Notepad - The preferred tool of the I.T. Professional

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Notepad is without a doubt my favourite work tool, I use it countless times during the day for all sorts of things.  I think it is also the word that I can type fastest as well, this is because to open the app you only need to press ÿ + R, then type notepad and hit return.

The program has been around since the very first version of Microsoft Windows, back in 1985.  It is a 'simple' text editor that is capable of opening any type of file, although the contents are always displayed as their text equivalent of whatever internal format the file being opened uses.

For me, the 5 most useful features that Notepad has are:

  • It can open any filetype.
  • It has keyboard shortcuts for every feature that it has  -  This means that you can work with files without touching the mouse once.
  • It can strip any formatting from text.  You can paste text into Notepad, then copy it again from Notepad to paste elsewhere and the text will lose whatever formatting that it previously had, such as colours, underlines, font sizes etc.
  • The status bar shows the current line number and cursor position  -  Invaluable for reading log files, although only available if you disable WordWrap.
  • It has a simple logging feature that inserts a new timestamp each time the file is opened  -  To do this the first line of the text file must be “.LOG”, without the quotes.

 

The logging and line counting features in action:

 imageimage

 

It is an all-round great tool and I hope that it never disappears from future versions of Windows, I would be lost without it!  I have in the past looked at 3rd-party Notepad replacements but I have always ending up rejecting them quickly as I feel that the biggest feature that Notepad offers is it's simplicity, something that the other tools tend to destroy.

 

BTW, the Windows Vista version of Notepad has the "Bush hid the facts" bug fixed in it.  This subject circulated a few years ago along with a conspiracy theory that the Notepad programmers had included it as an Easter Egg to show their anti-Bush politic views; the cause of the issue was actually a bug in the Unicode detection algorithm, not the inclusion of an Easter Egg.