Free XML Editor
Types Of Free XML Editors
There are literally hundreds of Free xml editor out there, one simple search on Google will return thousands of listings. You can even find sites like this one that list free xml editors, however not all sites are as dedicated and offer a comprehensive listing as we do.
The more popular free xml editors include, Cooktop, Zeena, XML Cop Editor and Jaxe. You can find out more about these programs in the detailed listing of free xml editors below. However you can refer to other sources for independent reviews as well to ensure you find the right software for your specific xml editing needs.
Basic Features of an XML Editor
When comparing your free xml editor, you should seek out the following functionality, these are common to even the most basic of xml editor.
- Code completion
- Syntax colour coding
- Help documentation
Once you have ticked your basic needs you might also want to cover some slightly more advanced features which some of the best xml editor have as standard.
- well-formedness of the xml document
- validation of xml document against a Schema / DTD.
- XSL transformation support
Recommended Free XML Editor
Having worked extensively with xml editors our best pick for the best free xml editor go to Microsoft’s XML Notepad. This has a number of “handy features” common to almost all XML editors:
- Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
- Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
- Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
- Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
- Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
- In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
- Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
- Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
- Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
- Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
- Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
- Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
- Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
- Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
- Built-in XML Diff tool.
- Support for XInclude
- Dynamic help from XSD annotations.
- Goto definition to navigate includes and XSD schema information.
Other Free XML Editors
Here is our extensive list of some of the best free editors available today.
Amaya 3.1 – Free
The W3C’s test editor/browser, Amaya is intended to be a comprehensive client environment for testing and evaluating new proposals for Web standards and formats. New features include expanded support for MathML and XHTML, line numbering in source files.
Butterfly – Free
Butterfly XML Editor is an IDE built on top of a new real-time incremental XML parsing algorithm. The editor features syntax and error highlighting, incremental validation, code completion, XSLT pipelines, and side by side DOM and source viewing.
Cooktop – Free
Cooktop is an editor and development environment for XML, DTD, and XSLT documents
Cooktop is a Windows application.
EditiX Lite – Free
EditiX Lite is a free and powerful and easy to use editor, Visual Schema Editor and XSLT debugger for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Emile Lite – Free
Emilé is used to author documents using extensible markup. XML allows the use of custom elements in addition to or in place of HTML tags, and provides many other features for better content management.
Exchanger XML Lite – Free
Exchanger XML Lite is very efficient and secure as it is developed using Java. It is a multi-platform software that includes many features that are useful to work with XML documents. Some of the key features include DTD, RelaxNG and XML schema based editing.
Firstobject – Free
firstobject XML Editor 2.3, as the name suggests, is a portable software that can be used as a simple text editor, HTML editor, and programmable XML utility, but the main purpose behind this software is to be used as an XML editor.
Jaxe – Free
Jaxe can be used as an administrator, to define a configuration file for a given XML language, or as an end user with the administrator’s configuration files. Developers can also add Swing components to display elements, or use Jaxe within other applications.
Microsoft XML Notepad – Free
There is a free beta available for download of Microsoft® XML Notepad, a simple prototyping application for HTML authors and developers designed to enable the rapid building and editing of small sets of XML-based data.
tkxmllint - Free
tkxmllint is a command-line tool for parsing XML documents. It is part of the Gnome libxml2 package. tkxmllint is a GUI version of that tool.
table.el – Free
WYSIWYG table editor that extends Emacs and provides text based table creation and editing features for Gnu’s Not Unix (GNU) Editing Macros (Emacs) and XEmacs (Emacs for X Window).
Xeena - Free
A visual XML editor, is a generic Java application for editing valid XML documents derived from any valid DTD. XML files can be created and edited without learning the intricacies of XML.
XML Copy Editor – Free
XML Copy Editor is a fast, free, validating XML editor. Binaries are released for Windows and Linux simultaneously.
XML Marker – Free
XML Marker is an XML Editor that uses a synchronized table-tree-and-text display to show you both the hierarchical and the tabular nature of your XML data.
XML Notepad – Free
XML Notepad 2007 provides a simple intuitive user interface for browsing and editing XML documents.
XML Spear 3.0 – Free
XMLSpear is a free XML editor. Experienced XML users will find many advanced features in validating files. The included text editor is useful for editing plain text files (shell scripts, ini and config files, etc).
XML Viewer 3.0 – Free
MindFusion’s XML Viewer is a freeware application for opening, showing, scanning the contents and editing or modifying XML files.
XMLwriter – Free
XMLwriter uses the Microsoft MSXML parser by default to validate XML documents against DTDs and XSD Schemas. Validation is also supported for XDR Schemas.
xslide – Free
Xslide is a Emacs package for editing XSL stylesheets. Features include a “Template” menu for jumping to template rules in the buffer, a comprehensive abbreviations table to further ease typing.
XtreeM – Free
XTreeM is a free XML editor oriented around a tree view. It allows you to quickly restructure and edit XML files.

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