looking for a UTF-8 text editor

Question

I am looking for a (simple) text editor that can handle text in different encodings in the same document.

I need to develop some sites with mixed Japanese and Englis

Answer 1

EditPad Lite and Pro fully support Unicode as of version 6. (Disclaimer: Those are my own products.)

If you get question marks, you're using an encoding that does not support Japanese characters. In EditPad, you can change the text encoding (Unicode, legacy code pages) via Convert, Text Encoding. You can set the defaults per file type in Options, Configure File Types, Encoding.

If you see squares instead of Japanese characters, select a Japanse font or Unicode font. You can do this in EditPad via Options, Font.

To type Japanese, simply install a Japanese keyboard driver in the keyboard settings in the Windows Control Panel, if you haven't already.

EditPad Pro has preconfigured file types for PHP and HTML.

Answer 2

For very basic UTF-8 multilingual text editing, I have had good luck with BabelPad (www.babelstone.co.uk): it's free, simple and robust and displays almost everything with no fuss. When the editing needs are more severe, I resort a lot to EditPad Pro, or occasionally Notepad++. For non-Unicode editing on Windows, I'm a TextPad user--my staff and I have probably spent about 200,000 hours in TextPad, with only occasional forays into NotePad2, MadEdit, jEdit, XML Copy Editor, and EPCedit. The latter two handle UTF-8 XML files well. All of the editors mentioned above are free except TextPad and EditPad Pro. Thanks to the person who suggested Emeditor. I'll try it out. --PFSchaffner

Answer 3

EditPad Pro ... is recommended for u

cheers ;)

Answer 4

I would recommend Vim still. The problem you were seeing with questions marks is probably an issue with the font you were using. When displaying text that contains characters not in the currently language applications typically display them as empty boxes or question marks. See here for UTF-8 support in Vim.

This section of the Vim manual is also helpful, especially for setting up UTF-8 in Windows.

Answer 5

Vim works fine for me as a UTF-8 text editor.

Firstly, you need a font that has the characters you are using. Choosing another text editor won't help you with this (unless it searches for other fonts for the correct characters when the font you are using doesn't have them). If you are using gVim, you can set the font like:

set guifont=Consolas

(This is not to say that Consolas is the font you want.) You probably want to put this in the .vimrc file so that it is always used.

Secondly, Vim needs to interpret the file as UTF-8, which it doesn't always automatically do. To make it do this, do:

set encoding=utf8

You can also see what encoding it is using with:

set encoding?

Answer 6

Try EditPlus. It has specific support for HTML, syntax highlighting and can also work as a simple IDE for any compiler.