One type of software I’ve kept a particular eye out for as I scour the web for freeware is the humble text editor. Text files are beautiful: simple, small, fast, universally compatible, and powerful – they can be simple to-do lists, but they are also the source code of every program and operating system out there. Coupled with the internet, the text editor is the Gutenberg press on steroids.
Basically, there’s no type of software that gives you more power per kilobyte than the humble text editor. Unfortunately, the standard Windows notepad leaves a little to be desired.
For years and years I used Metapad, which was about the same size as Windows’ notepad but had a lot more nifty features for slicing and dicing text files. But it has not been updated in 6 years, and it was not sufficiently full-featured that I could use it for everything, such as web coding, so I’ve used others in conjunction with it: Crimson Editor, Notetab Pro, Programmer’s Notepad, and Notepad++, to name some of the main ones.
Perhaps it’s silly. On a modern system, even those larger text editors start in a flash. But I like the minimalism of a simple text editor, and when I open a readme file, I don’t want to see a dozen panels flashing at me with all kinds of unneeded functionality.
Now, happily, I think I have found a text editor that I can install and that meets all my needs: Notepad2. Or rather, a slightly modified version. Notepad2 was developed by a fellow fan of Metapad, so it has inherited all of that good functionality but in a smaller package. However, it also is based on the Scintilla source editing component, so it has neat tricks like syntax highlighting (basically, it marks up your source code with different colours to make it easier to read and to spot problems). This was almost perfect, but it lacked one feature that I liked in other editors: code folding, the ability to collapse sections of code so that you could see the surrounding code all at once. I asked the author about this feature and he said he was not interested.
So I was delighted recently to notice that another user had created a modified version of Notepad2 with code folding and other enhancements. Yay! So I finally have a compact, uncluttered editor that basically does everything I want but in a small package.
Notepad2 also comes with an installer that can optionally install it to replace the Windows Notepad, which is nice because replacing notepad can be tricky – Microsoft stashes backup copies in several different locations and copies over any attempt to replace their notepad, so unless you know how to go about it you can get very frustrated.
I realize most people couldn’t care less about text editors. But for me, I’ve reached the end of a 10-year quest, so I have something to celebrate!
