Notepad is fine for me as an everyday editor , but I voted Emacs. I'm a long time fan of Richard Stallman and his work ..... personal bias on my part ? ..... probably !
PSPad has a spell checker, but you have to download the dictionary file from their site. UltraEdit has a nice spell checker, but again, not free. Not even cheap.
OK, I see. Those apps are more geared to programmers I think. I see you need the pro version of EditPad for a spell-checker.
They are but if that is not the target use for a text editor then I'd have to know what someone wanted to do to make a different recommendation.
Notepad++ has a decent spell checker, but has to be enabled manually through it's plugin manager. The spell checker plugin is called DSpellCheck.
Right away I'm thinking, "good ol, old school Notepad", but didn't expect it to clean house the way it did.
I'm usually reluctant to install third-party software when built-in tools like notepad work fine. But since I've started learning to program, I've been experimenting with other text editors including notepad++ and sublime text editor. I really like that these editors assist with syntax and the colored text and non-white background has helped to relieve eye-strain considerably. Would recommend both.
Ok, I voted Atom, and I'm a bit surprised I'm the only one. I think it's pretty sweet. I'm not sure why anyone would use relative oldies like Notepad++ (ugly) or TextMate over it. As for the real golden oldies like Emacs and Vim, I at least understand their niche. Atom doesn't seem slow to load for me, actually seems to load faster than Komodo Edit, Brackets, etc. But I'm on a Mac, so maybe the Windows version is slower. Atom is free, open source, cross platform, and based around upgradable & customizable packages. UI supports... themes (both for UI and for syntax highlighting), multiple cursors (add or correct multiple items at once), multiple panes, multiple tabs, flexible snippet / smart-replace tab completion functionality, nice find & replace (optional Regular Expression support), spell check (for plain-text and other non-programming grammars where it makes sense), multiple syntax "grammars" (HTML, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, Plain Text, etc), multiple text encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO 8859-1, etc), flexible whitespace control (soft tabs, trailing whitespace cleanup, etc), support for text "folding" (hide complete sections of text/code down to one line so you can focus on other areas) "hackability" / customization (don't like something, write a package to add it or change it), optional tree-view file browser "project" support, informational-level Git support (although not full-blown operational stuff like clone, commit, etc), and more. I would recommend giving it a shot...
We use "relate oldies" because relatively newer editors such as Atom do not offer any significantly better/new features, especially the ones you have listed. That is not to say Atom is bad, just not in any way a game changer.
