Textpad

Latest in our Saturday Software Review series

Windows comes with the very rudimentary: Notepad, and slightly better: Wordpad, but both pale in comparison to Textpad. Don´t underestimate the value of a really great text editor on your system. As text editors go - this one is hard to beat.

Platform: Windows
Cost: Shareware
Summary: powerful, general purpose editor for plain text files. Easy to use, with all the features a power user requires.



Having textpad at my disposal has become so second nature to my daily routing of working on various forms of files that I am somewhat lost when I get to a new computer and can´t just right click I file to get into it with Textpad. This is, by far, the best text editor for windows.

Why do you need a text editor? For the average user, it may be as simple as removing all the junk formatting from a word document you plan on posting to a web site, or just to make a really quick list to print out when you don´t want to load up some office suite and get total overkill just to type in a few words. For the seasoned power user the reasons abound. I have found uses for Textpad including:

• Editing code
• Tweaking Binary files like PDFs
• Inspecting files with incorrect file extensions to see what they really are.
• Clearing special characters
• Comparing files
• Converting from Dos to Unix line terminations
• Getting word, character, and line counts

The list goes on and on.

In short Windows need a better text editor regardless of your user style and Textpad is it.

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