Arachnophilia
Arachnophilia is a popular text-based HTML editor written in Java by Paul Lutus. It is known to be a successor to another HTML editor WebThing. The program is licensed as a Careware[1] type of software. The program’s name comes from the term meaning “love of spiders.”
OS support: Mac OS / Unix / Linux / Windows
Homepage

BDV Notepad
It is comfortable text editor, Windows Notepad replacement. In this program are combined: extended functionality, comfortable interface, flexible adjustment and all of this is absolutely free-of-charge! Program can work with files of any size, supports shortcuts, multilevel Undo/Redo, autosaving, URL-autodetection and start. It has customizable multilanguage interface, improved printing engine and many additional opportunities.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

ConTEXT
ConTEXT is a closed-source freeware text editor for Microsoft Windows, aimed at software developers. It can open and edit very large files, while requiring only modest amounts of RAM and hard drive space to run.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Eddie
Eddie is a text editor which was first released in 1997 for BeOS, and later ported to Linux and Mac OS X. It was written by Pavel Císler, formerly a senior developer at Be, who later worked for Eazel and currently works for Apple and continues to develop Eddie as his pet project, now on Mac OS X. Inspired by the classic Macintosh’ Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop editor, it is primarily intended for working with C and C++ development. However, Eddie supports syntax colouring for HTML, JavaScript, .kon/.widget, Perl, and many other formats. Eddie supports a Worksheet — provides a well-appointed shell that enables the power of bash and the convenience of editing in a normal text window mode.
OS support: BeOS / Mac OS / Linux
Homepage

EDXOR
EDXOR is a versatile, convenient and optimal text editor and file processor that far surpasses the capabilities of other Notepad-like applications. It offers innovative clipboard handling, cryptographic options and logic text conversions, great for education, fun, or privacy. EDXOR is small, self-contained, dependency-free and very fast. It provides over 90 menu items, including many unique functions and options, for diverse applications.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

EditPad Lite
EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor. EditPad Lite works with Windows NT4, 98, 2000, ME, XP and Vista.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

EmEditor Free
EmEditor text dditor is a lightweight yet extendable, easy-to-use text editor for Windows. EmEditor is very customizable, and it supports Unicode and powerful macros. EmEditor is designed for Windows XP, and certified for Windows Vista.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Editor²
Editor² is a really small (57KB download) notepad replacement, yet packed with useful features for productive everyday use. Both ANSI/Unix and Unicode text files are supported. It features powerful search and replace commands, Hex and RTF viewer, dual font/color selection, URL autodetection, lots of keyboard shortcuts plus loads of handy bits for programmers (brace matching, autoIndent, etc). The unique AutoText feature makes inserting HTML open/closing tags a breeze. Editor is one of the richest feature-to-size packages in its class.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

GridinSoft Notepad Lite
GridinSoft Notepad Lite is a powerful text editor for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems with code highlighting, supports HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Java, Perl, XML and others. Has a built-in HEX editor that allows you to truncate files, to replace, insert and remove bytes from any files – just open them in a built-in HEX editor.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

HAPedit
HAPedit is an acronym for Html Asp Php editor; a win32 text-mode editor useful for all developers of dynamic web pages. Its main features are: syntax highlighting for html/php, html/asp, html, JavaScript, CSS and SQL; page preview in browser; project manager; php code “compilation”; edit html tags; code completion; preview images; SQL console; FTP Manager; Code Explorer and more.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is a free Komodo-based text editor for dynamic languages published by software firm ActiveState. It inherits many features of Komodo IDE, like the full range of supported languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl) and platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows ). And like Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit also supports browser-side languages like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML. It was developed for programmers who need a multi-language editor with broad functionality, but not the features of an IDE, like debugging, DOM viewer, interactive shells, and source code control integration.
OS support: Mac OS / Unix / Linux / Windows
Homepage

