Many Windows users prefer to replace Notepad with a more capable text editor. XPad Text is one of the many contestants for the job. This portable freeware has full Unicode support for UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, including multiple languages. It's compact, lightweight, and uses little memory. Among its features are automatic copy selection to the clipboard, multiple clipboard selections, active links, a calculator, and various decoders and converters. Since it's portable, it can run from USB drives and other directories.

XPad's developers said this portable tool is fast, and it opened almost instantaneously when we clicked its single executable. A small pop-up includes Web and Contact links. XPad has an attractive, compact interface with an efficient layout: a main window flanked by icon-based toolbars. One of the program's stated advantages is that all its menus are available right on the interface. Among them is the Configuration menu, which lets users change the background color, create shortcuts, set file associations, and other options. We could also open Explorer, our e-mail client, and our browser from the interface (the browser button uses an IE icon but opened our default Web browser). Fonts, Tex Format, Always-on-Top, Multiple Clipboard, Search, Replace, Word Wrap, and many other controls and options are immediately available for the fastest possible operations.

So XPad is fast and efficient. But as a text editor? Actually, it's really good at that, too. We started with basic text operations like Copy, Paste, and Save, and then find and replace, text formatting, and using the multiple clipboard to insert pretyped text strings. But XPad really surpasses Notepad and similar tools with its filter menu. It includes Convert to Uppercase, Lowercase, and Namecase, Convert TABs to Spaces and Spaces to TABs, Sort lines, Text formatter, Trim Spaces, and others. Some thought went into XPad, which is one of the fastest yet most flexible text editors we've tried.