I’ve mentioned in a few talks that I long-ago renamed NOTEPAD.exe to N.exe as I have a tendency to “Windows-R, N, Enter” and I wanted to save a least a few hundred “otepad’s” a day. 

I’m also a big fan of starting a drag-drop operation, and without releasing the mouse button, doing an ALT-Tab, bringing my app up, and then releasing the mouse button and completing the drag.  A lot of people don’t know you can do this.

Anyway, the point was that Notepad is kind of lame, and hasn’t really changed in a while.  Sure, there’s lots of other Text editors out there, yada yada yada, but really what I want is a better Notepad.  No fancy toolbars, just Notepad++.

Now I’m using Notepad2 by Florian Balmer.  I’ve even renamed it to N.exe.  It’s really very nice.  It has lots of nice features, but here are the ones I care about:

• Line Numbers
• Long Line Indicator
• Show Line Endings (CR vs. CRLF)
• Transparent Mode (great with Always on Top)
• Configurable Syntax Highlighting (all the obvious languages included)
• Brace Matching
• Zooming with Ctrl+Mousewheel

It’s definitely going on Scott’s Ultimate Tools List.