MAX’s HTML Beauty++
MAX’s HTML Beauty++ 2004 is advanced HTML editor that can edit as many files at a time as you want, plus it has advanced customizable syntax highlighting, undo / redo, drag & drop editing, right-click tag editing, extended find & replace, template support, project management, auto updating code snippets, code library, tag case changing capability, spelling & grammar check and more… There are also 28 Tag Designers for almost every HTML tag, a Power Toolbar that contains almost all HTML tags, Built-In Image Browser / Viewer with GIF Optimize function and ability to convert images to WBMP image format which is used by WAP-compatible mobile phones, Built-In JavaScript Beauty Scripts (rollovers, slideshows, etc.), Built-In Support for HTML TIDY, Internal Preview using Internet Explorer and Mozilla and much more.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Metapad
Metapad is a small, fast (and completely free) text editor for Windows 9x/NT/XP with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad’s features and much, much more.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Notepad+
Notepad+ is a text editor for Windows PC systems intended as a replacement for the default Notepad editor. It was developed by Rogier Meurs of RogSoft and first released in 1996. At that time Notepad on Windows 95 was very limited in its facilities and could only open files up to 64 kibibytes. Notepad+ removed that limitation and added many new features.

Notepad+ received many awards and significant coverage in many computer magazines, but as it was popular relatively early in the development of the web many of the pages about it no longer exist today. The program has not been developed since v1.11 in 1996 but it still has many users who prefer its simple interface over many of the other Notepad alternatives which have since appeared.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

NoteTab Lite
NoteTab is a freeware/shareware text editor for Windows. It was developed by Eric Fookes of Fookes Software, Charmey (Gruyère), Switzerland. The program’s name refers to the fact that it was apparently one of the earliest text-editors capable of editing several open documents on different tabs (tabbed document interface). The first version of NoteTab, known as Mini NoteTab, was launched in 1995; version is 5 was introduced in 2006 with current version 5.3 released in July of 2007.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Q10
Q10 is a powerful and simple text editor built and designed with writers in mind.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Programmer’s File Editor
Programmer’s File Editor is a freeware text editor targeted particularly to the needs of software programmers. It was written by Alan Phillips of Lancaster University in the north of England.The program includes some macro capabilities. It also supports using batch files to perform compilation tasks from within the editor. Development of Programmer’s File Editor ceased in 1999, but the program is still in use by some programmers.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

PSPad
PSPad editor is a freeware text editor and source editor for the Windows platform. It was first released in 2001, this software is produced by the single developer Jan Fiala. PSPad is designed as the universal GUI for editing many languages including PHP, Perl, HTML, and Java. It integrates the use of many project formats for handling and saving multiple files. Other features include autocompletion, tab, FTP client and find/replace using regular expressions.

PSPad interface is based on the MDI with tabs for editing multiple files and better open document manipulation. This software doesn’t need an installation and is semi-portable.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

roPEdit
roPEdit is a rich featured multifunctional Text and HTML Editor with Syntaxhighligthing, Codelists, Codefolding and Functions for Programming.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Subpad
Subpad is a lightweight notepad clone with all of the features of Windows notepad, with just a few extras added. The main purpose was to make something close to notepad.exe, but with faster find/replace, MRU documents, and syntax highlighting. Subpad’s find/replace routine is perhaps one of the fastest out there.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Syn Text Editor
Syn is an Open Source Text and Programming Editor with Syntaxhighlight for many Languages, and some IDE Features, like starting a program (e.g. Compiler) and capture the output, support for Projects etc. Syn is written in Delphi (Version 5, Updatepack 1) for maximum performance, stability and filesize, hence it doesn’t require any bulky VC++/VB Runtime or MFC libraries!
OS support: Windows
Homepage

TED Notepad
TED Notepad is a freeware text editor for Microsoft Windows. The software has been developed by Juraj Simlovic since 2001, originally as a school project. It has a similar cosmetic look to Notepad, but provides more features, especially for advanced plain-text editing. The application is portable and fits on a USB flash drive and does not require an installation. You can find several innovative features too, like a second search or a line completion.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

TeXShop
TeXShop is a TeX previewer for Mac OS X, written in Cocoa. Since pdf is a native file format on OS X, TeXShop uses “pdftex” and “pdflatex” rather than “tex” and “latex” to typeset; these programs in the standard teTeX distribution of TeX produce pdf output instead of dvi output.

