Lightning Editor

Text editors are not just a means of taking notes, and they can also serve as the main workspace for building applications and web pages to write your code in. For instance, using specialized applications like Lightning Editor, you can load plain text files, or of various programming languages to analyze, and edit your code.

The application allows you to work on your projects from other computers as well, by simply running it from a USB flash drive, because it requires no installation to properly function. This also means that the health status of the target PC remains intact, since registries are not modified during, or after launch.

On the visual side of things, you get to work in a simple environment, with focus on the canvas itself, and a few general edit functions in the upper toolbar. In case the style doesn’t quite match your taste, you can change the skin by simply picking another one from the variety of choices.

You can start working on projects directly, or open a file to edit its content. The application does support a decent amount of types, such as HTML, C++, Visual Basic, C#, XML, or plain TXT, but you have to pick from all files, so don’t be surprised if compatibility issues occur when attempting to load a different format.

Unfortunately, even if you do load a source code for some of your projects, working with Lightning Editor can prove a little difficult, especially because it’s not actually dedicated for coding, with no built-in syntax highlighter to help you out. Lines are not numbered either, nor can you view the number of words, or characters inside a document.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Lightning Editor comes with good intentions, but in this case, simplicity does more harm than help out. It supports different programming languages, and plain text files, but without a syntax highlighter, or possibility to format text, practicality quickly becomes questionable.