I admit it, I love tabs. I think they’re a natural extension to the MDI interface. Of course, most of the time they’re not used as an extension of MDI, but rather as a totally different way to do MDI. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Notepad doesn’t cut it for me.
Here’s what I require from a text editor:
· Multiple Document support (tabs!)
· Small (I don’t need a development IDE – I already have one of those)
· Simple and consistent keyboard interface. I want Ctrl+F to be “Find”, Ctrl+H to be “Replace” and F3 to be “Find Next”, just like Notepad.
· Fast. I don’t want to sacrifice speed for these new features.
In short, I want Notepad with tabs! Regular expressions would be nice, but I won’t die if I don’t have ‘em.
I’ve tried the following (actually several more, but the others were quickly rejected):
· EditPad Pro from JGSoft. It’s pretty nice, and very full featured. Search and Replace is a little odd, though, and while I can re-map the keys, it doesn’t appear that I can re-map F3 to be “Find Next”. I have to hit my “Find” key again. It’s also not free. It doesn’t cost very much, and there is a freeware version (and I already bought the license anyway), but free would be a nicety.
· PSPad. It’s very nice, and find/replace work exactly like I’d expect. I can’t remember if the keyboard mappings out of the box were what I wanted or not, but if they weren’t, I could remap them. However, it does much more than I want. It has these “projects” you deal with and extra toolbars/status bars all over the place. Took me a while to figure out how to turn off everything that I didn’t need.
· Notepad++. This is what I’m currently using and seems to be the closest to what I’ve asked for. It seems a tad slow on startup, but nothing I can’t live with. I had some troubles with my “New” shortcut, but I fixed that and am happy now. (The shortcut for “Text Document” disappeared from my Windows Explorer popup New submenu).
Should I stick with Notepad++, or is there something else that might work better?