| Developer(s) | Eric Fookes |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 6.0 (Pro and Standard free to try) 6.0 (Light free) / May 2009 |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | freeware/commercial depending on version |
| Website | www.notetab.com/ |
NoteTab is a freeware/commercial text editor for Windows. It was developed by Eric Fookes of Fookes Software, Switzerland. The program's name refers to the fact that it was one of the earliest text-editors capable of editing several open documents on different tabs (tabbed document interface). The first version, known as Mini NoteTab, was released in 1995; version 5 was released in 2006, version 5.7 in 2008, version 6 on May 4, 2009. Before version 5, the latest version of NoteTab Light was 4.95.
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NoteTab's tabbed interface can simultaneously handle an unlimited number of text files up to 2Gb in size. It is highly customizable, with more than 90 commands available on a user-configurable toolbar.
Some of the more unusual features are the "pasteboard", "outline documents", the "clipbook", "clipbars", counting of words/patterns, and powerful support for search and replace. Text can be searched using regular expressions to match subpatterns and recombine the matched substrings in any order, such as reversing dates "May nn" as ("nn May").
The pasteboard is one of the most powerful (and unusual) features. The user chooses a document to "use as pasteboard". Thereafter, any text copied to the Windows clipboard is appended to the pasteboard document. The resulting combined text can then be used as any other text, and searched to reuse clippings from days or weeks ago.
Outline documents provide hyperlinked headings within a text document, which can be accessed directly by clicking in a side pane; the outline documents can be read in any editor.
NoteTab has its own macro language, called "Clip". The clipbook displays a library of clips (clickable macros) in a side pane. These could be anything from pieces of boilerplate text to HTML tags to "mini-applications" complicated scripts written in the scripting language. A selection of clip libraries is included with the software and others can be downloaded from the Web.
Clipbars are user-defined buttons that appear on a toolbar, for example to execute custom scripts and wizards.
The search and replace features of NoteTab are much more powerful than most text editors, and include regular expressions and a hierarchical search/replace of text in folders on a disk drive. Since version 5.0, NoteTab uses Perl Compatible regular expressions powered by PCRE.
NoteTab integrates with such products as HTML Tidy, TopStyle, CSE HTML Validator and WordWeb.
The software exists in three forms:
There are 30-day trial versions available for Standard and Pro.
NoteTab Light is completely free for all users, with no time-limit, nag screen, appeals for donations, etc. It lacks some of the features of NoteTab Standard. For example, you can read Outline and EBCDIC files but not write them; the disk search facility is present but not disk replace; and the clipbars, customizable menu shortcuts, spell checker and thesaurus are not available. (These "commercial features" can be "turned on" once from within the software, and be used for up to 30 days.) However, these features are hardly indispensable for most purposes and NoteTab Light works perfectly well as a full-fledged editor. For this reason, the author of NoteTab rejects the description of NoteTab Light as crippleware, and it is true that there are many less full-featured paid-for editors on the market.
NoteTab Standard includes, among other features:
NoteTab Pro adds, among others, multi-level undo/redo, syntax highlighting, show/hide nonprinting characters, wrap to column, and support for fixed-pitch OEM fonts, as well as greater speed.
NoteTab does not currently include support for Unicode documents. NoteTab only has syntax highlighting for HTML documents and NoteTab clip/scripts; and not for other languages.
Regular expressions were incorporated starting with NoteTab Light 5.4. The general syntax of NoteTab regular expressions uses the same rules as Perl.