Get Inspired, Write It Down, Enjoy the Process!

The text editors' well seems one without an end, since each day new ones keep popping up. As usual, we have free ones and commercial ones, and today's the time to check out the free evaluation version of a commercial product.

My target is called EditPad Pro, it reached version 6.03 and comes as a feature limited evaluation version. The installation kit is 5MB in size and the setup program was built having maximum flexibility in mind. You have three installation modes available, the first one won't ask you any question, while the second and the third one are for the medium and advanced users, allowing them to choose the components to install and set some of the advanced options from the start.

Once the program has been properly set up, you'll be able to start it for the first time and enjoy its nice interface that has only a menu bar, a toolbar and the main editing area to start with, but can have a lot of other tools added to it as you explore EditPad.

Let's start with the beginning, and that should be creating or opening a file. Once you have created a new file, a tab with an untitled document is opened, and what I don't like is that in order to create another new file you have to save the first one you created, giving it a name. I think that having Untitled1, Untitled2 and so on documents would have been much easier.

When saving a document, you can choose from the large amount of available file formats, starting with the good old plain text TXT and jumping to CSS, SQL or RSS, while the last entry in the long file formats list belongs to binary files (EXE, DLL and BIN are all together here).

At first sight, I wondered why any sane person would pay 50 bucks for a text editor, and the answer came to me slowly, while digging deeper into this program.

The Pro features unavailable in this free evaluation version are the spell checker and the RegExBuddy, a module that enables you to use regular expressions with the search and replace tool in order to maximize speed and efficiency. Since I wasn't able to check them out, I'll move on to some of the other goodies that can be used without problems inside the version that I have here...

After opening a bunch of files at the same time I wasn't impressed at all, since there are a lot of free text editors with the capability to edit multiple files. Having PSPad Editor in mind, I was even wondering where's the tools panel that includes the file browser, FTP client and more. Fortunately, I found them all inside the View menu.

What we can get from EditPad Pro as additional tools to place inside the main interface starts with the Search Panel and continues with the File, Explorer and FTP panels, File History and Navigator, Clip Collection and even more. Your files can be viewed and edited using the Hexadecimal Editor's Byte Value Editor, a tool that brings hex editors' powers down to earth.

When talking about programs with hundreds of features like this you can't go away without missing some of them, in case you don't want to write a bible on that subject, and I will say that the user's manual that seemed big to me at first glance, having two hundred pages, doesn't look so big now, after browsing some of its pages carefully. Since I started talking about Help contents, you should find out that the tooltips which appear when hovering your mouse over most elements of the interface and the good Windows Help that came with this program are a good support team in your quest to reveal EditPad Pro's hidden treasures.

Before I go, there are still some features that I have to point out. Macros, for example, are a great way to speed up your work, and I wouldn't dare to launch a commercial text editor without this feature. With EditPad Pro, recording and playing macros is extremely easy, and I am sure you'll get it right in a flash (it was an amazement for me to record and play a macro in a matter of seconds, since I had for a long time the impression that macros are something that only maniac-power users can handle).

The rest of it, such as excellent conversion capabilities, project management, bookmarking system and many more are your quest now, I am sure you'll enjoy your ride. Evaluating commercial programs for free is like taking a new car for a test drive, so if you think you're licensed for this, go ahead and give EditPad Pro a spin!

The Good

EditPad Pro is a top product, combining ease of use with power and flexibility to enable its users to achieve best results. Features like the internal mail sender, advanced selections and others can add some weight to the application and justify its price, at least partially.

This is not a program that you have to learn just by the way it is, but instead, you can customize it the way you want and make it learn the way you are and how you work. This is the reason why I didn't mention anything about the settings available inside the application - there are too much to tell, so you'll have to taste it for yourself!

The Bad

No matter how advanced this program is, I wouldn't spend so much on it when there are a lot of freeware alternatives with almost the same features. Other than that, I don't have anything else to say about it, apart from the fact that auto completion, another great time saver, is not supported.

The Truth

The final words about EditPad Pro...what can I say? It wouldn't be fair to consider it a bad program just because of its price and the fact that I wouldn't buy it in a thousand years, since I really enjoyed checking it out, so I advise you to do the same. If you think it's worth your money, get it, I am sure you won't be disappointed!


Here are some snapshots of the application in action: