2008 Trend: Best Ultraedit Alternative Free Text Editor You Recommend

I use Notepad++, which has most of the UltraEdit features (Windows platform).

But the main reason is a deployment one: I know I can just copy it one the desktop of my colleagues, and they can start using it. No setup or registry tweaking involved. It is actually one of the portable applications.

The integration of Scintilla component is quite stable now.

For me it's emacs, I always go back to it.

Available on almost any os.

Long time ago I switched from UE to Crimson Editor (but the latest version 3.72 is available on Source Forge under the Emerald Editor project).

Then recently I switched to PSpad after having tested more or less all the free editors available at the moment. It was the one that best fit my needs.

Just for completeness, for very very long time I've used MicroEmacs on a variety of platforms, mostly Unix but also Amiga and MSDOS. It's still around as Jasspa MicroEmacs and even if I think it's a great editor, I hadn't the heart of going back to a character based interface (my fault).

All these editors are scriptable and have syntax highlight and other features but none of them could replace a full IDE for the language. Most notably with an editor you'd miss the symbol cross reference to answer questions like "where this function has been defined?" or "where is this variable referenced?". For things like this I use Source Navigator NG that does a wonderful job on creating a complete cross reference database. It has also some editing capability, but I wouldn't rely on them!