What are the best simple text editors for Windows?

Question

30 Recommended Products	Recommendations	Platforms	License	Collaborative editing
#1 Notepad++· · ·	21 \| 2	Windows	GPL	plug-in
#2 Sublime Text· · ·	8 \| 0	Windows; macOS; Linux	Proprietary	No
#3 Atom· · ·	6 \| 0	Windows, Mac, Linux	MIT	Plug-in
#4 Vim· · ·	2 \| 0	Windows; macOS; *nix; iOS; Android	–	–
#5 Visual Studio Code· · ·	2 \| 0	Windows; macOS; Linux	MIT	–
#6 SciTE· · ·	0 \| 0	Windows; OSX; *nix	HPND	–

Comments

Welcome to the Slant Community

Stop spending hours researching

Slant is written by a community helping you be informed. Let us know what you’re passionate about to get an awesome personalized feed.

score 21 · Answer 1

Notepad++

Free and open source text editor which works as an alternative to Notepad. Extremely light and minimal it is also powerful and extensive, Runs on Windows only under the GPL Licen...

Pro
Light and fast

Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. Making for a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second the open it.

Pro
Portable

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on.

Pro
Handles massive files

Always opens a file gracefully regardless of size, e.g. 10s of MBs . Great for browsing logs, dumps etc.

Con
Dated UI

Very old fashioned user interface. With a modern GUI, Notepad++ could be way more popular.

Con
Annoying update notifications upon start

Update notifications tend to pop up and annoy upon start after having not used the app or machine for a few days. They are at least easily turned off.

See 4 more Pros See 7 more Pros & Cons

score 8 · Answer 2

Sublime Text

Add Description

Pro
Fast and responsive

Starts almost immediately. Doesn't feel bloated even though it has a lot of functionality. Package control is not installed but is essential for customization and adding key features (sidebar enhancements).

Pro
Clean UI

Add details

Con
Updates are not so frequent

Even though SublimeText is not buggy updates are not very frequent.

Comments

1

See 3 more Pros See 4 more Pros

score 6 · Answer 3

Atom

Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor developed by GitHub community. It supports macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.

Pro
Extendable

Due to its modular design, almost any aspect of the editor can be changed. Even seemingly core packages, like those taking care of search and replace functionality, can be forked on GitHub, and changed and replaced in the editor. The documentation for creating new plugins is also great, making it...

Pro
Beginner friendly

One of the goals of Atom is to be a text editor for both experienced and beginner programmers. You can add keyboard shortcuts, change themes, install plugins, and change core settings by clicking through a GUI, or by manually editing config files the old-fashioned way. It has the added advantage of

Con
Resource-hungry

Atom takes long to start up.

Con
Has difficulty with large text files

Tends to crash or hang with large >(10MB) text files, making it less useful as a general text editor.

See 6 more Pros & Cons See 8 more Pros & Cons

score 2 · Answer 4

Vim

Vim is a powerful, portable, keyboard based text editor. Being text-based, vim is lightning fast, with an incredible set of features developed over its multi decade existence.

Pro
Works in terminal over SSH

Unlike other editors such as Sublime Text, Vim is a command line editor and hence can be used in remote development environments like Chromebooks via SSH.

Pro
Extremely portable

Vi/vim exists on almost all Unix-like platforms. It's the de-facto Unix editor and is easily installed on Windows. All you need to make it work is a text-based connection, so it works well for remote machines with slow connections, or when you're too lazy to set up a VNC/Remote Desktop con...

Con
Lacks many modern programming features out of the box

Syntax checking, autocompletion, file management, plugin/update management, etc., all require plugins and extensive configuration to get working. Further to this, you'll probably have to compile native binaries yourself and ensure your system has the proper development libs to do so.

Con
Poor support for external tooling

Many plugins depend on optional Python and Lua features, which may or may not be included in whatever binaries are available for your system. And without platform-specific hacks, it is difficult for plugins to operate in the background or use external tooling.

See 1 more Pro See 3 more Pros & Cons