Every now and again, I'll post a review of a great free or open-source computer program that I like. This week's pick is Notepad2, by Florian Balmer.

Notepad2, as you may have guessed, is a replacement for Notepad, the text editor program that comes with Windows. While Notepad is great for editing source code files (like HTML, CSS, etc), it is a quite limited program. There are no line numbers, no syntax coloring, a very limited statusbar, and the undo/redo support is very limited.

Notepad2 fixes all that. There is a a quick-access toolbar, which is much faster than pull-down menus. The statusbar displays useful information, like the position in the document, the size of the document, the encoding, the line ending type (CR+LF, CR, or LF), whether insert or overwrite mode is active, and the syntax coloring tool being used.

My favorite two tools, though, are the line numbering and syntax coloring. Notepad2 displays the line number of each line of text in the document. For programmers, this makes debugging much easier, since errors are usually given with the number of the line they occured on. Syntax coloring makes reading code much easier, since strings are in one color, comments another, commands another, and so on.

Unlike other Notepad replacements, Notepad2 strikes a balance between power and simplicity. Without task panes, add-ins, multiple toolbars, or tabbed editing, Notepad2 makes itself out to be what it is: A simple but useful utility. While some would argue tabbed editing is useful (I'm on of them, actually), Florian has noted that tabbed editing goes beyond "[the] goal of a simple Notepad-like application".

The bottom line is, if you need a text editor that has a good balance between features and simplicity, Notepad2 is for you.