One of the most significant, for me, is, unexpectedly, enhancements to my old friend, Notepad:
Notepad now has a “Wrap Around” option for the Find and Replace dialogs, letting you find and replace in an entire document without first positioning your cursor at the top or bottom.
There’s a new zoom feature, too. Just click View > Zoom and use the options to zoom in and out. You can also hold down Ctrl and press the plus sign (+), minus sign (-), or zero (0) keys to zoom in, zoom out, or reset to the default zoom level. You can also rotate your mouse wheel while holding the Ctrl key down to zoom in and out.
Other useful features include line and column numbers while Word Wrap is enabled, the status bar enabled by default, and support for the common Ctrl+Backspace keyboard shortcut to delete previous words. Microsoft has also improved Notepad’s performance while opening large files.
There’s a new zoom feature, too. Just click View > Zoom and use the options to zoom in and out. You can also hold down Ctrl and press the plus sign (+), minus sign (-), or zero (0) keys to zoom in, zoom out, or reset to the default zoom level. You can also rotate your mouse wheel while holding the Ctrl key down to zoom in and out.
I can’t remember how Notepad behaves in Windows 7 but always thought it could be better. It looks like developers did too because there are a number of Notepad replacements to be found.
I use a plain text editor quite a lot and reckon Notepad++ is better than Notepad whatever Windows OS is being used. It comes with a few handy features including a spell checker that underlines mistakes as they are typed.
I should say Notepad++ is a bit more than a simple plain text editor but it can be set up for that and once done, it’s superior to Notepad. Have to wait and see if the October update version of Windows Notepad will be as good.
I’ve been using Notepad since Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.11 when it could not open files larger than 54 KB (kilobytes) and Microsoft recommended not to open files larger than 45 KB, with the official workaround advice provided by Microsoft being “Use another text editor” …
It’s very simplicity meant that files could be exported and imported from other systems, very useful in those “hands-on” days …
Just like MS Paint, MS Notepad is one of my “goto” tools …
I hadn’t realised that Notepad had “grown up” so to speak.
I have not used it for years as it was not big enough for my purposes but I’m having a re- think about that.
Although I was aware of its presence on all of my previous computers I’ve never ever used it and favoured word when producing text files. Trying to open unidentified files it was always offered as a solution in the little suggestion box, but when I did open any files with it I was faced with a page of jiberish! What is the point of notebook anyway Omah?..
It’s a text editor for keeping files simple, very simple. Next up in complexity is probably Wordpad (previously called Write), an early word processor with formatting facilities, still available on Windows 10. IIRC, the first MS office suite was MS Works, which was followed by the beast that is MS Office.
Notepad is a common text-only (plain text) editor. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files to use in a DOS environment and, occasionally, source code for later compilation or execution, usually through a command prompt. It is also useful for its negligible use of system resources; making for quick load time and processing time, especially on under-powered hardware. Notepad supports both left-to-right and right-to-left based languages. Notepad offers only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding text.
Notepad also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that starts with .LOG is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file.
Notepad accepts text from the Windows clipboard. When clipboard data with multiple formats is pasted into Notepad, the program only accepts text in the CF_TEXT format. This is useful for stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a web page and pasting into an email message or other WYSIWYG text editor. Formatted text can be temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to paste into the other program.
Notepad does not require a lock on the file it opens, so it can open files already opened by other processes, users, or computers, whereas WordPad cannot. Also, since Notepad lacks advanced formatting functionality, many people find its simple, minimalistic user interface (whose look has never changed since Windows 3.1 and whose menus were last altered in Windows XP, when “Format” and “View” replaced “Search”) faster and easier to use for basic text operations. The MS-DOS Editor, especially as updated in Windows 95, where it became an MDI application, also provides many features never offered by Notepad.
There are many third-party replacements for Notepad with additional functionality, including both free software (e.g. Notepad++ and Notepad2) and freeware (e.g. TED Notepad).
Thanks Omah, following your post I’ve found notebook and wrote this mornings blog using it. I can see the simplicity of it, not having the many distractions that ‘Word’ contains, and I enjoyed using it. However, unlike word, it doesn’t automatically start a new line so you can write off the page (so to speak) which becomes a problem when copying and pasting.
I became a victim of Microsoft Works when I found that it couldn’t be read on windows 7. I became quite an expert at making data bases and had lots of files in works, so using Vista on my desk top computer, I had to convert many works files into excel, there are still some that need converting.
I have not read anything here that would interest me in the least. I never use Notepad or Paint, for example, having superior third party tools. The only such things I do use are the Snipping Tool and Character Map.
If there was anything of particularly useful value in the Windows Updates, I’d be happy to accept them, but I have yet to see them.
The most annoying thing, though, is the fact that these updates are both obligatory and, in my experience, problematic.
