Caderno is a freeware text editor/Notepad replacement that’s focused on delivering an excellent user experience. It features a minimalist, tabbed user interface on the one hand and some powerful features on the other, without overloading the user with too many functions. Features include search/find/replace, go-to specific line, crash recovery, session management, Unicode support, as well as Syntax highlighting (INI, XML, HTML, Java, PHP).
How would you like fairly capable text editor that nonetheless sports a minimalist, uncluttered interface? This about sums this program up. It sets out to combine some good features with a Firefox-like experience (Tabs, search/replace/go-to-line bars, crash recovery, and the ability to save and load entire sessions and multiple documents simultaneously). More notes below:
- Tabs: honestly, an indispensable feature. Although I will say that the tabbed interface looks better in the Visa environment (screenshot above) than in XP.
Syntax highlighting: for INI, XML, HTML, PHP, & Java. Also gives you the ability to change the color scheme for each of the supported languages (see image to the right).- Firefox-style search/replace: find-as-you-type. See the top screenshot above.
- Go-to-line bars: another indispensable feature.
- Session management: if you work with a number of documents at once, and would like to get all of them loaded simultaneously, Caderno allows you to load/save a group of documents at once.
- Unicode support.
- Crash recovery.
The verdict: the internet is not lacking for excellent freeware text editors to replace Notepad. Two of my personal favorites are PSPad and Notepad++, packed choc-full of features and options to satisfy every audience. However, I will say that many text-editors, probably as a consequence of being the primary tools of the trade for developers and programmers are becoming a tad too complicated and/or feature intensive, at least for the most of us who are either not programmers or would prefer a clean, straightforward interface. If this describes you then you will probably like this program. Recommended.
Version Tested: 1.08
Compatibility: WinAll.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.46 megs).
Don’t know what the problem was, but this program didn’t work for me (I’m on Vista). Installed all right, but every time I went to open it, it would give me a taskbar tab but no real window. It’d freeze every time I tried to close the task. :shrug: Looked promising, but I had to uninstall it. On the upside, Revo Uninstaller found that the program’s uninstaller uninstalled it cleanly.
And as a vim fanboy I have to point out vim is better (even if it isn’t) because as I mentioned I’m a fanboy.
my firewall caught this thing trying to reach out to the internet. Why is a simple notepad replacement trying to reach a server? Happens every time I start the program. Why is it doing this? Might be innocuous but I like to err on the side of caution.
Scott, does the app check for updates? Is this behaviour configurable? Probably this would explain the chattiness.
The application checks for updates in a separated thread. When a newer version is found it will notify you.
Unicode? What Unicode? It doesn’t detect utf-8 files automatically and there is no obvious way to tell the programm that the file I just opened needs to be handled as Unicode, not ANSI. That is not Unicode support.
aabram, I’ve released version 1.09 of the program it has the unicode implementation fixed and also adds better support for UTF-8 files, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are currently not supported.
Also in case of bugs of suggestions, you’re welcome to post on my forums: http://freddy1990.com/forums/index.php?board=81.0
Love the find as you type feature, thanx
If it were portable, I will use it.
Besides that I had some issues downloading the file, well I got it from IE :S!
I have a portable version scheduled to be released somewhere along with one of the next versions, one of my other programs has had portable/u3 versions for quite some time now and I have the download buttons ready =P The problem is that the session recovery requires the session to be saved quite often and if it were portable and running from for example a flash drive, the saving would be rather slow… I’m trying to come up with a practical solution for that…
I tried and had numerous problems with Caderno under WinXP-SP3.
Once opened, I couldn’t close it, which necessitated using the task manager to finally kill it. Once it was ‘killed’ I got no less than three system alerts reporting various errors including one that said something about a “memory leak.”
After that I just launched Revo Uninstaller and scrubbed Caderno off my system. Don’t know if anybody else is having similar problems.
I’ve now also managed to finally reproduce and track down the bug described in the first reply by Rebecca, this will be fixed in the 2.10 release.