I seem to be on a “quest” to find the best text editor. Do you ever check your posts to see who links to them? Well, I do occasionally, and I found that someone had linked to my recent post about the list of software that I recommend for all Windows users. He agreed with all of them pretty much EXCEPT the text editor. He recommended his favorite, which was Jedit. I downloaded and played with Jedit, and it was OK… it had some things I really liked. But, being a Java application, it was a mite slow. Also, I had to download and install four plugins to get the features that I really wanted. However, in a forum discussing Jedit, I found a reference to this week’s Geek Software of the Week, and my new text editor… ta da! PSPad!

PSpad – Text and Programmer’s Editor

PSpad has all the features I was looking for and more! Check them out (…not the full list!)

– work with projects
– work on several documents at the same time (MDI)
– Save desktop session to later reopen all open files
– FTP client – you can edit files directly from the web
– macro recorder to record, save and load macros
– search and replace in files
– text difference with color-coded differences highlighted
– templates (HTML tags, scripts, code templates…)
– installation contains templates for HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl,…
– syntax highlighting auto set by file type
– user-defined highlighters for exotic environments
– auto correction
– intelligent internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla
– full HEX editor
– call external programs, different for each environment
– external compiler with catch command output, log window, log parser for each environment for “IDE” effect
– color syntax highlight printing and print preview
– integrated HTML TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
– integrated free version of top CSS editor TopStyle Lite
– export with highlight to RTF, HTML, TeX format into file or clipboard
– column block select, bookmarks, line numbers, …
– reformat and compress HTML code, tags char case change
– line sorting with ability to sort on defined column, with option to drop duplicates
– ASCII chart with HTML entities
– Code explorer for Pascal, INI, HTML, XML, PHP, and more in future
– spell checker
– internal web browser with APACHE support (this is VERY cool!)
– matching bracket highlighting

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