FREE Text Editor (ConTEXT)

I've been looking for a decent freeware text editor for years. In fact, I've been using the now defunct PFE Editor for years. They stopped work on it in 1999 but until recently, I'd never found anything better. Even then, PFE Edit was still a poor replacement for QEdit which I had in the DOS days.

So, after a long time looking, I'v found something that satisfies my main difficult criteria.

The ConTEXT Editor

http://www.contexteditor.org/

There are lots of text editors which do all kinds of fancy things. It's easy to find a text editor that will do bracket matching or open multiple files. I decided on a few things that I needed in a text editor on top of the usual things...

• The ability to Sort lists
• The ability to record and play back macros
• Block Selection
• Case Conversion
• Search and Replace

ConTEXT does all of this, plus a few great features that I didn't know I needed, like being able to strip the trailing spaces off lines and being able to convert tabs to spaces. ConTEXT also has a cool little file browser on the left hand side and a long list of recently edited files.

At first, I wasn't happy with the fact that I could position my cursor anywhere as I often use this to work out whether I have trailing spaces or not. A quick glance through the preferences dialogs however showed me that I could easily turn this feature off - and a few other great features, like line-highlighting, on.

If you're still using Notepad or if your current text editor isn't up to scratch, ConTEXT is well worth a look.

As far as I can tell, ConTEXT is only available for Windows. I presume that there's an equivalent product for the Mac and Linux environments but I haven't yet found it.