Windows Notepad is about as anemic as a text editor as you’ll find, lacking even the most rudimentary features. If you’re looking for a more powerful text editor, but don’t want to pay, you’ll want to download NoteTab Light, an excellent text editor with a variety of features left out of Notepad.
To start off, you can create and edit multiple files, and that by itself makes this free program worth downloading. Each file gets its own tab, so it’s easy to switch among them.
This program, though, offers much more than just that. If you need to do light HTML editing, for example for blog writing or creating simple Web pages, you’ll welcome NoteTab Light’s HTML editing tools, including some very nifty features such as automatically converting text files to HTML files. If you’re even more of a techie, and need to work with Perl or Gawk, it works with them as well.
Given that NoteTab Light is free, anyone who has ever been unhappy with Notepad–which means a lot of people–should give it a try. You’ll probably never go back to Notepad again.
Note that there are two for-pay versions of NoteTab available, NoteTab Standard and NoteTab Pro. They offer features that NoteTab Light doesn’t, such as a spell checker and thesaurus, customizable menu shortcuts, and HTML syntax highlighting.
–Preston Gralla