My pads
Getting to do plain text editing is something of a feat—with a myriad of exotic editors these days, who wants to know about plain text editors? They offer no pizzazz. But we still use them to write our scratchy notes, progress updates, hourly reports, grocery list, passwords, and things that you just write and forget. Following are my picks for the mundane work (and no, I stopped using Notepad a long time ago):
Metapad — This tiny application permanently rests on my desktop and is part of the minimum stuff that I carry in my usb key-drive. My one-tool for all non-business editing. It offers everything. Dual font, transparency, a very functional toolbar and very much customizable functions.
Textpad — I use this tool mainly for business (or my kind of work). This tool has everything. It can load files virtually of any size limited only by RAM (I need this since my FEM run outputs sometimes run in hundreds of megabytes of plain text! No kidding). It has a full macro support that you can customize. It has column selection i.e., cut and paste a column of text just like you’d do in Excel. This is one feature enough to let go of all other editors that you might have. My work data is mostly in columns: coordinates, member incidences, material properties, member overrides, loads: structural, environmental (wind, wave and current), inertia and seismic, virtually all info is in column structure and it’s extremely useful in doing stuff, copying and pasting from Textpad to Excel and vice versa. I could do this in Word (yes, you can do this in word, just hold alt key before doing column selection), but try opening a 200MB plain text file in it and you’ll know what I mean =).
In addition, you can have custom syntax (see the syntax files that I created for SACS and USFOS at textpad.com) that highlight the key or command text while editing. I’ve been using textpad for css, xhtml and js markup in addition to editing input files, viewing and porting data.