Free Text Editors – Notepad Alternatives
Notepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows and a basic text-editing program which enables computer users to create documents. Here are some Free Text Editors to replace Notepad.
Free Text Editors to Replace Notepad
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.
Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.
PS Pad
PSPad – text editor for developers for Microsoft Windows systems
The universal (freeware) text editor, useful for people who:
- work with plain text – the editor has a wealth of formatting functions, including a spell checker
- create web pages – as a web authoring editor, PSPad contains many unique tools that save your time
- want to use a good IDE for their compiler – PSPad catches and parses compiler output, integrates external help files, compares versions and much more…
There is no complex installation process, 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…
Notepad2
Notepad2 is a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation and does not touch your system’s registry.
EditPad Lite
EditPad Lite is a compact general-purpose free text editor. Use EditPad Lite to easily edit any kind of plain text file. EditPad Lite has all the essential features to make text editing a breeze:
- Large file and long line support.
- Full Unicode support, including complex scripts and right-to-left scripts.
- Direct editing of text files using Windows, UNIX, and mac Mac text encodings (code pages) and line breaks.
- Tabbed interface for working with many files.
- Unlimited undo and redo for all open files, even after saving.
- Automatic backup and working copies prevent data loss.
- Powerful search-and-replace with literal search terms and regular expressions that can span multiple lines.
TED Notepad
TED Notepad is a chrome-less non-bloated free plain-text editor. No showy toolbars or sidebars, but a simple, neat and KISS interface, stuffed with a variety of features, settings, and text-transforming tools, waiting on hotkeys and mouse clicks to get useful. It stays out of your way and thus helps you to work on what’s important, bringing your typing, text-working or even coding to the next level:
- Grep, Sort, Cut, Unique, RegEx, Shuffle, Tr, you name it…
- Serious search & replace with regular expressions
- Several rather innovative auto-completions
- The intelligent clipping, swapping and moving text
- All convenient text-editor features included, of course
- Even more features and settings
DocPad
Free Text Editor for Windows. DocPad is a free alternative to Notepad. Although it fills the same role, plain text editing, it offers an arsenal of time-saving tools: block indent/unindent, bookmarking, case conversion, customizable toolbar, encoding conversion, file backups, file history, jump to line/offset, keyboard macros, print preview, search and replace, skinnable interface, spell checking, statistics, variable pitch font, and much more. It also includes a built-in calculator, calendar, and character map.
ATPad
ATPad is an older Free Notepad replacement written in pure C and Windows API. Keeping simplicity of Notepad it provides many additional features, such as:
- Tabbed environment – especially useful for working with multiple files (for example, logs).
- Fully customizable editor – colors, fonts, etc.
- Lines numbering – it’s hard to find these days any respectable editor which does not support this feature.
- Word wrapping – can anybody write long scripts without it?
- List of recently open documents – ATPad stores this list accordingly to MAC address, so “Recent Files” on your laptop will look different from “Recent Files” on your desktop machine! But if you run the program from the removable drive and work with files on this drive, they will be always presented in a list, regardless of the MAC address of hosting computers.
- Keeping the last session – start the work exactly from the point you’ve finished (all said above about list of recent documents is true against last sessions as well).
- Bookmarks – never lose your way.
- Displaying whitespaces – tabs, spaces, line breaks.
- Reloading documents “on-demand” – instead of reopening them.
- Outer changes tracking – stay informed when any of the currently open documents have been changed out of the program.
- Reloading document in the specified interval – you can specify the interval for recurrent document reloading.
- Sending documents via email – it’s possible to send each document, even “Untitled”, via email as an attachment.
- Snippets system – create, edit, delete and insert into document your own text snippets.
- Unlimited find/replace and undo/redo
- Portability – ATPad does not require installation, it can be started from any drive (fixed or flash) and leaves no traces on the host computer after finishing.
ATPad is not purposed to compete with great names and great editors. Everyone has its own role and function.
NoteTab Light Free Text Editor
Did you know that NoteTab Light is one of the world’s most popular free Notepad replacements? In fact, it’s such a feature-rich text editor that it puts many commercial competitors to shame.
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. And so much more…
NoteTab Light shares many features with its commercial edition. But you’ll miss out on some great things like wildcard searching, the multilingual spell checker and thesaurus, the Print Preview option, customizable menu shortcuts, and the handy Clipbar feature (user-made toolbars).
GetDiz
GetDiz is an ultrafast free text editor with unique features. It can automatically resize the text window when loading files to accommodate the text width and remove leading/trailing spaces from selections when you copy them to Clipboard.
Additional features include an option to auto-copy selections, convert Unix files to the Windows text format, and highlight web links in text files so that they can be sent to the browser with a simple click. You can also install GetDiz on a USB stick for mobile usage.
FluentNotepad RC
FluentNotepad is a Free Windows Notepad with Office 2010 Fluent Ribbon UI. FluentNotepad features a powerful Text Editor and a Tabs Interface.
Atom
Cross-platform editing – Atom works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux.
Built-in package manager – Search for and install new packages or create your own right from Atom.
Smart autocompletion – Atom helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete.
File system browser – Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window.
Multiple panes – Split your Atom interface into multiple panes to compare and edit code across files.
Find and replace – Find, preview, and replace text as you type in a file or across all your projects.
Packages – Choose from thousands of free open-source packages that add new features and functionality to Atom, or build a package from scratch and publish it for everyone else to use.
Themes – Atom comes pre-installed with four UI and eight syntax themes in both dark and light colors. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Install themes created by the Atom community or create your own.
Customization – It’s easy to customize and style Atom. Tweak the look and feel of your UI with CSS/Less, and add major features with HTML and JavaScript.
Under the hood – Atom is a desktop application built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node.js integration. It runs on Electron, a framework for building cross-platform apps using web technologies.
TextMate
TextMate for macOS. Powerful and customizable free text editor with support for a huge list of programming languages and developed as open source. Requires macOS 10.12 or later.
BlueFish
Bluefish is a powerful free editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts, and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license.
Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, macOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD, and Solaris.
Caditor
Caditor is a portable, tabbed, and free text editor featuring encryption, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, line numbering and a functional plugin system.
This is a shortlist and we probably missed a few free text editors. What did we miss and which ones are your favorites? Let us know