EditPlus

I compose a great deal of text for websites, my blog, and my ezine in a plain text editor. Using Microsoft Word for these tasks inserts too many hidden characters, so I have been using Notepad, which is built into the Windows system. Notepad hasn’t been serving me well lately, primarily because it doesn’t have spell-check capabilities. I am a great speller, but once I’ve looked at copy too long, I can no longer see my own mistakes.

Then, from a colleague on Twitter, I learned about EditPlus. EditPlus is a text editor, HTML editor and programmer’s editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good Notepad replacement, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers. Some of its more advanced features include:

• Syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript and VBScript. Also, it can be extended for other programming languages based on custom syntax files.
  Seamless Web browser for previewing HTML pages, and FTP commands for uploading local files to FTP server.
• An HTML toolbar, user tools, line number, ruler, URL highlighting, auto-completion, cliptext, column selection, powerful search and replace, multiple undo/redo, spell checker, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more.

I’ll probably never use the majority of the features offered, but because I can have multiple files open at once (without having to save each of them before opening another), can spellcheck my doc, can do a search and replace of text if I need it, and can use the word-wrap feature, it works for me.

You can download a 30-day trial copy here.