BACKGROUND:
I’m a software developer and text-editor fanatic. I’ve tried pretty much every Windows text editor that’s ever been released. I don’t just use them to their fullest for work, I love text editors onto themselves – not just as a mean, but also as an end. EmEditor (EE) has become my daily go-to editor for both text processing and coding for fun.
FUNCTIONALITY:
There is nothing that EE can’t do: that’s its main selling point. It’s packed with built-in functionality and let’s you extend that core functionality with scriptable macros. Think “UltraEdit’s flexibility without the slow-as-death macro playback”.
EmEditor also comes in handy in unexpected ways: forget Excel, EE is THE BEST way to work with CSV files. As of a few years ago, I’ve been using EE instead of Excel to quickly process data from my bank accounts and credit cards at tax time.
By the way, the “filter” function extraordinarily useful, and I can’t remember seeing it in other editors: type a string and EE hides all but the lines that contain that string. Another, somewhat related setting is the ability (Edit > Narrowing) to restrict the current editing area to a sub-portion of the current file.
QUALITY:
I’m a fullstack web dev, but I’ve done quite a bit of Windows dev. I’ve never seen a piece of software that leverages so well all Windows APIs. You can tell that everything is done carefully and thoughtfully, even the most mundane functionality.
One of EE’s claims to fame is to be able to open huge files. (I can attest that it does: opening a PHP log from a live server and see it open in under a second is something.)
EXTENSIBILITY:
For years, I’ve been using TextPad for its macros. The macros are saved in a binary format and they can’t be customized after the fact. In EE, all macros are stored in editable JS code with a well documented API.
Both of these mean that there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do with EE.
SUPPORT:
As far as I know, EmEditor is a one-man project. The upside is that Yutaka Emura, EmEditor’s creator, provides support himself. Receiving support from the person who wrote the software is a treat. I hope that many people will buy what is not only objectively the best all-purpose editor on Windows, but also the only one that is actively developed, and has been uninterruptedly so for over a decade.
CONCLUSION:
Because of the size of my professional projects, I often have to work in full-fledged IDEs (JetBrains), which are comparatively slow and feel annoyingly non-native Windows. But whenever I can, I go old school and code in EE. It’s pure bliss.
Charles