A lot of people don’t like any sort of distractions when they are trying to write something. This is hard to accomplish with all the unnecessary features hovering inside a traditional word processor. For this you need a minimalist text editor that can help you focus on your writing instead of worrying about margins and formatting.

TextSave is one such web application that lets you put your thoughts on paper without getting distracted. No small buttons or crammed-up links to distract you. Simply head-on to TextSave and start typing, no registration or download. Once you are done, click on save and your text file would be saved online. You will also be provided with a short URL that you can use to access your file later.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

Overall, TextSave is a neat application when you have to write something without getting distracted and you want the option of saving it on the cloud. A couple of features that would make it even more useful are a full screen mode and an option to download the file to your hard drive.

When it comes to online word processors, people usually don’t go beyond Google Docs or Zoho. However, there are times when all those extra features and formatting just prove to be a distraction and nothing else.

For times like that, when all you want is a distraction-free, no-nonsense text editor, try DarkCopy. DarkCopy is a simple online text writer that doesn’t have a lot of features. All you can do is type clearly and see what you are typing. No sharing, saving, font or formatting options.
It does, however, has a built-in spell checker and a full screen mode.

The dark background helps in keeping the noise and distractions to the minimum. Once you are done typing, you can copy-paste the text or save it as a text file on your local drive. It is a really good tool for GTD fans and people who don’t want clutter when they are trying to write something.

If you like the dark background idea but want more features with it, you might want to check out a similar yet feature-rich text editor from Big Huge labs.

I’m a big fan of the Google online services. I use Gmail, Reader, Blogger, Docs and more. Guess what happened when I spotted a new application that lets me write text files to Google Docs?

When I found Nocs, and saw that it’s free open source software, I had to try it. Here’s what the web page says about it.

A Windows Notepad style application that uses Google Docs for synchronizing text files.

Features:
* all the basic functionality of the Windows Notepad
* login with a Google account
* change the Google account on-the-fly
* encrypt your documents
* auto-save after a specified timeout
* find & replace with regular expressions

I downloaded the install file for Nocs. It was a little over 1 MB in size. It’s a standard MSI (Microsoft Installer) file and it installed quickly with no fuss.

On start up, the first thing Nocs did was to prompt me for my Google Docs password. Once that was entered it tossed me into a very drab and basic looking text editor. There are no surprises here. It only has the same basic functions as Windows Notepad.

The real magic happens when you save a file. It quickly adds an entry in a spreadsheet in your Google Docs account. That’s not exactly the same as uploading a text file, but you’ll never know the difference.

How large can the text files be?

Each text file you upload is represented on Google in a two column spreadsheet. Column one contains the name of the text file and column two represents that text that you upload. When I saw the way that it worked, my first question to myself was, “How many characters can it store in each cell in the spreadsheet”. This would actually limit how large your text files can be.

I did a quick search on the net and I found that each cell in a Google Spreadsheet can hold roughly 30,000 characters. I noticed that each character in my text file was represented by about 4 characters in each cell. So, a quick guess would be that you can only send a little over 7500 characters in your text files. Only time will tell if I’m guessing right.

Is Nocs portable?

I copied the Nocs program folder to my thumb drive then uninstalled Nocs from my hard drive. I tried running Nocs from the thumb drive and it seems to work ok. As I said above, only time will tell if this will continue to work for me.

Conclusion

Nocs is another way to stay connected with your data no matter where you are. It’s still in beta testing so you may run into a few bugs. However, I can heartily recommend it. It does what it’s supposed to do and it doesn’t screw up anything else. Next I’m hoping they’ll figure out a way to let two or more people work on the same text file at the same time.

You should be aware that you can also use Microsoft Office with Google Docs and OpenOffice with Google Docs by installing a plugin. That’s actually a better solution, but it’s overkill if you only need to upload plain text like you find in Notepad.

Download Nocs

One of the most annoying thing about Microsoft is that they have not yet added a good text editor to their OS, there is Notepad then there is Wordpad. Both of these are decent text editors but there are tons of other free text editors which put both of these to shame.

