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It seems as though Windows Notepad is one of the most hated programs in existence, judging by the number of
TextEditors designed specifically to replace it.
What do you think?
- I do not agree with the above statement. Notepad is intentionally made simple, which makes it useful in many occasions. In my opinion it can, in fact, get even simpler. The reason behind Notepad "replacement" is other than simply hating it. I use various text editors for various purposes and have created my own as well. I think the term "Notepad replacement" is rather to emphasize that the application is going to be similar to Notepad, because Notepad is already known to everyone.
- Notepad is universal, but limited. Older versions (Win 3.X/95/98) had a 64K limit on the size of an edited file. Larger than that, and you were forced to Wordpad, which is a different animal. Notepad is also stupid. In particular, it doesn't grok Unix line endings. There are almost as many reasons to replace it with something as there are users of replacements. --DMcCunney
This is practically one of the
TextEditorFamilies
In fact, I will add it.
And I populated it (--
DMcCunney)
Is there a limit to how much an editor can implement before it moves beyond being a Notepad replacement? Is the criterion simply that it can sit on the Windows desktop and have a file dragged to it to open?
Here's the criterion for me: would you use the editor to be automatically invoked by Subversion to enter a commit comment? That means, to me, that the editor does not store session info: it always pops up with a clean slate.
(This implies, in turn, single buffer per instance.) I use MetaPad for this purpose.
NotepadPlusPlus bills itself as a Notepad replacement but I wouldn't use it for that because Notepad++ stores too much session state.
- — KismetCow
A Notepad replacement is simply a program you can use instead of Notepad for the same things you would use Notepad for. Notepad++ qualifies, since it was designed to be a vastly enhanced version of Notepad.
Saving of state is more-or-less required in a tabbed editor, as the assumption is that you will want the tabs restored and reloaded if you open it again. By default, Notepad++ is single instance, and new files are edited in a new Notepad++ tab. You can change this behavior in Settings/Preferences/Multi-instance, to start a new instance of Notepad++ for a new editing task.
I have NP++ here, but it isn't what I use as a Notepad replacement. That chore goes to another Scintilla-based editor called Notepad2 from Florian Ballmer. Properly speaking, I'm using a fork of Florian's code called Notepad2-Mod which includes support for code-folding and bookmarks. A neat feature of Notepad2 is a registry based hack that lets it fully replace Notepad, and have it called by Windows in place of the original in any case where Windows would normally run Notepad to view a file.
(And I'd likely use Git instead of Subversion for version control, with Mercurial a second choice.)
- — DMcCunney
NotepadReplacement