ImmersED: not just another Notepad replacement

ImmersED is an interesting plain text editor for Windows XP+. It’s not another feature-heavy developer-oriented Notepad replacement -- in fact, its core editor is very basic -- but the program has nice extra touches which could appeal to a wide range of users.

It’s designed to run full-screen, for instance, giving you a minimal chrome, distraction-free interface. But you can also run it in a window, and either environment can be customized by adding a word count, session target, a clock, and more.

There’s support for embedded notes, blocks of text which can be collapsed into text labels ("+ To Do") for simple outliner-type applications. The sidebar can optionally list all the notes in the current document, making them easier to navigate and view.

You get live spell-check via Hunspell, (as used in Firefox), and ImmersED can automatically save your current file, based on time or the number of words/ paragraphs you’ve changed.

ImmersED has various ways to customize your working environment. You can choose a new theme, or create one of your own, defining the text font, size, text, background and page colours. There’s also a fun "sound theme" option to make your PC sound like some classic electric typewriter models. (And a volume control, fortunately for others in the room.)

You’re also able to change page width just by clicking and dragging at the page border, or you might temporarily change font size by holding down Ctrl and spinning the mouse wheel.

The editing engine is very basic. It’s able to open RTF files, you can drag and drop text around in your document, or use plain text markup to make text *bold* or _italic_, but that’s about it.

The editor is well-packaged, though, delivering everything you need -- undo, copy/ paste, find/ replace, print/ print preview, a "recent file" list, all with the expected keyboard shortcuts -- and there’s real attention to detail everywhere. Display the clock in your sidebar, say, and you don’t just get some fixed block of text: you can opt to display just the date, just the time, or choose your preferred date/ time formats from a lengthy list of possibilities.

Put it all together and ImmersED is a smart text editor which doesn’t just follow the crowd, but dares to try out a few interesting ideas of its own. It’s also free for everyone, portable, and available now for Windows XP and later.