TeXShop uses TeX Live, a standard distribution of Tex programs maintained by the TeX Users Group (TUG) for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix machines. The distribution includes tex, latex, dvips, tex fonts, cyrillic fonts, and virtually all other programs and supporting files commonly used in the TeX world. The most recent version of this distribution is maintained for the Mac by the MacTeX TeXnical Working Group of the TeX Users Group and available undering the “Obtaining” tab.
OS support: Mac
Homepage

TextWrangler
TextWrangler is a popular text editor for Mac OS X from Bare Bones Software. It was originally a commercial product, but (beginning with version 2.0) has become the freeware alternative to their flagship editor, BBEdit, and the successor to their previous freeware editor, BBEdit Lite.

TextWrangler is intended for use by programmers, web designers, and others who spend time reading and writing source code.
OS support: Mac
Homepage

Win32Pad
Win32Pad is a feature filled text editor that is written with a programmer in mind. Its main purpose is to provide enough functionality that is missing from notepad without sacrificing file size and performance. It’s very fast and powerful. This editor is written so that you can install it and start using it. The features are added to make your experience better, easier and more efficient.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

WhizNote
WhizNote has a separate text file editor that allows you to customize its right-click menu to insert custom text with sophisticated template features. This can be used to make your own HTML templates. When editing HTML files, you can test all those HREF links by simple double-clicks and can test your web page in a browser even with local web sites using a personal web server.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Please let me know if there any errors especially with the urls. Thank you!

I decided to make a compilation of free text editors that use a graphical user interface. With so many available free text editors, I’ve decided to make this into a two part series. The first part consists of free open-source text editors.

AkelPad
AkelPad is a small, expandable text editor written for the Windows family of operating systems. It can also be run under Wine, an application which allows users to run Windows applications on Unix-like systems such as Linux. AkelPad’s author states that the program can “replace standard Notepad” and has many features which NotePad lacks.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Beaver
Beaver is a recursive acronym for Beaver is an Early AdVanced EditoR. It is intended for Linux and other Unices (even Windows eventually). It is licensed under the GNU GPL and intended to be lightweight, but full of useful features for programming, from website editing to coding. It is based upon the GTK+ 2 toolkit, supports many languages through config files and offers functions such as automatic indentation, completion and correction, as well as syntax highlighting. It even has its own mini macro language.
OS support: Linux / Unix
Homepage

Crimson
Crimson Editor is a professional source code editor for Windows. This program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size (so small that it can be copied in one floppy disk).

While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

GLeDitor
A small programmer’s editor whith syntax highlight, extended search features, beautiful icons and colors. The programming language is object pascal (delphi/win32 and lazarus/linux).
OS support: Windows / Linux (requires Wine)
Homepage

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 GNU General Public License.
OS support: Mac OS / Unix / Linux / VMS / Windows
Homepage

Kate
Kate is a multi document editor, based on a rewritten version of the kwrite editing widget of KDE, offering all the features of that plus a bunch of its own.

With a multi-view editor like Kate you get a lot of advantages. You can view several instances of the same document and all instances are synced. Or you can view more files at the same time for easy reference or simultaneous editing. The terminal emulation and sidebar are docked windows that can be plugged out of the main window, or replaced therein according to your preference.
OS support: Linux / Unix
Homepage

KatePart
KatePart is a fast and featurerich text editor component with many advanced features. It implements the KTextEditor interfaces, a common interface collection for text editor components in KDE, allowing it to be selected as the editor in applications that lets the user chose from different implementations, as well as it can use KTextEditor plug-ins.
OS support: Linux / Unix
Homepage

Kile
Kile is a user friendly TeX/LaTeX editor for the KDE desktop environment. KDE is available for many architectures such as PC, PowerPC (Mac for example) and SPARC.
OS support: Mac OS / Linux / Unix
Homepage

