MetroTextual

MetroTextual is a software utility which provides users with a simple means of writing text and comes bundled with syntax highlighting capabilities.

Clear-cut UI

The installation process does not last very long, as it does not bring any kind of unpleasant surprises, while the interface you are met with presents a design which can only be described as minimal and clean. Getting its inspiration from Microsoft’s Metro Design Language, the main window only encloses a few buttons and a pane in which to write your text. This means that all user categories can work with it with great ease, including those with little or no previous experience with computers.

Incorporated syntax highlighting for many languages

Multiple instances of MetroTextual can be opened, thus ensuring you the possibility of multi-tasking. Moreover, syntax highlighting is available for programming languages such as C#, C++, CSS, HTML, Java, PHP, SQL, Visual Basic and XML, and you can save your text to the hard drive as TXT files.

Customize the tool’s appearance and change character encoding

From the settings panel you can easily change the aspect of the interface, by selecting another window color and adjust its opacity with the help of a slider bar. It is also possible to enable code folding and word wrapping, change the language (e.g. English, Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Italian, Japanese etc.) and encoding (UTF-8, ASCII and Unicode).

Conclusion and performance

It does not put a strain on the system’s performance, as the CPU and memory usage is insignificant and thus you can run it along with any program without encountering issues, be they demanding or not. The response time is good, the interface is accessible to all users and we did not register any errors or crashes.