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  • XPad: Lightweight, No Install Text Editor

    XPad: Lightweight, No Install Text Editor

    XPad is a text editor with a compact interface and a good number of extra tools. The program can be run right after download with no need for an installation. The program’s menu surrounds its interface (see image).

    The left hand side icons or menu are the usual New, Open File, Save, Save As, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete (the selected text), Find, Search Again, Replace and About. Of course all the usual keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl+P, Ctrl+S, etc. – apply as well.

    The right hand side icons or menu is where the XPad extras can be found, they are as follows:

    • Word Wrap
    • Automatic Copy Selection To Keyboard
    • Multiple Clipboard, if activated or pressed it will hold a configurable number of clipboard items that are automatically pasted when they are highlighted or chosen from the generated list
    • Open system’s font selector
    • Text format, set any of Windows, Mac, UTF-16, Arabic Characters and many more for the text document
    • Filters for such tasks as removing spaces, converting HTML to text, converting tabs to spaces and more
    • Encode and decode Base64, UTF-8
    • Clean or remove clipboard content
    • Delete file securely
    • Open another instance of XPad
    • Open system calculator
    • Send current text as email, in my test the text was automatically copied to the email subject line with nothing in the body
    • Open (default) browser, if a URL is highlighted it will be loaded otherwise a blank browser window opens
    • Open an instance of Windows Explorer
    • Keep XPad on top, click the pin icon

      The final icon is for XPad’s configuration options. In it one can create a shortcut icon for the program, associate it with *.txt files (so all *.txt files open with XPad instead of Notepad or other system default text editor), remember last opened files and/or directory and the aforementioned multiple clipboard option. There is also a Window with a list of XPad’s hotkeys or shortcuts (see image).

      XPad is just over 1MB, it is only one single *.exe file (and one *.ini file to hold its settings) and should run on all Windows versions.

    • PlainEdit.NET Is A Complete Text Editor

      PlainEdit.NET Is A Complete Text Editor

      PlainEdit.NET is described by its author as

      PlainEdit.NET is a text editor for ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files


      PlainEditNET
      The list of features of PlainEdit.NET are impressive and it is a very complete text editor and notepad replacement. Its features include many of expected and common set like syntax highlighting for many languages and search and replace. But even those regular features are extended in that PlainEdit.NET suports find as you go style search ala Firefox – and only few other text editors. It has such additional features as the ability to choose text encased in HTML tags only. To bookmark a line to be able to return to it any time. To insert such things as the file path, date, special characters and the output of a command line argument. For the latter one can for example choose to output the dir (directory) command to get a list of files in a certain folder inserted into the document. PlainEdit.NET can also paste or input the current clipboard content in various positions in the open file. It can convert text to and from various formats including encoding and case conversion and even to join lines or to eliminate whitespaces and lines that match certain selectable criteria. Under the Extras menu the Configure Shortcuts submenu allows the user to edit or set keyboard shortcuts for such things as launching external applications.

      PlainEdit.NET is one of the most feature rich, even beyond those mentioned in this review, and impressive text editors I have reviewed and used, it works well with ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files and it requires the host system to be running the 2.0 .NET framework but it is a 526KB RARed portable download. The accompanying help file however is in German only while the product site itself is available both in German and English.