notepad posts

Filed under: Text, Productivity, Web services

J.ot Down is a simple, sharable online notepad

by Jay Hathaway Jun 3rd 2009

There are a lot of ways to take quick notes and share them online. Some, like Google Docs, have large feature sets and require accounts. J.ot Down is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It lets you type, share and save, and that's about it.

Going to the site opens up a new note. From there, you just type. There's no formatting with fonts, colors or styles, and no HTML support - just typing. When you pause, J.ot Down will autosave your document and give you a permalink you can use to share it or come back to it. You can also manually save.

That's the entire feature list, as far as I can tell. It's amazingly lightweight, and makes a good substitute for stickies or notepad docs when you're not on your home machine.

Tags: document, j.otdown, jotdown, notepad, notes, text

Filed under: Text, Utilities

AkelPad - Notepad alternative

by Romeo Wahed Jan 9th 2008

Judging by the large number of substitutes for Windows Notepad, people must have had issues with Microsoft's text utility since day one. This comes to no surprise as Notepad was built with a number of limitations like maximum file sizes, and minimal ability to format text.

Akelpad, like many of the other Notepad substitutes out there, seeks to improve on Notepad while staying true to its sense of minimalism. Still lightweight, but with more flexibility and less limitations, it can handle the basics - and with a few plugins it can handle even more - syntax highlighting, auto completion, sessions, and quick search, to name a few functions.

However, for the power user, Akelpad may not have all the features you might want. Other Notepad replacements such as Notepad++, Notepad2, and TED Notepad have other strengths, especially in terms of coding and other applications.

As with many other things in life, the kind of text editor one uses is a very subjective area. If you're in the market for a quality Notepad replacement, AkelPad is no slacker - but sampling a variety of editors may help find what works best for you - and is supposedly recommended by psychologists as a great way to spend an evening for stress relief (dinner and a text file anyone?).

[via gHacks]

Tags: akelpad, notepad, replacement

Filed under: Developer, Text, Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

Notepad2 - simple text editor with syntax highlighting

by Jason Clarke Jul 29th 2007

Notepad2 is a simple and quick text editor with the added benefit of offering syntax highlighting for many popular languages. It uses the Scintilla source code editing component, making it quite powerful for its size.

It's hard to find much more to say about it; if you're looking for something that affords the simple user interface of Notepad and is nice and quick, Notepad2 appears to be a worthy successor.

Tags: Notepad, Notepad2, Scintilla, syntax highlighting, SyntaxHighlighting

Filed under: Business, Developer, Text, Utilities, Windows, Blogging, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

Send to Notepad

by Jason Clarke Jan 21st 2007

Although I'm always a fan of simple utilities, this one may be a touch too simple. Send to Notepad is a tiny little application that sits in your system tray, using the typical Notepad icon from Windows. When you want to copy text to an instance of the Notepad, you simply copy the text you want to copy, then double-click on the Send to Notepad icon in the system tray. Poof, it opens a copy of Notepad and dumps the contents of the clipboard there.

Although I can see that this could be a useful application, I wish it had a few other usability features. For example, the ability to paste to Notepad using a shortcut keystroke would be useful. Also, it should be able to detect when you've got text highlighted, negating the need to actually copy the text to the clipboard before firing off the Send to Notepad functionality.

Even still, this could be a useful utility to have in your arsenal.

Note: I had difficulty viewing the Send to Notepad site in Firefox; for some reason it didn't detect that I had the Flash plugin installed. It opened fine in an IE Tab in Firefox, though.

Tags: Notepad, Send to Notepad, SendToNotepad, system tray, SystemTray

Filed under: Developer, Text, Utilities, Windows, Microsoft

XML Notepad 2006

by Ryan Carter Sep 3rd 2006

Everybody likes quick and dirty apps, especially me. Anything quick and dirty that is also free is my holy grail. Microsoft is offering the XML Notepad 2006 for download, which is quick, dirty, and free. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is a simple XML editor for editing XML documents. Sometimes less is more, and this app proves it. XML Notepad does a nice job of helping you organize XML nodes and easily modify XML documents. Like I said, quick and dirty is the focus here, and it isn't (by any means) full featured, but it does it's job well and makes quick work of editing XML, should you ever need to. I 'm sure that most of the time, XML documents are managed by more complex processes and programs, because that is the point after all. This app is nice to have in case you run into a small-scale edit that needs to be done. You don't need to launch your behemoth programming IDE to do it.

More screenshots after the jump...

Tags: 2006, editor, notepad, utilities, XML

Filed under: Business, Text, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

ZuluPad - Personal Wiki Notepad

by Jason Clarke Aug 2nd 2006

I first fell in love with the concept of wikis a few years ago, after reading an article at Sitepoint entitled "What is a Wiki?". Since then, I've used a number of personal wiki notepads (useful for organizing your notes and thoughts) as well as public online wikis. The somewhat self-organizing abilities of the wiki are still very alluring to me, but I've yet to be able to find one to settle on. ZuluPad may be the one.

ZuluPad is a free, stripped-down personal wiki for the Windows desktop that eschews silly customs like CamelCase or funky markup to denote links to new pages, and instead allows users to either click a button to mark a word or phrase as a link, or simply use CTRL-L as a hotkey. Simple, and effective. Beyond the manner in which links are created, ZuluPad delivers what you might expect - a very small and quick notepad with wiki functionality.

Probably my only gripe is that there are no formatting options whatsoever in ZuluPad. While I don't want to over-complicate this simple and effective tool, the ability to bold or italicize things would go a long way towards making pages more readable. I'm just sayin'.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tags: notepad, personal wiki, PersonalWiki, wiki

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Productivity

Weird hidden Notepad feature: Create a log file

by Jordan Running Jul 7th 2006

Here's an odd little feature I never knew was in Notepad, Microsoft's otherwise featureless text editor: It can be used to make log files. Give it a shot: Open Notepad and type .LOG on the first line, then save the file as whatever you want. Now every time you open the file the current date and time will be appended to it, which make it super-quick to create simple texty log files for whatever you want. Of course, every word processor and many text editors have shortcut keys for inserting the date, but simplicity does have its appeal. The Microsoft knowledgebase says this feature only applies to Windows 98 and ME, but it seems to work fine in XP as well.

Tags: feature, log, notepad, windows

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