I browsed through the screenshots and feature list for each one, and then chose two trial versions for a quick spin. I won't even pretend that I lived with these applications long enough to have an informed opinion about which one is 'best'. I did quite a bit of searching for commercial text editor recommendations from other developers, which turned up the following: I felt guilty emailing Florian with questions since he was already providing such an excellent bit of software completely gratis- so this time, I figured I'd bite the bullet and purchase something with a more formal support relationship. Although I've been relatively happy with Notepad2, I work with files this size fairly often, so I had no choice but to search for Yet Another Notepad Replacement. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a basic text editing app to have decent performance on largish text files in the 5mb - 100mb range. Now, to be fair, this isn't Florian's fault- these are limitations of the Scintilla engine he uses to drive his (free!) app. Or the way Notepad2 would go into minute-long convulsions if I tried to search that same file. The biggest problem was performance slowing to a crawl on my Athlon 3200+ when I opened a text file larger than a few megabytes. Unfortunately, after six months of living with Notepad2, some glaring deficiencies began to nag at me. What good is Notepad doing anyone these days? Why even keep it around when there are so many other worthy replacements available with marginally larger memory footprints? And when I say replacement, I mean replacement:Ĭopy notepad2.exe c:windowsservicepackfilesi386notepad.exeĬopy notepad2.exe c:windowssystem32dllcachenotepad.exeĬopy notepad2.exe c:windowssystem32notepad.exe

In revenge of Notepad, I recommended Florian Balmer's truly excellent freeware Notepad replacement, Notepad2.

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