EditPad™ Is a Text Editor You Can Rely On

EditPad was originally released in 1996 and has been in continuous development ever since. It has grown to be one of the best performing and most feature-rich text editors for Windows. If you spend much time editing text files then make your life easier with EditPad. It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer working on a manuscript, a programmer editing source code in many languages, a webmaster updating thousands of web pages and scripts, or a systems administrator dealing with huge log files. EditPad can do it all and does it well. With full support for Windows 11, EditPad has stood the test of time and continues on strong.

EditPad is available in two editions. EditPad Lite is the basic package that offers all the functionality that most people expect from a text editor. EditPad Lite is free for personal use. If you’re using it for your job or business then you should purchase a license. Prices start at US$ 29.95 for a single user license. To sweeten the deal, the licensed build of EditPad Lite includes a few extra features from the Pro version.

EditPad Pro is the full package. It has everything you could want from a text editor. Prices start at US$ 59.95 for a single user license. It’s not cheap, but if you use a text editor day in day out then it’s worth treating yourself to a high quality tool.

Features Available in All Editions of EditPad

• Files are loaded in the background. You can instantly access and start editing both the top and the bottom of your file, no matter how large it is, and scroll down or up as the file is being processed.
• No hard limit on the maximum line length. Many editors force lines to wrap after a few thousand characters. EditPad performs well with lines that are tens of thousands of characters long.
• Syntax coloring for many popular file types. HTML, XML, CSS, Delphi, Java, C#, C++, VB, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Eiffel, SQL and many more are supported out of the box. User-contributed syntax coloring schemes support a variety of file formats.
• Many different color palettes for displaying your files. All palettes work with all syntax coloring schemes. You can select different palettes for different file types. EditPad comes with light and dark palettes, colorful palettes and monochrome palettes (gray, silver, green, or amber). Some palettes mimic other editors you may be using in combination with EditPad, such as the Visual Studio and Embarcadero IDEs. It even includes palettes for color-blind users and palettes with “solarized” and “harmonized” colors with uniform brightness levels and reduced contrast for people with sensitive eyes. All palettes can be fully customized and can be exported to share with others. The color picker adjusts itself to the palette you’re editing to ensure monochrome, solarized, and harmonized palettes stay that way.
• Light and dark themes for EditPad’s entire user interface. Switching between themes also switches the color palettes of all file types if they are part of a light and dark palette pair, which most built-in palettes are.
• Change the keyboard shortcuts of all menu items if you are used to different key combinations.
• Full documentation in multiple formats. If printed, the part describing EditPad is over 300 pages. The regular expressions tutorial adds another 200 pages. Not that we expect you to read all that. You can just dive in and start using EditPad right away. But if you ever need any help with anything, just press F1 to access context-sensitive help, and all will be explained.

Bonus Features when You Buy EditPad

The licensed builds of EditPad Lite and Pro have an integrated spell checker. You can easily check the spelling of a single file or even all files currently open. The spell checker works together with the syntax coloring. If, for example, you are spell checking a Java source code file, it will only check words in strings and comments as these are likely to contain natural language. Anything else is very unlikely to be natural language and therefore skipped. The dictionaries are separate downloads so they do not waste disk space if you do not intend to use them.

Licensed users can access the user forum for technical support and just to talk about EditPad with other users. The forum is built right into EditPad itself. Simply select Help|Forum in the menu and click the Login button. There’s no need for an account or a password. Your license identifies you as a legitimate user. The same is true for all other forum users. Unlike some web-based forums, EditPad’s forum is entirely free of spam or bad manners.

Licensed users can download the Syntax Coloring Scheme Editor to edit any syntax coloring scheme included with EditPad, or to create brand new ones. This allows you to add syntax coloring for new file formats or a variation of a file format with different syntax. You can share your scheme with other EditPad users or you can keep it private. The scheme editor is not needed if you just want to change the colors EditPad uses for your file. You can customize the color palette in the file type configuration in EditPad itself.

The free version of EditPad Lite can edit files up to 2 GB in size. The licensed version can edit files of any size, including files larger than 4 GB, as long as they fit into your computer’s available memory. To edit files that don’t fit in your computer’s memory you need EditPad Pro.

