vNote
A real editor for the files Notepad will not open — and one that tells you what it did to them.
The problem
Notepad has two habits that cost people afternoons. Open a file written on a Linux server and it shows one enormous line. Open a file from an older Windows program and the quotation marks come out as black diamonds. Both are the same fault underneath: it decides how to read the bytes and never says which decision it made.
vNote makes those decisions out loud. The bar along the bottom always says what encoding the file was read as and how its lines end, and both are one click from being changed. Open a file, save it without editing it, and the bytes on disk are the bytes that were there before — which is not something every editor can claim.
What it does
1It knows what it is reading
UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 either way round, and ANSI — worked out from the bytes rather than the extension. Convert between them, or reopen the file as something else when the text looks wrong.
2Line endings you can see
Windows, Unix or old Macintosh, shown in the status bar and converted on click. A file with a mixture of all three says so, instead of quietly picking one.
3Nothing is lost to a crash
Tabs come back when you reopen it, including the ones you never saved. Unsaved text is written to a backup every few seconds, so a power cut or a 3am Windows update does not take your work.
465 languages, coloured
Chosen by extension, by file name — Makefile, .gitignore, hosts — or by the shebang on the first line, for the scripts that have no extension at all.
5Forty lines at once
Select a column with Alt and drag, or drop a caret on every line with Alt and click. Then type once, and it happens everywhere.
6Find in Files
Search a whole folder tree with a file mask, whole-word and regular expressions. It skips binaries instead of filling the results with noise, streams large files rather than loading them, and stops when you tell it to.
7The tools you currently paste into a website
Format JSON, indent XML, Base64 and URL encode and decode, sort lines, remove duplicates, change case, tabs to spaces. All of them run on this PC.
8Editing that keeps up
Folding, a document map, bracket matching, indent guides, find and replace with regular expressions, and the whole of Visual Studio Code’s editing engine underneath.
Why it is worth it
The encoding and the line endings are written back exactly as they were read. If an encoding cannot hold a character you have typed, it says how many would be lost before it writes, not after.
Eleven tabs open, half of them never saved, and you can close the window. They are all there tomorrow.
Pasting a config file into a website to have it formatted sends it to somebody else’s server. The same job here does not — and vNote has no network code at all.
The installer adds "Edit with vNote" to the right-click menu and puts vNote in the Open with list. What opens a .txt today still opens it tomorrow, unless you change it yourself.
How you use it
"Edit with vNote" is on every file, not a list of extensions — the whole reason to install an editor like this is the file whose extension nobody recognises.
It tells you the encoding, the line endings, the language and where the caret is. Click any of them to change it.
Ctrl+Shift+F, point it at a folder, and the results dock along the bottom. Click a line to open the file at that line.
There is no need to save first. What you were typing comes back.
What it needs
| Windows | 10 or 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Installs to | Your user profile — no administrator prompt |
| Needs | Nothing else installed first |
| Data kept in | Your own profile folder — settings, the session and the backups of unsaved work |
| Largest file | Opens up to 512 MB; above about 12 MB the map and folding switch off to keep it quick |
See vNote on your own machine
A short screen-share is usually enough — we open it on your PC, with your files.
Or write to info@issmart.in.
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