Also Read: Fire Notepad and Hire Metapad

Another annoying thing about Notepad is that it still does not support tabs, which means that if you want to open 10 text files you will have to deal with 10 open windows.

Notepad Tabs is a freeware and nice notepad replacement that is much more better. It allows you to open multiple text files in a single window by providing users with a tabbed interface.

In addition to that Notepad Tabs also providers users with several themes including Office 2007 Blue, Office 2007 Silver, Office 2007 Black and more.

Notepad Tabs Features

• Different from classic notepad, ‘Notepad Tabs’ gives the freedom to view multiple text files in a single Notepad just like in IE7 and Firefox, which saves you from the mess in the taskbar.
• Allows to open txt files with only one click.
• You can easily select and navigate through open tabs in a single Notepad instance.
• Before closing the application, it allows to save all opened tabs at the same time.
• User friendly interface gives easy access to frequently used commands.
• Unlike classic notepad you can choose 6 different themes

Download Notepad Tabs [via To the PC]

Normally we use Wordpad to create and edit documents if we haven’t installed any of the office suite. But the main drawback of Wordpad is that, it provides only basic features. Here is an alternate to Wordpad, that takes basic editing to the next level.

Easy Writer 09 is an excellent alternate to Wordpad with an elegant look. It also sport a ribbon interface, that you may have earlier used in Microsoft Office.

Best features of Easy Writer 09

Ribbon Interface

You may be familiar with the ribbon interface if you have earlier used Microsoft Office 2007. Ribbon Interface proves to be much easier and efficient as compared to the old menu style interface. Though the Wordpad provided in Windows 7 already have ribbon interface, this software will help the users of Windows XP and Vista to get the same look and feel right inside their OS.

Clear Everything

Many a times you need to delete everything that you have written, for this you normally keep pressing the backspace key or you may first select all the text with ctrl+a and then press delete key. To make this process much simpler, a single button is provided to clear all the text in the document.

Open Audio, Video And Images

Most of us have the habit of listening songs while doing work. But if you are writing something inside Easy Writer 09, just forget any other music players because you can play audio, video as well as image files right inside the program itself.

Although there are many advantages of using this software, but one of the biggest disadvantage is that you can open and save files only in .rtf (Rich Text Files) format. It would be better if they have provided support for more file formats.

We would definitely recommend you to use this software as it provides many exiting features as compared to any other basic text editor.

Download Easy Writer 09

Over the last 12 years I have been using Windows the only thing that I have not seen change is notepad, it has been as it is for so many iterations of Windows. So as a developer, I have always had to rely on other editors to get my job done.

There have been various notepad replacements over time, and many of them have definitely been pretty good, TinyEdit definitely makes it to that big league of notepad replacements.

TinyEdit runs out of the box and does not require any installation and supports several formats and syntax highlighting for PHP, CSS, HTML, Java, Java Script, VB Script, XML, Perl, Python, Ruby, C#, SQL, Tcl/Tk, GW-TEL Scripts, UNIX Shell Scripts, Semanta DD, Standard ML, Vrml97/X3D, AWK Scripts, MS-DOS Batch, C/C++, COBOL, Visual Basic, Pascal, Modula-3 and Fortran.

TinyEdit Features

• Powerful and easy to use
• Syntax highlighting for more than 26 scripts
• Multiple document interface
• Unlimited undo/redo capability
• Text can be automatically word-wrapped
• Line number, Powerful search and replace
• Only one executable file (no need install)
• Freeware for both personal and commercial use

Download TinyEdit

Smashing Magazine has put up a review of 35 useful source code Editors. Those editors can be quite useful for editing HTML, CSS or programming code or just as a notepad replacement.

Here are some of my favorite picks from the list most of which I currently use too.

• Adobe Homesite.
• UltraEdit.
• EditPlus.
• Notepad++.
• PSPad.
• TopStyle CSS Editor.
• TextPad.

The one editor that finds a worthwhile mention from my end if Eclipse which I use to create java and PHP projects. I use eclipse for creating WordPress plugins and client projects because of the better management features it provides me with.

Would love to know which is your favorite editor.