Sadly, there really *isn't* any adequate free substitute for PsPad... All of the others that I've tried (all 21 of them) have lacked major features that I consider mandatory in my professional work!!
For well over a decade, I used a shareware editor called MultiEdit; in fact, I started using it back in the MSDOS days. However, it hasn't been supported since 2008 (the company is essentially bankrupt), so I had looked for a replacement. Only PsPad and SynWrite had all of the critical features that I felt I couldn't live without. SynWrite, unfortunately, has some strange quirks, especially when many files are open (it is common for me to have 10 or more files open when I'm working). PsPad is superb, and I *really* miss it!! But having a crash occur once or twice a day is intolerable, and having the random garbage pop up in files is aggravating, especially since the garbage often *replaces* the valid code that was there before, forcing me to delve back into the repository to recover what was lost... sigh... -- <https://forum.pspad.com/read.php?4,70027,70052> PSPad freeware editor https://www.pspad.com
