TxtView

TxtView is a lightweight text editor that facilitates a simple workspace for writing ideas and opening plain text documents. It has a built-in file navigator and offers support for multiple encoding methods. However, it cannot be used for editing text.
There is no installation involved, so you can save the program files in any part of the hard disk and just click the executable to launch the app.

Open and view files as text or binary

It's wrapped in a seemingly outdated interface based on a large window split into two panes, dedicated to file navigation and text viewing, respectively.
After opening a text file, you should be able to read its contents in the second pane, which has a blue background and yellow highlights, which remind us of BSOD.

Explore multiple encoding modes

You can make a text selection and copy it to the Clipboard, change the view mode from text to binary (decimal or hexadecimal), hide the file explorer, call a Notepad instance to make text modifications and save files, as well as cycle through various encoding methods: ANSI, OEM, Symbol, Mac, Baltic, East European, Greek, Turkish, and Cyrillic (Windows, MS-DOS, ISO-8859-5, KO18-R, Mac).
As far as program options are concerned, you can change the font type, size, background and foreground color, along with the TAB snap (4 or 8 characters).

Evaluation and conclusion

There were no stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the utility didn't hang, crash or prompt error messages. It left a small footprint on system resources, using low CPU and RAM.
On the other hand, TxtView hasn't been updated for a long time, and it needs a lot improvements in both interface and feature set.