Most text editors have different replace functions to change one word for another or fix formatting issues, but none of them seem deep enough. With that in mind, we came across Textreme, an external application that allows us to program actions to edit a text in multiple ways, such as changing all content to uppercase, removing spaces, and moving specific characters, among other things.
The Need for Automation
Suppose you've downloaded an old text from the web that was written entirely in capital letters. That already makes it quite uncomfortable to read, but any additional manual editing will only increase your work. Another common action is having to replace a group of characters with others, although that function exists in basic tools like Notepad. Certain formats can be very complicated to process, and often we are interested in having a clean text file, without strange symbols or conversion errors. The problem is that everything depends on the size of the text itself. A couple of lines are easy to manage, but if the text is longer than we expected, we will need some kind of automation.
Introducing Textreme
That brings us to Textreme. In essence, this program allows us to create scripts with the aim of editing and altering the formatting of entire texts with just a few clicks. Switching from uppercase to lowercase (or vice versa), removing spaces, replacing and swapping characters (the latter to generate a basic encryption), splitting and numbering lines, substituting brackets with other symbols, and deleting entire sections of text represent most of the available options. The program is not what we would call intuitive, and it is recommended to read the help file before starting large edits, as it takes only a few minutes and will make the whole process easier.
Technical Details
One technical detail to keep in mind is that Textreme works only with plain text files, that is, with txt, php, htm extensions and similar. If you have a document saved in rtf or doc, you must convert it first, or you will not be able to select it. Textreme is completely portable, and its developer offers 32 and 64-bit versions.
