I have been using Notepad++ for quite a long time. It’s my default text application and I have never looked at another one - I didn’t have to, because Notepad++ does everything for me. Even the text editor I’m about to review here today isn’t going to make me replace Notepad++. So why am I writing this? Because it does have some interesting features that you might like to know. It never harms to try new alternatives every once in a while.
Well, NoteTab Light is a free text editor for Windows but with a rather horribly cluttered interface. But don’t let the interface bother you for now because soon you will discover it’s outstanding features hidden under those awful toolbar buttons.
The most useful feature in NoteTab is the enormous library of commands or macros that this application has. These commands, called Clips, are displayed in a column on the left and they do anything from inserting bits of text to executing commands and generating scripts. The clips are organized into libraries. The FTP library, for example, lets you create server profiles, connect, upload and download files, and issue various commands. The HTML library auto-completes HTML tags. A selection of clips is made available in the software and additional clips can be downloaded from the site’s resource page. You can also create your own clips.
The pasteboard is another unusual feature. The user chooses a document to "use as pasteboard". Thereafter, any text copied to the Windows clipboard is automatically appended to the pasteboard document. The resulting combined text can then be used as any other text, and searched to reuse clippings from days or weeks ago.
NoteTab supports outline-type documents that provide hyperlinked headings within a text document, which can be accessed directly by clicking in a side pane. The outline documents can be read in any editor.
The search and replace features of NoteTab are much more powerful than most text editors, and include regular expressions and a hierarchical search/replace of text in folders on a disk drive.
There is but two limitation of NoteTab: it doesn’t support Unicode documents and it has no syntax highlighting making it difficult to read codes.
NoteTab is available in three versions: Pro, Standard and Light of which the latter is a freeware.
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