Over the years, whenever I ran some version of Windows, I was always hunting down new and better text editors. I’ve purchased a couple of the premium versions, but in the long run, it’s hard to beat these two: Cream and Crimson Editor.
My primary use for a computer of any sort is writing, followed closely by reading and research. I’m old-fashioned enough to appreciate having at least a plain-text copy of everything I write. It’s the easiest format to preserve, and it’s the easiest to share. Of course, I’m conscious of the studies which show the human brain and eyes can best process text when it falls between 50 and 75 characters per line. Given the original standard on the Net was 72 characters per line for plain text, that’s what I use for storage and sharing.
Most editors for use in Windows will not do hard returns properly, if at all. A good text editor will allow hard returns where you want them, easy reformatting within that limit, plus a simple way to indent quotations and formatting within that, too. It helps to offer quick and easy case changes, and spell-checking is a must. On-the-fly spell-checking is even better. When I produce a text file for storage, I use Cream. It does far more than I’ll ever use, but it is just about the only text editor for Windows which does all the formatting correctly. It doesn’t hurt Cream also offers extravagant syntax highlighting like nothing else, so when I code my XHTML files, it’s almost a pleasure.
However, Cream is just a bit heavy for ordinary use, and isn’t suitable for those few compositions where I need soft returns initially. That’s where Crimson comes in. It pops open very quickly, and offers a tree-view file browser on the side. It’s perfect as the default text file opener in Windows. Most blog articles are best prepared with soft-wrap until after it’s posted. While not as fancy with syntax highlighting as Cream, it does well enough for the manual coding I always do on when blogging.
Best of all, these two are free.
