Page 2 | Best Text Editors for Windows of 2026

Zed

Zed Industries

Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. Written from scratch in Rust to efficiently leverage multiple CPU cores and your GPU. Integrate upcoming LLMs into your workflow to generate, transform, and analyze code. Chat with teammates, write notes together, and share your screen and project. Multibuffers compose excerpts from across the codebase in one editable surface. Evaluate code inline via Jupyter runtimes and collaboratively edit notebooks. Support for many languages via Tree-sitter, WebAssembly, and the Language Server Protocol. Fast native terminal tightly integrates with Zed's language-aware task runner and AI capabilities. First-class modal editing via Vim bindings, including features like text objects and marks. Zed is built by a global community of thousands of developers. Boost your Zed experience by choosing from hundreds of extensions that broaden language support, offer different themes, and more.

Starting Price: Free

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Lapce

Lapdev

Lapce is a cutting-edge, open-source code editor focused on delivering a fast and responsive experience, particularly for developers working with large projects or complex codebases. Written in Rust, Lapce leverages the performance advantages of native development to provide a smooth editing experience with minimal lag. It features a clean, modern interface and advanced functionality such as multi-caret editing, split views, and integrated terminal support. With built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), Lapce offers precise autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and code navigation across various programming languages, enhancing productivity. Its extensibility, support for plugins, and focus on performance make Lapce ideal for developers looking for a lightweight yet powerful editor that balances simplicity with capability, appealing to both beginners and seasoned professionals.

Starting Price: Free

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Predator CNC Editor

Predator Software

The Predator CNC Editor is the most popular CNC code editor available on the market. It includes hundreds of features to improve the day to day productivity of CNC machine tools, operators and CNC programmers, yet it is extremely easy to use. The Predator CNC Editor is the ideal choice for the small job shop or the largest manufacturer.

Starting Price: $250

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SlickEdit

A true cross-platform, multi-language code editor, with support for over 60 languages on 9 platforms. Build or compile your project, then double-click on an error message in the Build window to jump to that location. Errors and warnings are marked with an icon in the left margin. In addition, the overview bar, positioned alongside the vertical scrollbar, marks the position of errors and warnings relative to the current scroll position in the document. To quickly scroll a marked location into view, you can drag the scrollbar slider to the mark, or click on the mark itself. SlickEdit's integrated debugging provides a convenient and easy to use front-end for many debuggers. Set breakpoints, step, inspect the stack, view variables/members - all the features you expect from a debugger. SlickEdit supports debugging for: GNU C/C++, Java, WinDbg, Clang C/C++ LLDB, Google Go, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, XCode, Scala, C# using Mono, Visual Basic using Mono, and Android JVM/NDK.

Starting Price: $99.95

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Boost Note

Boost Note is a powerful, lightspeed collaborative workspace for developer teams. Built to empower developers productivity with the most solid note taking experience for developers. Not just a GitHub flavored markdown. Put diagrams with Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML in documents to maximize visibility. Choose from keymaps like Vim, over 150 themes, and more to create your own Markdown editor. Manage your documents programmatically. Grab an authentication token and access Boost Note's APIs via simple HTTP requests. Automate your documentation work with over 2,000 external tool integrations via Zapier. Collaborate with your colleagues and share information your way. Have all your teams in one shared workspace. Write documents as a team with Boost Note's realtime editing. Check revision history of a doc. You can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. Keep your important data safe through granula access control based on workspace.

Starting Price: $3 per member per month

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TextPad

When just getting the job done is work enough, the last thing you need is to waste time having to learn yet another computer application. Your experience with other tools should be relevant to each new application, making it possible to sit down and use that new application right away. That is why TextPad is so popular. Whether you simply need a powerful replacement for Notepad, a tool for editing your web pages, or a programming IDE, TextPad does what you want, the way you would expect. It is available from our website to try before you buy basis, so please download your trial copy now, and find out just how productive you can be. TextPad is designed to provide the power and functionality to satisfy the most demanding text editing requirements. It can edit files up to the limits of virtual memory, and it will work with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 7, and Server 2008 to 2019.

