Steve Eichert and a few others mentioned Intype recently as a "TextMate for Windows". I've never used TextMate, so I can't say if it really is that. However, the site looked intriguing enough that I downloaded and tried it recently.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed by how well the editor worked given that it is such an early release (Alpha 0.2.x). Some things I liked:

  • It's reasonably fast to load. Doesn't quite load as fast as I like, but it does much better than many other simpler editors I've tried.
  • It's snappy when typing. Nothing is worse than seeing the display lag behind your typing (a place where unfortunately Word 2007 and Outlook 2007 are a significant step backwards).
  • The included color schemes are pretty nifty, if someone limited in the colors supported. I rather liked the Cobalt scheme, btw.
  • Has been pretty stable for me so far

That said, it will take a while before it indeed can replace my standalone text editor (old trusty Notepad2), as it still lacks quite a bit of basic functionality. For me to use it day to day, it would need to at least tab settings, regular expression search and replace and C# syntax highliting. The other thing is that it seems to require an installer, which is definitely a downside for me (this is the kind of app that really, really needs an xcopy deployment model).

I do plan on keeping my eye open on Intype and see how it evolves!

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Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.