The purpose of software is to make our life easier; even when it comes to a function like sprucing up plain text. Plain text is the basic building block of the writing we do on our editors. But plain text lacks functional extras that we wish could give us some control over the text we type.

Dolphin Text Editor v1.6 is a lightweight Windows app that adds some functional extras to any Windows program that handles text. Sitting in the System Tray, it can be brought up with a hotkey and the text formatting commands applied on the selected text. Dolphin Text Editor is a free text editor (for personal use) and it runs on all Windows versions and all Windows software (Notepad, MS Office, code editors, and even browsers, and online chat apps like Facebook Chat etc).

Just how useful is this utility when all you are typing is vanilla plain text? Let’s take this productivity app and run a few laps around to see how we can make use of it.

A Lightweight Utility

Coming in at 884KB, Dolphin Text Editor is a small bundle. You can even install it as a portable app with an approximate size of 1.52MB. It sits quietly in the background and doesn’t cut in too much into your memory space. Set the option to load it at startup or click to open it on the System Tray where it sits and awaits your next command.

free text editor

Dolphin Text Menu as the name indicates has a menu of text functions which you can simply call up with a hotkey. The default hotkey is CTRL + 0 (Numpad). You can change the hotkey from the Options settings.

Text Formatting In Action

windows text editor

The software page and the screenshot above describe the menu functions. So, I won’t go into each one, but instead show some of the more important ones with the help of a few screenshots and examples of how I use it.

Quickly arranging names in alphabetical order:

windows text editor

This simple utility is really helpful if you are working in Notepad or even a simple text box and quickly want to arrange names or numbers in a particular order.

Quickly arrange text in blocks by removing extra space:

text editor freeware

Paragraphs of text with trailing lines can be quickly arranged in blocks of text by removing blank lines, leading spaces, trailing spaces etc.

Quickly format sentences into titles (or change case):

text editor freeware

This is especially useful if you do a lot of writing on the web and need to format your titles, headings, and sub-headings with a click. Word does have a similar feature but if you are using an editor which doesn’t then this is handy.

Quickly clean text:

text editor freeware

Word does help to strip text of any formatting if you working with it. But think of a forwarded email message or replies to your comments on discussion boards: if you want to spruce them up, then Dolphin Text Editor can help you clean text by converting everything to plain text, removing HTML tags and also stripping any BBCode tags.

Quickly get word count:

free text editor

Minimalist text editors like Notepad lack a word count feature. Dolphin Text Editor meets the gap with functions like word count which breaks up the figures in detail (as in screenshot). You can also copy it straight to the clipboard.

These five uses are pretty much the common ones you can expect to encounter each day. Which other free text editor can you think of that tackles theses simple things from the system tray?Take a look at Dolphin Text Editor and let us know if you can put it to any other use unique to your requirements.

Image Credit: Shutterstock