TotalEdit Professional is an interesting and very capable Notepad replacement. But it used to cost $29.99, a major issue when competing editors such as Notepad++ cost nothing at all. It seems that the developers have also realized this is a problem, though. And as they’re looking to Android and iPhone products as a means to generate revenue, TotalEdit Professional is now available for free. (It still installs as a trial version, but just register with the license code 2D5B073C-93D0-6D40-8970-B041-C2C and it’ll be activated right away).
Getting started is easy. Support for Unicode files and various line endings and document encodings should mean you can open most documents, and of course they’re accessible via a very configurable tabbed interface (the tabs can be aligned to the left, right, top or bottom, even hidden altogether).
The editor isn’t the most feature-packed I have seen, but it’s solid enough. You’re able to toggle case, trim leading or trailing spaces, drag and drop selected text from one area to another, search for text using regular expressions, or across multiple files. Of course there’s a spell checker, too.
Software developers will appreciate tools like syntax highlighting, code folding, line numbering/ sorting, bolding of matching and non-matching braces, the configurable “HTML, XHTML and XML tidy” formatting, and more.
TotalEdit Professional gets more interesting as you explore its higher level tools, though. Like the File Comparison option which can visually highlight the differences between two documents; different files, say, or the current file and its last saved version. Or the built-in Hex Editor which means you can view and tweak binary files, too.