pnotepad.org/
Programmer's Notepad (http://www.pnotepad.org) is the one for me. Very clean layout and the ability to insert Text Clips (HTML, C, Java etc) make it a winner for anyone writing or modifying code or for just as a text editor.
Notepad++ is also very good but I think Pnotepad has the edge.
this is also very good .after use almost all of text editors mentioned in this page, i rate pnote as one of the top 3.
bfish should have a look at it.
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