Starting Price: $16.50 one-time payment

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WildEdit

TextPad

If you ever need to make the same changes to many files at once, then WildEdit will save you a lot of time. It is an interactive tool for users to edit a set of plain text files in a folder hierarchy, filtered by wildcards. This makes it ideal for editing web pages and software source code or reformatting log files and newsletters. It is not suitable for editing files with proprietary binary formats, such as Microsoft Word documents. You simply need to specify the search text, optionally using a regular expression, the replacement text, and a wildcard filter, then let it run. This process can be repeated as often as is required, and up to the last 10 changes can be undone and redone. WildEdit is available as a trial version before you buy it, so please download your trial copy now, and find out just how productive you can be. You can edit any files containing plain text.

Starting Price: $8.50 one-time payment

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Pulsar

Pulsar-Edit

A community-led hyper-hackable text editor. Pulsar works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search and install new packages or create your own right from Pulsar. Pulsar helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window. Split your Pulsar interface into multiple panes to compare and edit code across files. Find, preview, and replace text as you type in a file or across all your projects.

Starting Price: Free

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ConTEXT Editor

ConTEXT is small, fast and powerful text editor for software developers. Unlimited open files, unlimited editing file size length, powerful syntax highlighting for C/C++, Delphi/Pascal, 80x86 assembler, Java, Java Script, Visual Basic, Perl/CGI, HTML, SQL, Python, PHP, Tcl/Tk, user definable syntax highlighter, project workspaces, compiler integration, multi-language support and many more features.

Starting Price: $0

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EditPad Lite

EditPad

EditPad Lite is a compact general-purpose text editor. Use EditPad Lite to easily edit any kind of plain text file. EditPad Lite has all the essential features to make text editing a breeze. Large file and long line support. Full Unicode support, including complex scripts and right-to-left scripts. Direct editing of text files using Windows, Unix, and Mac text encodings (code pages) and line breaks. Tabbed interface for working with many files. Unlimited undo and redo for all open files, even after saving. Automatic backup and working copies prevent data loss. Powerful search-and-replace with literal search terms and regular expressions that can span multiple lines. EditPad Lite is free for personal use. Business and government users can purchase a license. If you use EditPad Lite at home or at school for purposes that don’t generate money, you can download the free version of EditPad Lite without any kind of payment or registration.

Starting Price: Free

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Typora

Typora gives you a seamless experience as both a reader and a writer. It removes the preview window, mode switcher, syntax symbols of markdown source code, and all other unnecessary distractions. Instead, it provides a real live preview feature to help you concentrate on the content itself. Typora allows you to manage your files easily, providing both file tree panel and articles (file list) side panel, allows you to manage your files easily. Organize your files your way, including putting in sync services, like Dropbox or iCloud. Automatically see the Outline structure of your documents in outline panel, which allows you to quickly go through the document and jump to any section with one click. Export to PDF with bookmarks. Go further and export or import. More formats, including docx, OpenOffice, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Epub, etc, can be exported or imported. See how large your document is in words, characters, lines, or reading minutes.

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CKEditor 5

CKSource

CKEditor 5 is a modern WYSIWYG rich text editor that can easily accommodate the requirements of businesses and users in the age of digital transformation. It allows software creators and developers to build powerful writing solutions for applications of all sorts, within hours. Thanks to a fully customizable framework, ready-to-use builds, native integrations, extensive documentation, and reliable customer support, the editor can be fully tailored to your needs. To provide users with an all-around streamlined and collaborative writing experience, you can additionally include advanced features such as Track Changes and Comments, Revision History, and (if preferred) Real-time Collaboration! Easy Export to PDF and Word, responsive images, pagination, Markdown input and output support, and robust paste from Word and Google Docs are also popular choices.

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JetBrains Fleet

JetBrains

Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. JetBrains Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI. We built Fleet to be a fast and lightweight text editor for when you need to quickly browse and edit your code. It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately, and it can easily transform into an IDE, with the IntelliJ code-processing engine running separately from the editor itself. Fleet inherits the things that developers love the most from IntelliJ-based IDEs – project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes. Fleet’s architecture is designed to support a range of configurations and workflows. You can simply run Fleet just on your machine, or move some of the processes elsewhere – for example by locating the code processing in the cloud.

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EditPad Pro

EditPad

EditPad Pro is a powerful and versatile text editor or word processor. Designed to make text editing as convenient as possible, using EditPad Pro to edit text files will save you a lot of time and frustration. You can make EditPad Pro as small as you like, and hide its toolbar, status bar, and side panels. There are a great number of text editors available. Some editors offer limited functionality. This makes them easy to use, but more complex editing tasks are quite tedious. Other text editors claim to be powerful, offering every possible feature the developers could think of. You can do many things with those editors, but their complexity will hinder you. Convenience was and is our number one design goal when developing EditPad Pro. We want to offer you a text editor that takes the drudgery out of text editing. With EditPad Pro you can focus on the goals you want to achieve, rather than on the oddities of your text editing tool.

