EmEditor Professional Review - Intricate Text Editor for Seasoned Users

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Comprehensive text editor
  • (14 more, see all...)

Designed as a lightweight text editor for Windows users, the professional edition of EmEditor integrates a wide range of practical word processing options for casual and experienced users, thus extending the functionality common text editors, like Windows Notepad.

It offers support for multiple tabs, tab groups, macros, Unicode characters, very large files, advanced search and replace functions, document comparison options, macros, plugins, and more. It also reserves features for programmers and web designers, such as syntax highlighting and snippets for coding languages.

License type, installation, interface

The trial edition can be tested for 30 days without any feature restrictions. Once this period expires, you can either remove the app or purchase the full pro edition for $39.99 / €35.07 (lifetime license, excluding VAT). However, you can take advantage of a $20 / €17.68 discount by purchasing EmEditor Professional via Softpedia.

The installation procedure doesn't take long. It can be customized by excluding any components from the package when it comes to languages, plugins and dictionaries, along with program shortcuts and associations for .eeWorkspace, .jsee, .txt and .vbee file extensions.

Typical interface, multiple tabs, and extensive file type support

The interface is familiar and has a neatly organized structure, giving you the possibility to open multiple tabs to be able to seamlessly juggle multiple opened documents. Tabs can be customized in many ways, such as style, icons, insert position, action on close, and width. Plus, they can be organized into various groups, arranged by name, type, modified date or active status, as well as disabled.

EmEditor Professional: The interface is familiar
EmEditor Professional: The interface is familiar

EmEditor is quite generous when it comes to supported file types. Apart from common files like TXT, HTML, BAT, INI, INF and LOG, it lets you open scripts written in C#, C++, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, TeX and x86 Assembler, to name but a few. As previously mentioned, syntax highlights are supported.

Explore a wide range of text editing options

It's possible to manage Clipboard history, copy text in quotes, make vertical selections, toggle sticky vertical mode, select the beginning or ending of lines, open links in the default browser, jump to a particular line and column, or switch to reading mode.

Furthermore, you can insert or remove new lines at wrap points, split or join lines, convert them to uppercase or lowercase, capitalize text selections, convert equivalent spaces to tabs, increase or decrease the indent, add or remove comments, as well as encode and decode text, such as HTML/XML character reference to Unicode, Unicode to universal character names, or percent-encoding to Unicode (UTF-8).

What's more, you can insert special characters or numbering at the cursor's position (hexadecimal, decimal, octal, binary or character), perform half-width or full-width conversions, remove duplicate lines, move the cursor to the last edited position, jump to tags, find matching tags, organize documents into different groups, create and manage bookmarks for the current document or group, enable a spellchecker, as well as sort CSV text (e.g. adjust separator positions, automatically add separators, sort smallest to largest).

Run advanced search-and-replace operations

You can locate a selected text or word at cursor, only selected text or only word at cursor, the last used value, or a fixed value. The utility lets you enter multiple lines of text, enable case or whole word matching, use regular expressions, perform incremental searches, restrict the scan scope to only the current selection, or count matches. Aside from typical keyword replacements, you can replace multiple text entries within the same document in batch mode.

Find-and-replace tasks can be executed across multiple documents in a given directory, and EmEditor enables you to filter files by type, include or exclude subfolders, select the encoding mode, detect UTF-8 or HTML/XML charsets, and fiddle with output options (e.g. display file names and lines, show matched strings only).

Rich options for file viewing and comparison

By default, the application displays each line without wrapping. However, you can wrap them by characters, the window size or page width. Line numbers, a ruler, indent and the character code value can be shown on the document, together with various types of marks, such as returns, end of file, tabs, spaces, wide spaces, CR and LF, control characters, and indent guides.

EmEditor Professional: Compare two files and configure options
EmEditor Professional: Compare two files and configure options

Plenty of comparison settings are put at your disposal. For instance, you can compare the two most recently viewed documents by placing them side by side, tweak the quality from rough to precise, as well as ask the program to ignore leading, trailing and embedded spaces, cases, returns, comments, and encodings.

In addition to this, EmEditor is able to synchronize vertical and horizontal scrolling along with the cursor positions. The two windows with the two documents fit the screen horizontally or vertically, and they are reset to their previous positions after exiting compare mode. Moreover, you can bookmark all different lines between the two files to track them down easier.

Record macros, load plugins, and set shortcuts to other programs

Macros with user actions can be recorded for repetitive tasks using JavaScript or VBScript, as well as saved to file. All mouse movements, together with mouse and keyboard input to other applications may be included in the recordings, and you can also specify an idle time before inserting the sleep method.

EmEditor supports plugins, which means that you can extend its functionality. The ones built into the installed package are a basic file navigator similar to Windows Explorer, an HTML bar that lets you create and edit HTML code (e.g. headers, paragraphs, breaks, hyperlinks), two tree views for opened documents and projects, a basic search function, predefined snippets for coding (e.g. if..then, request.form), a web previewer for HTML code, code completion, and an auto counter for words, characters, lines and the width.

As far as tools are concerned, you can open instances for Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, Command Prompt and the program associated with the current document. Similar shortcuts can be created for any other external apps. It's possible to split files into multiple parts and piece them back together.

Configure and save program preferences

Keyboard shortcuts are supported for all commands in all menus, and they can be changed into anything you want. Moreover, the text editor is fully customizable. For example, you can tinker with settings regarding automatic page scrolling in horizontal and vertical mode, such as double line scroll, faster cursor movement, or a horizontal grid.

Additionally, you can activate auto-saving and backups and specify the saving directories, exclude any characters from wrapping, enable non-wrap words, indicate words that will be automatically highlighted by EmEditor, switch to another UI theme, personalize the text and background color, print line numbers, as well as set the utility to check spelling in specific areas: quoted lines, strings enclosed by single or double quotation marks, comments, scripts, tags, highlighted text, hyperlinks, and unspecified text.

All EmEditor settings can be exported to a registry or INI file, either on the local disk or a removable drive.


The Good

The software application worked smoothly in our evaluation, without hanging, crashing or prompting errors. It's compatible with Windows XP through 10, both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture types. CPU and RAM consumption was minimal. Help documentation is included.

EmEditor Professional has rich features. It offers full Unicode support, full screen mode, large files, a Clipboard history, advanced search and replace for one document and across multiple files at once, document comparison mode with synchronized scrolling, a customizable spellchecker, syntax highlights and snipper for coders, macros for recording mouse and keyboard activity, various plugins, shortcuts to external programs, and word completion mode, among others.

Those who want to bypass the installer and run the app directly from a pen drive may resort to its portable counterpart with identical features, Portable EmEditor Professional.

The Bad

Users are likely to encounter issues with trying to figure out what each setting does, since the menus are complex.

The Truth

Taking into account its vast array of intricate options, EmEditor Professional is definitely worth the attention of advanced users who are patient enough to learn all its tricks, as well as willing to purchase a comprehensive text editor at a reasonable price.

NOTE: You can also check out our previous review for EmEditor Professional 6.

user interface 4
features 5
ease of use 3
pricing / value 4


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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EmEditor Professional (23 Images)

EmEditor Professional: The interface is familiarEmEditor Professional: Explore the "File" menuEmEditor Professional: Explore the "Edit" menuEmEditor Professional: Explore the "Search" menuEmEditor Professional: Explore the "View" menu
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