For years now I’ve used TextPad as my text editor and have always liked it. When it went from version 4 to version 5, however, I found that the new version (written in a different language) had some issues. This was especially evident with the initial version 5 release. The community forums had a common theme: people complained about a major version change that seemingly only introduced bugs and degraded the user experience. The minor version updates fixed most of these. But the whole experience of a major version release with no new significant feature set changes, and things being broken initially, soured my experience with it. I could have gone back to version 4 again (and I did briefly) but my nature is to remain at the latest release of whatever I use.

I started looking around for some alternatives. I looked at freeware products first, my first choice in applications. In that category, I can highly recommend PSPad. It does everything that TextPad does, and some more, and just feels more comfortable to me. Plus, it’s free. The only thing that prevented me from switching to it was a lack of good macro support. I review, and report on, on daily basis Bugzilla entries for new and fixed SeaMonkey problems. I had set up a series of macros in TextPad to do this, but was tired of not being able to have it solicit me for input, paste what I’d entered into my document, and then continue working with that. So, unfortunately, I had to leave PSPad behind.

I finally settled on UltraEdit, and paid for a license. I’ve just now finished tweaking my macros, and I must say that my daily bug reporting experience is now far better than it ever was under TextPad. I know that I’m using only a portion of UltraEdit’s features, but I already ready know that it’s a far better product than TextPad. (Not that I want to disparage TextPad – it served me well over the years – it’s just that UltraEdit is, relatively speaking, a better tool.)