I write a lot of text documents: online articles, autoresponder text, web site copy, etc. One of my most loved and most hated two programs for creating and editing text files are the ones that come for free with any new PC: Notepad and WordPad.



Most people have used Notepad - it's a very, very, very simple text editing program. There is nothing fancy whatsoever about it - it's meant for just whipping up text. There is no way to save formatted text, no way to have multiple fonts, no way do spell check or find out information about your document like word counts, etc. It's about as plain as plain can be.

Notepad has a simple find/replace command, but no support for tabs, colors, bulleted lists. It will only open or save your document as a .txt (text) file only. For a while, it worked fine for my needs.

Then I saw another text editing program, that is also free and comes installed in Windows by default - that program is called WordPad. WordPad is a little more sophisticated than Notepad. The operative words here are "a little."

The major difference between Notepad and WordPad is that WordPad allows you to have multiple fonts and styles and will open or save documents as either RTF (Rich Text Format) or as plain text. WordPad will also allow you to work with tabs - including automatically setting the left, right and first line indents, as well as allow you to work with bulleted lists.

These two programs are great for the price: FREE - but I wanted a little bit more. I wanted something that would give me more tools like spell checking, word counts, the ability to paste raw or formatted text, and the ability to make automated backups of the files I was working with.

I wasn't looking to replace Microsoft Word - I wanted just a compact, easy-to-use program that was a bit more full-featured than either Notepad or WordPad. I found everything I was looking for in a text editor called "NoteMagic" by JSoft Consulting.

NoteMagic allows me to open and save .txt, .ini (initialization files on Windows) and HTML documents. It doesn't do stylized text, RTF or tab stops like WordPad - but I use Microsoft Word for those types of documents anyway. It has really cool features like a spell checker (comes with American English but others are available); word counter; realtime line counter (also displays the number of characters in that line); the ability to convert text to lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title Case and tOOGLE cASE; find and replace; and probably my most favorite feature: the ability to have more than one document open at a time.

You can download a free 30 day evaluation from: http://www.jsoftconsulting.com. If you decide you like it - you can purchase it for a very reasonable $19.95.

On Eric's scale of 1 to 5 (5 being best) NoteMagic scores a 4.5 out of 5! If you write a lot of text and use either Notepad or WordPad, this is definitely a product with your time.