BowPad is a text editor with syntax highlighting features and a modern user interface with ribbon bar just like in Microsoft Office. It can be used as a regular text editor or as a code editor for a number of different languages. It supports syntax highlighting for many computer languages such as C#, C, C++, HTML, Visual Basic, Java, HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Ruby and more.
BowPad is open-source software and is available both in form of a setup installer and as a portable application. The portable version is great for keeping on your USB thumb drive so that you can use it on any Windows PC you want.
As a code editor, BowPad gives you all the tools and features desired by a programmer. It has color syntax highlighting for dozens of languages, it has line numbers, margin, auto-tabs and auto-braces. It makes writing a computer program very convenient in any of the supported languages. When working with a project containing many files, you can select any of the source-code files through the file-tree control for editing.
Another feature that you often want when working with code editing is easy access to compiler or interpreter. For example, when making programs in C language, you may want easy access to GCC command. BowPad allows you to quickly launch “cmd.exe” window from where you can run any of these compilers to quickly test your programs. In case of HTML file, they can be launched in any of the installed browsers. And you can also add many custom commands in the user interface for quick access.
BowPad is a very convenient, fast and powerful code editor. It can be used in place of Notepad or even Notepad++ in Windows. On their homepage, they actually give instructions on how you can replace Windows Notepad with BowPad using some registry editing.
You can download BowPad from https://github.com/stefankueng/BowPad.