What EditPad Pro Offers on Top of EditPad Lite

• Edit files of any size, including files larger than 4 GB, and even files larger than the amount of RAM in your PC. You can configure how much RAM EditPad Pro is allowed to use per file and in total. Larger files are swapped out to disk. You only need to have enough free disk space for the parts of the files you’re actually modifying.
• File navigation for many popular file types. HTML, XML, CSS, Delphi, Java, C#, VB, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and many more are supported out of the box. User-contributed file navigation schemes support a variety of file formats. You create and edit file navigation schemes with the JGsoft File Navigation Scheme Editor.
• Hexadecimal editor and byte value editor. EditPad Pro is perfectly suited for editing binary files. You can quickly switch between text and hexadecimal mode without risking any data loss due to encoding issues.
• Edit files consisting of fixed length records by setting a record size in hexadecimal mode. This works great with text files too because you can switch the hex editor to ASCII-only mode with your preferred 8-bit encoding.
• Controlling external tools. You can add any external application to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu. You can make the tools listed in the menu depend on the type of file currently active (it makes no sense to run a Java compiler on a C++ file). You can have EditPad Pro send the active file as a command line parameter or through standard input. EditPad Pro can catch the standard output and error into their own tabs so you can see what your tool is doing and save the output for later use or edit it. You can also continue to work with EditPad Pro normally while the tool is running in the background, perhaps peeking at the output every now and then.
• More extensive search commands such as highlighting search matches, incremental search, and folding lines without search matches.
• Instant search and instant highlight let you search for the word under the cursor or the characters you selected without using the Search panel at all.
• Instant replace lets you replace all occurrences of the word under the cursor throughout the file or within a previously made multi-line selection simply by editing one occurrence of that word. You can even paste in the replacement.
• Search on disk to selectively open files based on their content. Or just display the matches in a side panel without opening the files.
• Block editing is easier with persistent selections, allowing you to move the cursor without losing your selection. You can toggle this as needed.
• Column editing is possible with rectangular selections. Any EditPad command that works on a selection can also work on a rectangular selection. A zero-column rectangular selection lets you insert or erase text on multiple lines at the same time.
• Loathed by ASCII purists but loved by fans of proper typography, EditPad Pro’s most controversial feature is its ability to automatically convert straight quotes into smart quotes. By default, it’s on for plain text files and for HTML files. It knows, based on the syntax coloring system, that quotes inside HTML tags must remain straight. This web page was written in EditPad Pro 8 with the automatic quote conversion enabled. All the quotes you see are nice and curved even though they were entered as straight quotes. All the quotes you don’t see (unless you look at the HTML source) are straight.
• EditPad warns you the first time it does anything automatically, such as converting quotes, and explains you how you can turn the feature off if you don’t like it.
• Less controversial automatic editing features are EditPad Pro’s ability to automatically convert keywords or tags to lowercase or uppercase for certain file types, and to automatically trim trailing whitespace while editing or when saving the file.
• One-off quote and case conversions can be done via the Convert menu, including converting smart quotes back to straight quotes and inverting case to fix Caps Lock accidents.
• Smart quotes don’t need to be the English high outward commas. EditPad Pro supports and can convert between all quotation characters available in Unicode and comes with many predefined quotation styles, including low and high commas, guillemets, angle brackets, and corner brackets.
• Highly requested (and new in EditPad Pro 8) is the ability to automatically insert matching brackets or tags, and to automatically insert line breaks around and adjust the indentation of curly braces (or whichever keywords or syntax a file type uses to delimit blocks). EditPad supports all indentation styles. You can select a different style for each file type. And “off” is always an option.
• Project functionality allows you to quickly open and save sets of related files, such as all the HTML files that are part of your web site, all the chapters of your next book, or the source code file of the application you’re developing.
• Open all files in a folder, or just files of a certain type, into a new or existing project. Optionally open files from its subfolders too.
• Files Panel makes it easy to work with hundreds or even thousands of files at the same time across any number of projects.
• Explorer Panel provides basic file management directly in EditPad Pro.
• Built-in FTP client for conveniently editing your web site via FTP, and for uploading and downloading files from any FTP server. EditPad Pro can connect to as many FTP servers as you want simultaneously, and even to the same server using different usernames, which makes it very easy to manage multiple web sites. All TLS encryption modes and even SFTP (file transfer using SSH) are supported, including keyboard-interactive authentication and private keys.
• Built-in difference tool for comparing two files. Very useful for making you see the differences between two revisions of the same document. Since the difference function creates a new file showing the differences and similarities, you can merge two versions of a document easily by deleting what you do not want.
• Record and play back keystroke macros to easily automate otherwise tedious and time-consuming editing tasks.
• Bookmarks: you can use them to mark a spot and then quickly jump from one spot to another in a file. When you save a project, bookmarks are saved into it.
• Built-in email functionality so you can quickly send out texts to others.
• Sort function for putting the selected lines or the entire file in alphabetic order. The sort takes notice of the current Windows locale setting and lines containing special characters will be sorted appropriately.
• Comment block function. You can use it to prepend one or more characters you specify to each paragraph in the selected block (which can be rectangular), which is most useful for commenting out pieces of code in a language that does not support multi-line comments.
• See statistics of the file or even all files you are editing, including file size, word count, paragraph count and character count.
• Keep logs easily. If the first 4 characters of a file are .LOG, the current time and date will be appended to the end of the file when it is opened or refreshed, just like Notepad’s .LOG function.
• Limit the length of each line in a file if the file will be used by software such as older email clients or newsreaders that cannot handle files with long lines.
• Automatically unwrap or rewrap the lines in files from software like older email clients or newsreaders that limit line lengths.