Download Review: Intype is an attractive and useful text editor

A good text editor can be a powerful tool. If you want to write some text quickly, it won't distract you with extra tools and they can be a quick alternative to the heavy weight code editors. Intype is a capable text editor with a clean interface and all the essential tools.

At present Intype is only available as a portable app. Download and extract the compressed folder on to your computer. Double-click on the Intype program and it's ready to go.

As we said, there isn't much to distract you when the editor loads for the first time. There's just a menu bar at the top and a status bar along the bottom.

The status bar can be used to select the programming language being edited (if that's what you're doing) as well as the kind of line breaks and tabs being used.

There are two extra panes, the project pane can be set to appear on the left and the messages at the bottom.

The project pane is a handy way to find files when you are working on several at a time. A common example would be editing a website template. Having all the files in the pane is easier than using the Open dialogue and can help when refering to files in code.

Creating a project is simple as it is possible to drag and drop folders and files into the Project Pane. Intype will attempt to load any files that are double-clicked, so images can produce some interesting results, hopefully this might be tweaked to load them in the default viewer in Windows.

Multiple files can be open at the same time with a tabbed interface for switching between them.

Code-colouring is a very useful tool for making sure that everything is entered properly and for tracking down errors. Intype supports a good range of languages to colour code.

The Bundles tool has the potential to be a big time saver as it includes code snippets that are used on a regular basis. Not only does this save time writing out snippets such as HTML document type statements but it reduces the risk of making mistakes.

While it doesn't have quite as many tools as our current favourite, Notepad++, Intype is a good text editor with a lot of potential.