We all love the simple notepad coming with the windows. It is a tiny utility to edit and save simple text. From simple note to a long story can be typed and stored using notepad. Unlike, WordPad and word it doesn’t support formatting and other advanced options. Ever wondered if the Notepad has all the advanced features bundled with it. If yes, here is a list of some good text editors, which may replace the old notepad. Most of them have more advanced features than the conventional notepad. Moreover, most of them are free !
Notepad2
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad2/)
The first one we want to mention here is the Notepad2. It is a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages. Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting and this program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system’s registry. Moreover the software is free to use.
Notepad++
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/)
Notepad++, a an advanced source code editor and also a Windows Notepad replacement. The best feature of this software is by optimizing its routines, it results in reducing CPU power consumption.
EditPad Lite
This is another notepad replacement software worth mentioning. EditPad Lite is a compact general-purpose text editor, you can use it to easily edit any kind of plain text file. The software offers full Unicode support, including complex scripts and right-to-left scripts. Direct editing of text files using Windows, UNIX, and mac Mac text encodings and line breaks is possible. Another nice feature that the notepad never have is the tabbed interface, this feature help us to work with many files. Unlimited undo and redo for all open files, even after saving can be done. Another great feature is the automatic backup and working copies, which prevent the data loss-an essential feature.
TED Notepad
TED Notepad is a chrome-less free notepad replacement. There are no toolbars, no sidebars, no fancy-looking gadgets. It offers 312 text-processing functions, innovative features and timesaving tools. All of them on hotkeys; all designed for quick advanced editing. The main feature of this light-weight portable text editor is it fits on any USB flash disk and loads instantly with no installation required. TED Notepad is particularly targeted to advanced notepad users with non-trivial demands and tasks.
Akelpad
(http://akelpad.sourceforge.net/)
AkelPad is an open source editor for plain text. It is designed to be a small and fast with single window (SDI), multi-window (MDI) and pseudo multi-window modes. It offers full support of Unicode strings on Unicode systems.
Editplus
EditPlus offers more ,it is a text editor, HTML editor, PHP editor, Java editor and Hex Viewer for Windows. It offers some powerful features for Web page authors and programmers like syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, Java, C/C++, CSS, ASP, Perl, JavaScript, VBScript, Python and Ruby on Rails. Also, it can be extended for other programming languages based on custom syntax files. Other features include Hex Viewer, HTML toolbar, user tools, line number, ruler, URL highlighting, auto completion, clip text, column selection, powerful search and replace, multiple undo/redo, spell checker, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more.
Glass Notepad
It has a completely glassed surface which goes well with the “Aero” theme on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Notepad Tabs
It offers tabbed view of multiple text files. You can view multiple text files in a single notepad. You can easily switch from one file to another through tabs at the top of the frame.
PSPad
PSPad is ready to work immediately without requiring customization. The editor supports many file types and languages, with syntax highlighting. There are macros, clip files and templates to automate repetitive tasks. Integrated HEX Editor, Project support, FTP Client, Macro Recorder, File Search/Replace, Code Explorer, Code page conversion… these are just some of the many features that PSPad offers.
TinyEdit
TinyEdit Text Editor is a free text editor, a nice Notepad replacement, have many powerful features for Web page developers and programmers, supports syntax highlighting more than 26 languages source code, include Java, C/C++, HTML, CSS, PHP, XML, SQL, Perl, Python, Java Script and VB Script and more.
NoteTab Light
(http://www.notetab.com/notetab-light.php)
This is another notepad replacement. With NoteTab you can handle a heap of documents with a simple tabbed interface. Search files, strip HTML tags and format text quickly. Build libraries of text macros to speed up your work.
FluentNotepad
FluentNotepad is a Windows Notepad with Office 2010 Fluent Ribbon UI. FluentNotepad features a powerful Text Editor and a Tabs Interface.
TabPad
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/tabpad/)
The main goal of TabPad is produce a basic text editor that includes the ability to view multiple documents with the ease of tabs. This will be developed for Windows API in c++.
XEMacs
XEMacs is one more powerful alternative to windows notepad. This is available for different platforms also, available for Windows, MAC, Linux, BSD etc. XEmacs is a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system.
Crimson Editor
(http://www.crimsoneditor.com/)
It is a professional source code editor for Windows. This program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size (so small that it can be copied in one floppy disk). While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.
In addition to this there are a lot of notepad replacement utilities. We want to mention some of them like Metapad, Textpad, Zulupad, pnotepad, Pronotepad, win32pad, xplorer,EDXOR, etc. Zulupad has two versions free and pro version. Pro version has more features than the other. Pnotepad is the programmer’s notepad- a free utility. Of these xplorer is a mini HTML editor.
Of these whole set of wonderful utilities, we loved the Notepad2 and editpad lite. If you are programmer you can consider Notepad++ and Editplus. Both offers syntax highlighting and other features, which are essential for programmers. It you need the same notepad with multiple tab feature the Pronotepad is the best candidate and it is free to use. We are adding a screenshot below of Pronotepad to get a glimpse of the free editor.
To compare two text files, you can use some free tools, which are described in depth in our earlier article, best tools to compare text files. What you think about the above list? Did you find any utilities better than this? What is your opinion and which is your favorite notepad alternative or still stick on the old windows notepad? Share your opinion and comments…
