Best Free Text Editor

by Mike 14 August 2008 12 Comments

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Hello friends, welcome to the Freeware Mission. I have only a few freeware programs left to install and my computer will be working just fine with no commercial software in it. Today I’m going to choose a free text editor. I’m using Notepad too, everybody does, but there are some freeware programs that offer a lot more.

And I think that the best of them is… Notepad++. It’s a text editor but it can be a very useful tool for a programmer. It supports a large number of programming languages offering syntax highlighting and folding.

And there’s better news: the program can be enriched with the dozens of plugins that are available as we speak.

You can download Notepad++ from here, it’s open source!

My Evaluation	9
Operating System	Windows All
Size	2.04 MB
Author	Don HO
Version Tested	5.0.3

Five more episodes to go and the Freeware Mission will reach the peak! On Monday I will publish the list with the programs I installed in my computer to have it working with only freeware programs in it!
I wouldn’t miss that!

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12 Comments »

Dave said:

Right Johnny,the link has been changed to your new one and the blog is looking good

# 14 August 2008 at 8:55 am

Johnny Karp said:

Thanks Dave!

# 14 August 2008 at 10:55 am

Anonymous said:

Never heard of EDXOR ??

# 8 September 2008 at 10:50 am

Anonymous said:

What I’m really missing in notepad++ is a column editor.
CrimsonEditor has that, so I’d recommend CrimsonEditor (now also opensouce project called emeraldEditor) (http://www.emeraldeditor.com / http://www.crimsoneditor.com/)

# 13 September 2008 at 12:20 pm

Wim said:

pspad (http://www.pspad.com/en/) is also a really good one, although closed source, it is updated frequently and the author will listen to good suggestions

# 14 September 2008 at 5:31 am

Jim said:

You can post what you think is the
best text editor at whatUrunning.com

# 15 September 2008 at 11:17 am

Marco said:

EditPad Lite, free and excellent.

# 1 January 2009 at 11:09 am

Johnny Karp said:

@Marco
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll give it a try.

# 1 January 2009 at 1:53 pm

Bilgisayarınız İçin 72 Ücretsiz Yazılım | catlakses.com said:

[...] Notepad++ – Programlama dillerini de destekliyor [...]

# 29 January 2009 at 9:47 pm

ParSalian said:

I’ve been using Textpoad for ages. I know, i know, its not free, just shareware, that’s not the point. But one day i started studying japanese & chinese (yeah, both), and UTF-writen folders appeared in my desktop. And… wtf??? why the hell can’t TextPad open them? It’s just trying to open “C:\bin\????\index.txt” instead of “C:\bin\日本\index.txt”… ok, let’s move it to the desktop…. ouch! the charachters inside aren’t well depicted, and if i save the file, then the file is totally corrupted. In few words: It doesn’t has support for asian languajes. That day I started my search for a good text editor, trying to find the things i most use in textpad (and the ones i miss ):
* Full UTF-8, UTF-16 support… maybe JIS?
* RegExp Search & Replace (all opened files)
* Search in files, file compare
* Line marking (so you can go ahead and back between different points…. the definition of a function and its uses )
* Syntax highlighting (not closed-format, so I can add AU3 / LUA / whatever if undefined, and automatically extension-linked)
* Colum editing (copy-paste in column mode, filling with fixed text, number sequences…)
* Usability (keyboard shortcuts) and fast learning curve
* ….

I looked into wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors) and found some interesting options. Tryed many, but no one had all i was looking for. Anyway, at least i found a good one, and started using it. Not sure if it was Scite or Notepad++…. It had some crashes, but hey, it was working. I was saving frequently so i don’t lose my work. In one of this times… it crashed during the save. Ok, as always, i reopened the file… the empty file… hey, stop. Empty? WTF? yeah, it was empty.

I hope it was a beta version or whatever. But it messed up my work due to a crash during the save. Even the previously saved work was lost.

It has been some time ago. I’ve been textpad again for files wihout kanji, and notepad (standard) for kanjis. Now, I’ve received an invitation to try the Seven, and i want to retry.

Any good text editor?

(btw, sorry if my english isn’t perfect… i’m from Spain )

# 14 October 2009 at 7:49 pm

Johnny Karp said:

Notepad++ is a good free option in my view but I don’t know if it meets all of your criteria. And don’t worry, your English is quite OK

# 15 October 2009 at 11:45 am

72 Programs For A Freeware Only PC « streetvisuals said:

[...] Notepad++ – Powerful open source text editor written in C++, supports a wide range of programming languages, great multi-document and multi-view features. [...]

# 12 June 2010 at 1:36 am