EditPad Lite: Basic Text Editor with Full Regular Expression Support

EditPad Lite is a basic yet handy text editor for the Microsoft Windows platform. It has all the essential features for editing plain text files, including a complete set of search-and-replace features using a powerful regular expression engine.

EditPad Lite’s Regular Expression Support

EditPad Lite doesn’t use a limited and outdated regular expression engine like so many other text editors do. EditPad Lite uses the same full-featured regular expression engine used by PowerGREP. EditPad Lite’s regex flavor is highly compatible with the flavors used by Perl, Java, .NET and many other modern Perl-style regular expression flavors.

EditPad Lite integrates with RegexBuddy and RegexMagic. You can instantly fire up RegexBuddy to edit the regex you want to use in EditPad Lite, select one from a RegexBuddy library, or generate one using RegexMagic.

Search and Replace Using Regular Expressions

In EditPad Lite you can press Shift+Ctrl+F or click the leftmost button on the Search toolbar to toggle between the small Search toolbar and the full Search panel with multi-line Search and Replace boxes. The latter is very convenient for composing longer regular expressions. Pressing Ctrl+F focuses the Search box in either case. Press the Regex toggle button to enable regular expressions mode. Press the Free button if you want to enable free-spacing mode. EditPad then ignores spaces and line breaks in your regex, so you can make the most of the multi-line Search box. Enter the regex you want to search for and hit the Find First or Find Next button. EditPad Lite then highlights search match.

When there are no further regex matches, EditPad Lite doesn’t interrupt you with a popup message that you have to OK. The text cursor and selection will simply stay where they were, and the find button that you clicked will flash briefly. This may seem a little subtle at first, but you’ll quickly appreciate EditPad Lite staying out of your way and keeping you productive.

Replacing text is just as easy. First, type the replacement text, using backreferences if you want, in the Replace box. Search for the match you want to replace as above. To replace the current match, click the Replace button. To replace it and immediately search for the next match, click the Replace Current and Find Next button. Or, click Replace All to get it over with.

More Information on EditPad Lite and Free Download

EditPad Lite works under Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11. For more information on EditPad Lite, please visit www.editpadlite.com. EditPad Lite is free for personal use. Business and government users can purchase a license.