Maybe you know this scenario. You’ve just been handed a large XML or CSV file, you start to load it into your database of choice, and you get a file format error. There’s an embedded comma in a text field, or the XML isn’t properly nested. You’d like to open up the file and take a look, but you know opening up this 100meg file in notepad is gonna’ eat your computers lunch. Try TextPad!

I tried TextPad out for the first time the other day. It’s awesome! It can open ENORMOUS files with relative ease. It allowed me to open a 200meg XML file to verify that it was properly formatted without killing my machine. Granted I have 1gig of memory, but performing the same task in Notepad is essentially impossible.

On top of being able to handle such large files it is feature packed without being bulk-ware. Installed it takes up a whopping 4megs of disk space.

I must admit, I am a new user to TextPad and I haven’t fully explored the applications potential. But some great features I’ve noticed include macros, spell checking, character maps, find and replace using regular expressions, file compare, sorting, and tabbed open files. There is also support to compile and run Java code from the editor, though I haven’t tried this feature.

TextPad is free to try with all of its features enabled. If you like it, a single user license is $28.70US. They also have license packs.

If you need to do serious raw text manipulation for HTML, Java, CSV or otherwise, check this tool out.

References:
TextPad – The Editor for Windows