Free text editors

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Why you need free text editors, when you have notepad provided by Windows of all versions? The answer is simple: notepad is too dumb for any editing needs, except simple tasks such as copy and paste, find and replace. If you mistakenly drag a huge file into Notepad, you will have to kill it before you get too frustrated to see anything happens.
But there is rush to buy great great commercial editors. There are quite a number of excellent free text editors. Here are what I have found so far.

• Notepad++ (download) in Portable Applications is a great portable text editor, which also has a lot of nice features for programmers, making source code writing comfortable.
  
• Sakura (download) a great editor but all in Japanese. Works on MS Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista. Japanese site is here. Not only the normal features such as macro recording and playing, block copy and paste are supported, features such as bracket matching, grep etc. are also also supported. What's neat is that it has nothing but a single executable file. No hassle of installation at all. For gurus, the source code is also available.
• Note Tab Light 5.6.1 is a free version of Note Tab text and HTML editor. Not portable but quite powerful with many libraries and utility tools including file comparison, although the user interface of the later is not really intuitive.
  
• crimson only has its last update in 2004, but can basically perform the most common tricks, including record and play. However, it is not portable, will contaminate your environment.
• Metapad has the fun feature of installing to overwrite the infamous Notepad of Windows.
• TeraPad (download) is another Japan made portable editor, light and supports bracket matching & block copy and paste.
  

I hope this link list help as many people as it can, because when you look for "free text editor" by search engine, you may encounter candidates that are not free at all. Those sites trick search engine with the keywords "free download". I have wasted a lot of time because of them