Kerkia

Background

Windows comes with a very well know text editor called notepad. This editor is however extremely basic and most users will want to replace it with a more feature rich application. This is particularly useful to software engineers and web developers, who often need to open and edit text files without having to load them in their IDE, but this also proves useful to many other types of users.

Recommendation

We recommend Notepad++, a very powerful and complete text editor. It features syntax highlighting and folding, a WYSIWYG editor, auto-completion, tab-based multi-document support, regular expression search and replace, file status auto-detection, zooming, multi-language, favourites, macro recording and playback, and of course a powerful plugin architecture that allows a wealth of 3rd party plugins to add to these capabilities including a file explorer, an hex editor, a spell checked, and file diff utility and many more. And even if notepad++ really does it all, it remains extremely fast and very useable including for users who have only basic needs, as well as very adaptable to your needs and likings.

Many other text editors are also pretty good, including PSPad, Notepad2 or Cimson, often used by programmers especially. None matches the Notepad++ in our humble opinion but we thought we’d mention them anyway. Also worth mentioning is a tool called Programmer’s Notepad which, unlike its name suggests, we find can be a good alternative for users who just want a very easy-to-use, fast alternative to Notepad with support for tabs.

Web links

Notepad++

Web site: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Download: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/download.php (select “Binary files”)