Many people, including researchers of Jewish languages, may have no doubt about equating a word processor with the preparation of electronic documents. Since it tries to assume two separate functions of preparing both textual content and its physical layout simultaneously, it is slow, especially when processing large documents, and to be worse, neither of the functions is fulfilled efficiently and professionally. When one concentrates on the textual content without being detracted by its physical layout, it is therefore absurd to use a word processor. This function can be fulfilled more efficiently by a text editor.

In spite of the growing acceptance of Unicode and the growing number of text editors that claim to be Unicode-compliant, the majority of them turn out to fail to fully support Unicode, including the bidirectional algorithm. For text editors to be an efficient tool in preparing textual content in Hebrew and Jewish languages, often with the mixture of English and other left-to-right languages, they probably have to embody the following features in the descending order of importance.

  1. Saving documents in UTF-8 without BOM [very important]
  2. Proper display of Hebrew (RTL) text [very important]
  3. Proper input of Hebrew (RTL) text [very important]
  4. Proper editing of existing Hebrew (RTL) text [very important]
  5. Right alignment of a whole Hebrew (RTL) document [very important]
  6. Word wrap [important]
  7. Find and replace with regular expressions [important]
  8. Find and replace in multiple documents [important]
  9. Showing whitespace, tab, EOL and EOF marks
  10. Syntax highlighting
  11. Tag auto-complete
  12. Folding

Only a handful of all the self-proclaimed "Unicode-compliant" text editors for Windows support the first five features, which are essential in processing RTL text, such as Notepad++ (open source freeware), Alpha (open source freeware), BabelPad (freeware); EmEditor Professional (shareware) and EditPad Pro (shareware), two sophistcated editors whose support for RTL text is still partial, are added for comparison. The following table summarizes the features they support.

Feature Notepad++ Alpha BabelPad EmEditor EditPad
1. Saving documents in UTF-8 without BOM yes yes yes yes yes
2. Proper display of Hebrew (RTL) text yes yes yes partial partial
3. Proper input of Hebrew (RTL) text yes yes yes partial partial
4. Proper editing of existing Hebrew (RTL) text partial1 yes yes no no
5. Right alignment of a whole Hebrew (RTL) document yes yes yes no no
6. Word wrap yes yes yes yes yes
7. Find and replace with regular expressions partial2/3 yes no yes yes
8. Find and replace in multiple documents partial2 no no yes yes
9. Showing whitespace, tab, EOL and EOF marks yes yes no yes yes
10. Syntax highlighting yes yes no yes yes
11. Tag auto-complete plugin no no plugin no
12. Folding partial4 no no yes yes

Notes