Notepad++

★★★★★

A perfect balance of powerful and lightweight, Notepad++ is far more capable than Notepad, but doesn’t complicate things like a full IDE.

This Windows text editor launches fast enough I don’t even bother using Notepad anymore. It works great for editing large files, using custom syntax highlighting, multifile / regex / multiline search and replace, sorting, dealing with duplicates, and all kinds of advanced things you might want to do on a text file or group of them. I’ve opened multi-megabyte CSV files, sorted or filtered, and re-saved in the time it would take Excel to parse them.

Free Software, in both senses of the word.

Notepad++ is my main text editor on Windows, just as BBEdit is on MacOS. As for Linux, Notepad++ works great on Wine. There’s a little more overhead though, so when I don’t need its advanced features I still use Featherpad for speed.