The best IDE alternative to Windows Notepad is Sublime Text, which is free. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to Windows Notepad and 15 are IDEs so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting IDE alternatives to Windows Notepad are Vim, Kate, Notepad3 and GNU Emacs.
Powerful editor blending code, markup, and prose editing with enhanced features like multi-tab selection, side-by-side definition viewing, and multiple selection tools for swift code navigation.
Vim ("Vi IMproved") is an advanced text editor that allows syntax highlighting, word completion and has a huge amount of contributed content. It also has a GUI version called GVim.
The Kate project develops two main products: KatePart, the advanced editor component which is used in numerous KDE applications requiring a text editing component, and Kate, a MDI text editor application.
Notepad3 is a fast and light-weight text editor with syntax highlighting for programming jobs. Auto-completion, Multi-language, Dark mode more.
It's the best alternative that I was looking for: more powerful, while being lightweight, simply to use and full with useful features.
I tried Notepads and several other alternatives, looking for simple, lightweight app that had more features than Notepad and was less cluttered than Notepad++, as I am just using it to edit .txt files, not programming, markup, HTML or otherwise. This fits fairly well. Thanks, developers.
GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. The features of GNU Emacs include:
TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.
Lightweight multi-platform code editor with hardware-accelerated GUI, customizable minimalist interface, syntax highlighting for 50+ languages, terminal and LSP support, plugin extensibility, unlimited editor splits, persistent project state, and portable, ad-free use.
SynWrite is a free source code editor and notepad replacement for Microsoft Windows Operating Systems.
TextPad is designed to provide the power and functionality to satisfy the most demanding text editing requirements. It can edit files up to the limits of virtual memory, and it will work with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, Server 2003 and 2008.
A powerful, feature packed, fully configurable IDE specifically designed for Windows developers.
Notepad-like VB.Net multi-tab source code editor for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 that supports ASM, ASP.Net, Boo, C#, C++, CSS, HTML, INI, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, VB.Net, XML and plain text files.
TEA is free text editor for Linux, *BSD, OS/2, Windows, Haicu. It depends on Qt 4.6+ or Qt 5 or Qt6, zlib and, optionally, on Aspell or Hunspell. The old (but renewed) branch, TEA-GTK depends on GTK+ 3 and GtkSourceView 3.
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Lightweight, easy to use, and offers syntax highlighting.