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Top 5 Awesome Free Text Editors for Windows

Notepad and Wordpad that comes with default Windows OS is not good enough. It is very basic and lacks some serious functionality. However there are tons of free text editors available in the market, which has more functionality than some of the commercial text editors.

In this article, let us review the Top 5 Free Text Editors for Windows OS.

1. Notepad++

Notepad++ Best Text Editor for WindowsNotepad++ is an open source text editor that does excellent job — both as notepad replacement and as full blown source code editor. Following are some key highlights.

  • Multi-Tab and Multi-View
  • Drag and Drop support to open and move documents
  • Syntax highlighting for several languages
  • Auto completion of functions and code blocks
  • Bookmark a location within the document
  • Macro – Record and play repeated operations.
  • Search and replace using regular expressions
  • Lot more additional features using plugins

2. NoteTab Lite

NoteTab Lite Text Editor For Windows Operating SystemNoteTab lite is a good free text editor that offers all the standard features that you might expect in a text editor. Using NoteTab, you can create a paste board file which will save all your clipboard copy automatically. This helps in retrieving the clipboard copy other than the last one.

3. Notepad2

Notepad2 Light Weight Fast Text Editor for Windows OSIf you hate default windows Notepad, you’ll love this Notepad2. This has all the features you wish Microsoft had in their default notepad. It is very light-weight with just a single executable.

4. Editpad Lite

Editpad Text Editor for Windows OSThis is an excellent textpad editor, which would’ve easily taken our #2 spot. Since it is only for personal use and not for commercial purpose, this has come down to #4 spot. This has the tabbed interface and has multi-level undo facility.

5. Jedit

Open Source Free Text Editor for ProgrammersJedit offers a wide selection of features with it’s plugins. This is an awesome source code editor that has tabbed interface, syntax highlighting, diff, macro recording and everything a programmer would ever need. If I consider only the features, this would’ve easily taken the #1 spot. However, this is heavy-weight and it takes some time to startup.

Vote for your favorite editor

If you use any of the editor from our top 5 list, vote for your favorite editor. If your favorite editor is not in the list, choose other from this poll and leave a comment and let us know what is your favorite editor.

[poll id=”2″]

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Ajith Edassery October 2, 2009, 9:15 pm

    Used notepad++ in the past. Now a days, I am back to notepad and wordpad though both are bad. Should try the other options

  • Vikas.V January 26, 2010, 10:33 am

    Notepad++ is the best text editor for windows from the OSS world. The name should have been “Notepad+=100” !!! because it is 100 times better than plain old notepad. It also supports a million language syntax. Its the best.

  • Vikas.V January 26, 2010, 10:39 am

    Notepad++ also adds a shell extension of “open with Notepad++” during installation so that its possible to open any file without changing its properties. This is a good feature. Also, there’s an option of “viewing all characters” which displays Newlines and Carriage returns as NL and CR. This is useful to identify which OS created that file.

  • Dean-Ryan Stone March 28, 2012, 3:10 pm

    Notepad++ is great, but doesn’t do too well on very large textfiles for example. They load, but flipping between them takes a long time. I find that Editpad Lite loads files quick AND allows you to flip between and search them quick too.