Beyond Notepad: powering up plain text editors
Posted 18 October 2007 at 8:28AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support
Plain text editors are the Cinderella of computing applications... which, presumably, makes Word the ugly big sister. But I digress. If you ever have to get your hands dirty with code - and I suspect that's a good number of us, you'll be spending a good portion of your coding time looking at a plain text editor. If you don't know what I mean, think of it as Word without all the processing.
The entry level, included with every Microsoft Windows build but increasingly difficult to locate, is Notepad. It really doesn't get more plain: you can change the font, you can do a crude find-and-replace, and that's about it. Yes, it's a back-to-basics program by definition. But there are countless free Notepad replacements which add valuable extra functionality to the mundane tasks of plain text editing.
I tend to do my writing using a plain text editor: it removes the temptation of playing around with fonts and formatting. Currently I'm using something called TED Notepad, which manages to squeeze a startling number of features into a tiny file. For me, the best feature is the ability to call up a box of text statistics - word count, etc - with a single keystroke... but that's only scratching the surface of what it can do.
One feature still missing from TED Notepad, though, is what's known as syntax highlighting - and if you're any kind of a coder, you'll know why this is a must-have. When you open a code file - let's say an HTML page - the editor recognises the kind of code you've used, and automatically adds formatting to the various commands and punctuation. Suddenly that mass of text characters is much easier to digest.
Recently I've tended to use Notepad++ for code editing. It's excellent on syntax highlighting, plus it has a tabbed interface, allowing you to edit multiple files at once. Notepad2 is based on the same underlying code; it's much smaller, and lacks the tabs - but I like the look of its latest version, and may try it as my primary tool for a while.
But the one I couldn't live without is NoteTab Light, a tool I've been using for nigh-on a decade. The free version lacks syntax highlighting, and I no longer have the need for its (still impressive) 'clipbooks', which I guess you could describe as interactive macros. But where it truly excels is in 'find and replace' - with support for regular expressions, as well as simpler tokens like '^t' for a tab. Once you're familiar with these, you can do some amazing things with lumps of text: my personal favourite is turning them into tab-separated spreadsheets, and manipulating the newly created columns to get the information exactly how you want it.
Tags: notepad, notepad++, notepad2, notetab, plain text, ted notepad, text editors
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Comments
2. At October 18, 2007 2:17 PM, Bruce Taylor wrote:
You're missing the best text editor of the lot, TextPad (www.textpad.com). It's tabbed, has syntax highlighting and supports extensions. It can also cope with Windows/Unix files and binary files. We've used it for around 8 years now.
3. At October 19, 2007 8:22 AM, Dean Wood wrote:
Not free but I still love EditPlus (www.EditPlus.com) after years of use and trying other editors.
4. At October 19, 2007 9:03 AM, anjanesh wrote:
My favourite is notepad++.Brilliant user friendly and allows multiple instances of same script file.
easy to edit and has a very low RAM footprint.
love its tabbed interface plus ablity to run the script esp html / javascript on selected browsers.in response to Pam: there is NO way that i am going to chuck the humble notepad . Indespensible for editing formatted html and javascripts without nosy editors auto correcting the text or distracting me with unecessary formatting colors / works with other editors.
it is also very useful for stripping text of ALL formatting .best of all it only takes neglible memory.
5. At October 19, 2007 10:40 AM, William Baskerville wrote:
In relation to the comment from Pam, I still use notepad to date for coding websites if need be. I guess it is just years of habit, as I find other tool's / web design suites out there too bulky and memory hungry.
Having 4gb RAM and two 500gb harddisk drives, it is not that I don't have the space / memory to use other applications like the ones in this blog, I guess it is just habit.
I can see the benefits of having various sections colour coded or tabbed, but there comes a point when there is too much clutter. If a website is well coded, then it is easy to use notepad. If it is not, then you can easily re-model it in notepad, and not get lost!
6. At October 20, 2007 5:45 PM, Tanvir Ahmad wrote:
I would recommend using Programmers Notepad. Great tool and has a set of predefined text clips for ASP.Net, C, DocBook, HTML/XHTML, and PHP.
7. At October 22, 2007 10:31 AM, David Crowther wrote:
I replaced Notepad completely with Notepad2 which is great for any plain text formatting or quick HTML edits. For more heavy coding I use Notepad++.
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1. At October 18, 2007 12:51 PM, Pam wrote: