Best free simple text editors and Notepad replacements with advanced features


Case Transformer will be a great companion for any Notepad you may like to use, since it will let you change text case easily. It transforms on the fly any text to UPPER CASE, lower case, Title Case, Sentence case, of even iNVERTED cASE!

AutoTagger adds html tags to simple text, aiming at simplicity, providing the most common tags, bold, italic, underline, adding to them just a few more, to keep the list short: div, span, paragraph, header, href, img and blockquote. Whenever you need to tag your text, just select it and press AutoTagger’s keyboard shortcut. AutoTagger automatically places selected text inside tags!

Notepad PlusPlus is one of the most powerful and convenient simple text editors and MS Windows Notepad replacements you can find, although it misses some features I consider useful such as the placement in the default context menu a Change Case command that includes all possible scenarios. I also find disappointing its regular expressions search and find (UltraEdit was far better on that) and its one-direction-at-a-time find and replace, missing an Up-And-Down option. Its printing function is also strange, since the program won’t let you define a special font size letting you use only the size you have for display! Here is how you can overcome this problem and configure Notepad++ to use a smaller print font

RJ TextEd features syntax highlighting, code folding, auto completion, HTML validation, templates and more. The program also includes support for Topstyle Lite CSS editor, has a dual pane file commander, as well as an FTP client with synchronization, text clips, project manager… Tools available like syntax editor, color picker, charmap… I don’t like the Open dialogue, which is full of unnecessary (for me) options. I was also surprised that I had to define a shortcut key for such a common command as “close file”. It is nice that shortcut keys can be customized, but the most common should have a default configuration. The program’s interface is elegant and customizable. Definitely an editor you should consider if you need advanced features.

PSPad features work with projects, sessions, FTP to edit files directly from the web, macro recorder, and more.

TED Notepad looks like the default Windows Notepad, fits on USB flash disk and loads instantly with no installation required. It is designed especially for daily writing of notes, lists, scripts and html files. It features nine permanent clipboards, unlimited file size, search over multiple lines, easily define a search phrase containing newlines; Second search is also available, if you need to search for two things at the same time; Select to Next feature helps you to quickly select any text up to any next occurrence of the searched phrase; Choose from variety of text case conversions. Repair encoding of several locale characters; Add tags before every line; Close lines tool to finish every line, and more. As you can guess it is a program that offers some options which are not that usual. However, note that it can have only one document open at a time.

Text Editor Pro provides of course syntax highlighting (for more than 50 scripting languages and scripts) a lot of options to customize it, SQL formatter, and support for multiple directories and search results. It is a powerful text editing tool you can try if you need a convenient program to edit your files.

AkelPad is designed to be small and fast. It features Column text selection, auto-completion, scripts execution, keyboard macros, and more.

MyText Notepad features encryption, but otherwise is not that powerful, it resembles rather the default Windows Notepad.

Dark Room Notepad features a full screen distraction free. Dark Room works ONLY in full screen, as if you were in a dos session – dark background in full screen, text in color. This is not what I prefer, but others may find it convenient.

Notepad2 is light-weight Notepad-like, with syntax highlighting. If features basic regular expression search and replace ; Rectangular selection (Alt+Mouse) ; zoom functions, and more.