Starting Price: $59.95 one-time payment

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MangoWriter

MangoWriter is a secure text editor for Windows designed to run completely offline with no cloud, AI, network connections, or telemetry, offering a familiar, simple editing experience while keeping content private by default. It uses state-of-the-art AES-256-GCM encryption with strong key derivation (Argon2id) and optional keyfile two-factor support, ensuring no plaintext is ever written to disk and eliminating caches or temp files. MangoWriter protects your work with a secure clipboard that binds copied content to the current session, an instant lock screen to mask content when stepping away, and one-click bulk redaction tools to permanently black out selected text across documents. Sensitive buffers are zeroed after use and your password never gets stored on disk, with key material kept only in secure memory while a document is unlocked. It is delivered as clean, code-signed builds available as an MSI installer or portable ZIP and includes secure export options.

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Firepad

Firepad is an open source real-time collaborative text editor. It provides true collaborative editing, complete with intelligent operational transform-based merging and conflict resolution. Firepad can render documents using the CodeMirror, Ace, or Monaco editors, and its operational transform code borrows from ot.js. Behind the scenes, Firepad uses the Firebase Realtime Database for cloud data storage and synchronization. You can build any application that requires collaborative editing of text documents. Firepad supports both rich text and code editing out-of-the-box, and it's easy to extend for other use cases. Firepad was built by Michael Lehenbauer and the team at Firebase. There are many other features that could be added, please star Firepad on GitHub and send over a pull request when you have things to contribute! You can build any application that requires collaborative editing of text documents.

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Emacs

GNU

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

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Spacemacs

A community-driven Emacs distribution. The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim! Spacemacs is a new way to experience Emacs, a sophisticated and polished set-up focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency. Key bindings are organized using mnemonic prefixes like b for buffer, p for project, s for search, h for help etc. Innovative real-time display of available key bindings. Simple query system to quickly find available layers, packages and more. Similar functionalities have the same key binding everywhere thanks to a clearly defined set of conventions. Community-driven configuration provides curated packages tuned by power users and bugs are fixed quickly.

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jEdit

jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Hundreds of macros and plugins available. Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature. Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode. Highly configurable and customizable. Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor.

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gedit

The GNOME Project

gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features.

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CudaText

CudaText is a cross-platform text editor, written in Object Pascal. It is open source project and can be used free of charge, even for business. It starts quite fast on Linux on CPU Intel Core i3 3GHz. It is extensible by Python add-ons, plugins, linters, code tree parsers, external tools. Syntax parser is feature-rich, from EControl engine. Syntax highlight for lot of languages (270+ lexers). Code tree structure of functions/classes/etc, if lexer allows it. Code folding, multi-carets and multi-selections. Find/Replace with regular expressions. Configs in JSON format. Including lexer-specific configs. Tabbed UI, with a split view to primary/secondary, and a split window to 2/3/4/6 groups of tabs. Command palette, with fuzzy matching, minimap, and micromap. Shows unprinted whitespace and offers support for many encodings. Customizable hotkeys. Binary/Hex viewer for files of unlimited size (can show 10 Gb logs).

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yEdit2

Spacejock Software

It also includes a special .yedit2 file format, which is password-protected. You can put all your web logins, email accounts, etc in yEdit and then save them out in a password-protected file. (The contents of your files are not sent to, nor viewable by, Spacejock Software, and there is no magical backdoor to open your files if you lose your password.) There's also an Android version on the play store, currently available in public beta, and an iOS version is on the way. Due to play store/app store regulations, mobile versions will not have file encryption.

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Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris. Bluefish 2.2.12 is a minor maintenance release with some minor new features. Most important is a fix for a crash in a simple search. Python 3 compatibility has been further improved. Encoding detection in python files has been improved. Triple-click now selects the line. On Mac OSX Bluefish deals better with the new permission features. Also using the correct language in the Bluefish user interface is fixed for certain languages on OSX.

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Best Text Editors for Windows - Page 2

Compare the Top Text Editors for Windows as of November 2026 - Page 2