The 4 Best Free Text Editors

Notepad++

Notepad++ is an excellent alternative notepad application for Windows computers. It’s really easy to use for beginners who just need a text file opener or editor, but it also includes some really advanced features.

This program uses tabbed browsing, which means several documents remain open at a time, and they'll display at the top as tabs. While each tab represents its own file, the program can interact with all of them at once to do things like compare files for differences and search for or replace text.

Probably the easiest way to edit files with this tool is to right-click the file and choose Edit with Notepad++ from the context menu. I use this program for all my editing needs, and opening files this way definitely saves me time.

It can open nearly any file as a text document and supports lots of helpful plugins. It also includes a really handy text search-and-replace function, automatic syntax highlighting, word auto-completion, offline text-file conversion.

The Find option searches for words with criteria like backward direction, match whole word only, match case, and wrap around. You only get a couple of those in the Windows Notepad app.

I also found these features that are worth a mention: bookmarking, macros, auto-backup, multi-page searching, resumed sessions, read-only mode, encoding conversions, searching for words on Wikipedia, and opening the document in your web browser.

Notepad++ accepts plugins to do things like auto-save open documents, merge all the text from open documents into one main file, align programming code, monitor open documents to refresh them as they change, copy and paste more than one item from the clipboard at once, and lots more.

It saves text documents to a huge variety of formats like TXT, CSS, ASM, AU3, BASH, BAT, HPP, CC, DIFF, HTML, REG, HEX, JAVA, SQL, and VBS.

Windows is the only supported OS, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. You can also grab a portable version from the download page; one is in the ZIP format and the other is a 7Z file.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is used primarily as a source code editor. It's extremely minimal and even has a "Zen Mode" option that immediately hides all the menus and windows, and maximizes the program to fill the whole screen.

The tabbed browsing interface seen with other text editors is supported here as well, which makes it really easy to work with multiple documents at once.

You can also open entire folders of files at once if you're working on a project, and even save the project for easy retrieval later.

However, this text editor probably isn't ideal unless you plan to use it for programming purposes. There are entire sections dedicated to debugging code, viewing command outputs, managing source control providers, and even using a built-in Command Prompt.

Here are some useful features I found while using this program: open whole folders at once from the right-click context menu, "Change All Occurrences" option makes it easy to select and edit text you want to change throughout the entire document in one sweep, "Rename Refactoring" changes the name of a symbol in every instance of it across all the documents in your project, opening recently closed documents is easy since they're listed in the same place, "IntelliSense" helps to automatically fill in code based on surrounding text and the location of the cursor in the document, files can be auto-saved if you turn the option on, and documents can quickly be reverted to the state they were in when you last saved them.

Visual Studio Code runs on Windows 11, 10, and 8; macOS 10.11 and newer; and Linux computers.

Brackets

Brackets is primarily meant for web designers, but can of course be used by anyone to view or edit a text document.

The interface is clean and modern and feels really easy to use despite all of its advanced settings. In fact, nearly all the options are hidden away from plain site so that it's easy for anyone to use, which also provides an extremely open UI for editing.

Here are some things I think all you code writers might like about Brackets: highlights syntax, can split the screen to edit more than one document simultaneously, lets you click one button for a really simple distraction-free interface, and supports lots of keyboard shortcuts so that you can quickly indent, duplicate, move between lines, toggle line and block comments, show or hide code hints, and more.

You can quickly change the file type you're working with to instantly change syntax highlighting rules, as well as change the encoding of the file if you need to.

If you're editing a CSS or HTML file, you can enable the Live Preview option to watch the page update in real time in your web browser as you make changes to the file.

The Working Files area is where you can open all the files that belong to a single project, and quickly move between them without leaving the program.

Some examples of plugins you can use include one to support W3C validation, Ungit to make it easier to use Git, an HTML tag menu, and Python tools.

The program comes installed with both a dark and a light theme that you can change at any time, but there are dozens of others that you can install through the Extensions Manager.

It's available for Windows and macOS. It's also available from a web browser through the Phoenix tool.