EmEditor

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EmEditor is a lightweight, but extensible, commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows. It is developed by Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft, Inc. Although designed for Windows XP, the program is also certified for use with Windows Vista. Available editions of the program include the 32-bit edition and the 64-bit edition, and the program also includes a portability option to set up a removable drive, such as a USB drive, through an Import and Export Wizard. Feature-wise, the program includes unicode and large file support, a tabbed window design, and is extensible via plugins and scripts (macros), many of which have been written by the users.

Unicode support

From the beginning, the program was designed to support Unicode. The author states that “EmEditor supports Unicode natively, and in fact, the whole program is built as a Unicode application.” EmEditor also provides tools for work with various text encodings: automatic encoding detection, Byte Order Mark support, file reload with a different encoding, detection of encoding errors. The program opens a file with any encoding supported in the Windows system, and easily converts from one encoding to another. The program opens Unicode file names and searches for Unicode characters. Within EmEditor, the ability to open and edit files as Unicode makes it the preferred encoding method for multiple language support because it can display multiple languages at the same time.

Plug-ins

EmEditor is extensible via plug-ins written in C/C++. Many features commonly found in text editors, such as Spell Check, Code Folding, and Auto-Complete, are implemented as plug-ins instead of being built in. The editor’s API is available, so that users can write their own plug-ins.

There are 12 plug-ins built into the EmEditor Professional program:

There are many other additional plug-ins available for download in the Library section of the EmEditor website, such as CSE HTML Validator Plug-in, Align Left Plug-in, and ColorPicker Plug-in.

Besides plug-ins available for the 32-bit edition, there are also plug-ins available for the 64-bit edition.

Scripting macros

The program is scriptable. The scripting engine is based on the Windows Script Host (WSH). Individual EmEditor scripts (macros) are stored as separate text files. Simple scripts can be created with a macro recording utility. By default, the program’s scripts are written in either JavaScript (more precisely, JScript) or in VBScript. In general, the program can be scripted in any scripting language that supports Active Scripting, including Python, Ruby, Perl, and PHP. For instance, the user can write EmEditor scripts in Python after installing the official Python distribution from www.python.org and also Python for Windows Extensions.

The program includes powerful macros. Macros can be written to do almost anything in the program . The program can write macros using any ActiveScript language that is supported by the program. Macros can be defined to record keystrokes and mouse operations. Macros can be assigned to keyboard buttons and toolbar buttons. All defined My Macros are displayed in a macro toolbar. Macros also have a drop down menu in EmEditor with commands such as start, stop and run for the macros. Designed to run independently of the EmEditor program, macros in the program are implemented as a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) file. To conserve system resources, the Dynamic Link Library is only loaded during macro execution.

Large file support

The program can open huge files (up to 248 GB or 2.1 billion lines) with only a little memory. The program uses temporary files for the opening process, to consume only a little memory. When opening a file larger than 248 GB, the program uses a large file controller to monitor the file being opened. The controller specifies the start point, end point, and range of the file. Within the Large File Controller, clicking the Stop button stops the opening process. The unit can be changed between bytes and terabytes.

Tabbed window design

The program includes a tabbed window design. Like tabbed browser applications, EmEditor uses tabbed windows to allow a user to switch between opened documents easily, as well as open many documents easily. A user can drag and drop tab icons to switch document positions or press the mouse middle button to close the tab. The Enable Tabs command on the Window menu allows a user to switch between single and multiple window interface. A user can right-click on the tabs and adjust the way that the tabs are arranged. The tabs can be arranged by Name, Type, Modified, Active, Ascending Order, Descending Order, or Auto Arranged.

Snippets

The Snippets plug-in is installed by default with EmEditor Professional. This plug-in allows you to insert words and phrases quickly. A snippet is a piece of text that you insert into your document and may contain plain text, placeholders, shell code, a macro, or regular expressions to transform text and various built-in and user-defined parameters. In the Snippets plug-in, you can create two types of items – snippets and macros.

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