Notepad tips and tricks

  • Article

Like most people, I use notepad when I need to put together a script. I never actually looked at the help file for notepad (well, why would you?!?) until I hit the F1 key by accident recently. As a result I found quite a few tricks that notepad provides that I never knew existed. They are turning out to be pretty helpful so I thought I'd share them below:

  • When editing a file, press the F5 key to insert the system date and time
  • Change or add headers & footers by selecting file | page setup
  • Press ctrl-G and enter a line number to go to (VERY useful when debugging VBScript errors)
  • Select view | status bar to display the line/character number as you navigate the file (another beneficial debugging aid)

Another tip I found was the ability to maintain a log file with timestamps. This is useful when troubleshooting a problem where you need to record what is happening at specific times:

  • open notepad
  • set the first line to be (without the quotes and in uppercase) ".LOG"
  • press enter and save/close the file
  • every time you open the file, notepad will automatically insert the system date/time at the end of the file and add a new line where you can begin typing