code editors

We review TextPad, a general-purpose text editor that can handle large files.

TextPad is a simple text editor but it has an interesting peculiarity: it allows you to open very large files. That would be the feature that I would highlight in TextPad and that would summarize this analysis, although it has another series of very useful features, such as converting the character set of text files, which we will also discuss in this .com article.

TextPad is a plain text editor for the Windows system. We could compare it with Notepad, but it wouldn’t be fair, because it has an infinite number of additional possibilities that undoubtedly should be taken into account. However, the purpose of the program is exactly the same as Notepad, the creation and editing of text files.

TextPad would only need to be a free product to become the definitive text editor, but it is commercial software. However, you can download an evaluation version that doesn’t seem to have an expiration date and the price of buying a license is really low (about 20 euros), so it is well worth considering it as our preferred text editor.

We can find features of the program, although in English, as well as access its download from its website: http://www.textpad.com

TextPad Text Editor Features

Some characteristics that we consider fundamental to positively assess the program are the following:

Allows you to open very large files
If we ever need to open a text file that takes up a lot of space in Kb, we can try TextPad. This program allows opening files up to the size of the Windows virtual memory configured in our system. I discovered this program when I had to open a MySQL database backup file, which was about 800 MB. I couldn’t open it with Notepad or with other editors that I usually use to program web pages, so I had to do some research until I found TextPad, thanks to a friend’s recommendation. Indeed, with TextPad I was able to open the file and work with it.

Allows you to change the character set of the document
When saving a file, we can choose the character set we want to use, among several common possibilities such as ANSI, DOS, UTF8, Unicode… so changing the character set is fast, direct and without complications. In addition, it also allows you to select the file format between several systems: Windows, Linux and Mac.

Find and replace with regular expressions
It has a powerful tool to find and replace text, which also allows the creation of regular expression patterns.

Many other interesting features
To summarize the possibilities of TextPad, it is worth listing capabilities such as being able to open several files at the same time, multi-language capabilities and text correction with dictionaries also in different languages, hot start -which remembers the files that were open the last time the program was closed -, intelligent copy and paste tools, unlimited redo and undo, macros, a powerful file manager, etc.

Another interesting feature is text coloring, which can be useful, even if it only works for HTML-like markup syntax.

In short, TextPad can give us some other interesting utility that we can’t find in other plain text editors and that’s why we recommend it. At we have verified that it can get us out of trouble, because it allows us to open huge files and change their character set. That’s excellent, but we mustn’t forget that it’s still just that, a plain text editor, albeit a powerful one.