Overview

If you’re looking for alternatives to Notepad, then EmEditor Professional is certainly one of the programs you have to check out. It is lightweight, but don’t let that fool you; it can open huge files at ease, simply by cutting them in pieces and opening one piece at a time - saving time and memory consumption. It also has macros support for Javascript, VBScript, PerlScript, PHPScript and others, syntax highlighting for various languages (HTML, PHP, etc.) and can also encode text in either ASCII or Hexadecimal view.

Installation

When you run the installer you’ll have to choose installation language first, and then follow a series of simple steps. In one of the steps you’ll be asked to select installation type; the available choices are Typical, Custom and Complete. The first option will install only the main program features, whilst the Full installation will install all program features. If you want to choose manually which features you want to install, pick Custom and continue to the next screen, where you can see the available additional components: Translations, Plug-ins, Dictionaries, Shortcuts and Associations.

The setup package is clean from malware and is supported by all versions of Windows. It recently added support for Windows 8 as well.

Interface

Upon first-time launch you’ll be prompted to configure update settings. Then you can view the main window of the program, which has most of its functions available in the toolbar. An explorer tree-style sidebar is located on the left of the window and the contents of open files are displayed in the rest of the screen. Multiple files open in tabs, therefore you can have as many files open at once as you wish.

Pros

One of the most important capabilities EmEditor has is that it can open files with sizes of hundreds of gigabytes without overloading the RAM and eventually crashing your system. This is due to a technique which splits the file into several smaller pieces and reads one at a time. This is both efficient and fast, since practically you can only read one part of the file at a time- the rest is useless until needed.

Syntax highlight is supported for quite a lot of languages, including C++, CSS+, EmEditor Syntax, HTML, Ini, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, VBScript and others.

Many plugins are included in the setup package as well: HTMLBar, OpenDocuments, Search, Projects, WordComplete, WordCount and others. You can either uninstalled the currently enabled ones or add new ones.

Another unique and useful feature is the program’s ability to record and play keystrokes and mouse movements, even against other applications.

When hovering your mouse over HTML/XML references, a tooltip appears and displays the Unicode characters.

Cons

No bugs or lack of features, so no cons here.

Alternatives

Other powerful text editors are Notepad++ (free), Vim (free), Sublime Text (free), PSPad (free) and UltraEdit (paid).

Conclusion

EmEditor is one of the fastest and most complete text editors available, so searching for a better one would be a waste of time and energy. Grab it without any hesitations.