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Text editing is a really simple task, and most people are happy using the tools built into their operating system, like Notepad or Wordpad, but we're not all the same... When you work on large articles, web pages or large scripts, those simple tools are not enough, since you need to use macros, edit multiple files at once and take advantage of advanced preview or syntax highlighting.

The features I just mentioned are available in more programs for every single computing platform out there, and in the Windows world there are probably hundreds of good text editors. Today's pick is one of the most popular ones, called EmEditor Professional.


Setup

The last stable version of this program is 6.00.4, and its setup package is as small as 2.2MB, including some useful plugins that you can choose to install or not during the setup process. The Web Preview and the Search plugins are "must have" ones, and the other can also prove very useful, so I can't advise you anything else than to check the Install plug-ins box. Below, you can check 3 screenshots taken during the install of the program, to ensure this is as easy as possible to get working, so let's move on and talk about the interface and features...

Interface
EmEditor Professional has an interface that's just like hot iron - you can bend it as you wish. All the toolbars can be moved around, resized, or simply hidden, while custom ones can also be added. As you can notice in the picture to the left, the default interface of this program looks just like a text editor should - easy to use, well organized, without useless tools and panels, but if you need more room for your data, then you can hide almost everything, as I was saying.


Features

Now, text editors should be able to create, edit and save text documents, right? The difference between simple ones and the professional tools is not their goal, but how easy you can accomplish that goal. Let's take HTML editing as an example. Basic text editors don't have syntax highlighting, you can't preview how your page is going to look in a browser inside them, and you can't use macro commands and snippets either, just to name the most important features.

Additional features include the ability to use bookmarks inside each of your text files, so instead of having 40 different files for a large project, you can have 40 bookmarks inside a big text file, to get quick access to any of the chapters of your work. As you can see from the screenshots above, this is only a glance, so feel free to take a closer look at EmEditor Professional, and prepare for version 7(an early Beta was available for download last week on the official site)!


The Good

This text editing tool is one of the few that got Vista certification so far, but this is not all. For its price, EmEditor Professional has an excellent combination of features, and using it should be really easy even for beginners.

The Bad

The ability to edit and save files from a remote location, like a FTP server, would be an excellent addition, while lowering the price just a little won't hurt the future buyers either...

Conclusion

While I still consider Ultra Edit to be the king of Windows text editing tools, EmEditor Professional seems to catch up, and probably it's only a matter of time until these two programs will have a battle head to head. Until then, there's nothing better to do than grab EmEditor's shareware version and give it a try, because it has more than enough to offer already!

Developer: EmuraSoft
Price: 39.99$
Trial Link: Download