Programmer's Notepad

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 25, 2012 at 10:11 PM

Recently, in one of my “back to text” moments (I know many of you here share this regressive tendency, especially all you CT lovers!), I was looking for a competent Windows text editor that would list text files (including e.g. Markdown, HTML, OPML etc. files) in the form of a two-pane outliner, i.e. folders/text files on the left, main editing window on the right.

Now common wisdom has it that there aren’t many such editors in Windows. Actually, that’s b*ll*x. There are loads of them! And many of them are free. I’ve downloaded a bundle of goodies (including e.g. Zeus Lite and Komodo Lite) and gazed fondly upon a couple of rather good-looking commercial options (cross-platform Sublime, TextPad), but in the end I’ve opted for the very nice and simple - and free! - Programmer’s Notepad.

I was vaguely aware of this a few years ago, when I conducted a similar search for Windows text editors. It’s developed quite a lot since then, and has turned into a very nice, flexible text editor with a raft of options for programmers or HTML coders, but a pleasingly simple interface for mere authors (like moi) who wish to write or edit text qua text.

Best of all, you can set up “Projects” that automatically track certain folders (plus all subfolders and files therein; you can also set file filters such as e.g. *.txt, *.md, *.htm and so on). I immediately set up a ‘Project’ that is keeping track of my Dropbox folder (into and out of which I am constantly loading text files). It’s quick, efficient and best of all, has a file-spanning search function that runs pretty quickly, despite lack of indexing (took about 10 secs to search through a series of massive CSV files and pinpoint several contact names I’d “lost”).

This is a gorgeous adjunct to my various fave iOS (and Android) editors, which currently include e.g. Notesy, WriteRoom and Nebulous Notes (not to mention Notebooks, which supports raw text files as well as RTF/HTML), and means I can rapidly shunt files to and fro in any number of subdirectories. The latter feature also makes it vastly superior to ResophNotes, which I’ve tried hard to like but actually don’t (hate the inflexibility, to be honest).

It even supports folding (in coded text files), although I’m not sure how that works yet. But I’ll be checking it out…

Cheers,
Bill