Leafpad
Leafpad is a simple GTK+ text editor that emphasizes simplicity. As development focuses on keeping weight down to a minimum, only the most essential features are implemented in the editor. Leafpad is simple to use, is easily compiled, requires few libraries, and starts up quickly.
OS support: Linux / Unix
Homepage

MadEdit
MadEdit is an Open-Source & Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor written in C++ and wxWidgets.
MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes, and supports many useful functions, e.g. SyntaxHighlightings, WordWrap, Encodings.
OS support: Mac OS / Windows / Linux / Unix
Homepage

NEdit
NEdit is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the thorough functionality and stability required by users who edit text eight hours a day. It provides intensive support for development in a wide variety of languages, text processors, and other tools, but at the same time can be used productively by just about anyone who needs to edit text.
OS support: Linux / Unix / Mac OS & Windows require X windows environment
Homepage

Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.
OS support: Windows / Linux & Unix (requires Wine)
Homepage

Notepad2
Notepad2 is an open-source text editor for Microsoft Windows, released under a BSD software license. It is written by Florian Balmer using the Scintilla editor component, and was first publicly released in April 2004. Balmer based Notepad2 on the principle of Microsoft Notepad: small, fast and without frills.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

Programmer’s Notepad
Programmer’s Notepad 1 (PN1) is an open-source text editor targeted at users who work with source code. It was released in 1998 by Echo Software (a trading name for Simon Steele). Programmer’s Notepad 2 (PN2) was released in 2002 and is now based on Scintilla. Possibly the most unique feature common to both versions is the combination tabbed document interface and multiple document interface called “Tabbed MDI” by the developer.
OS support: Windows
Homepage

RexEdit
RexEdit – very powerful and fast programmer’s text and source code editor. Includes highlighting for over 50 syntaxes (programming/markup languages, scripts, specific files, etc). Fully customizable environment: you can change everything – from button layout to syntax highlighting colors. It also has very helpful ready to use additional functions such as text transformation procedures or specific files managing routines. Effective templates engine and integrated project management features helps edit your files in lighting speed.
OS support: Mac OS / Windows / Linux / Unix
Homepage

SciTE
SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations – I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves.
OS support: Mac OS / Windows / Linux / Unix
Homepage

Smultron
Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It has all the advantages of an Cocoa application and some of its features are tabs, line numbers, support for syntax colouring for many different languages, functions list, support for text encodings, snippets, a toolbar, a status bar, preview, split window, multi-document find and replace with regular expressions, possibility to show invisible characters, authenticated open and saves, command-line utility, full screen editing and running commands and scripts from within the application.
OS support: Mac OS
Homepage

TeXnicCenter
TeXnicCenter is a free open source IDE for the LaTeX typesetting language. It uses the MiKTeX or TeX Live distributions. It allows the user to type documents in LaTeX and to compile them in PDF, DVI or PS. A menu gives access easily to precoded elements and environments (formulas, symbols, sections). It also allows for the creation of projects to organise and access the sections and environments of documents, and to insert a bibliography (using BibTeX) and an index (using MakeIndex).
OS support: Windows
Homepage

The Hessling Editor
The Hessling Editor (THE) editor is one of the oldest open source editor projects and for the last decade it was written and maintained by Mark Hessling, who along with being the original author of THE is also a maintainer of Regina, an open source REXX interpreter that has been ported to most Unix platforms.
OS support: Windows / Linux / Unix
Homepage

Yudit
Yudit is a unicode text editor for the X Window System. It was first released on 1997-11-08. It can do TrueType font rendering, printing, transliterated keyboard input and handwriting recognition with no dependencies on external engines. Its conversion utilities can convert text between various encodings. Keyboard input maps can also act like text converters. There is no need for a pre-installed multi-lingual environment. Menus are translated into multiple languages.
OS support: Linux / Unix
Homepage

Let me know if there are any broken or bad links. Watch out for the second part of this series for more free text editors.