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Why would anyone use Notepad as a primary editor?

  • Article

From time to time I see people mentioning that they are using Notepad as their primary editor. Web site developers, I think, are the most common case. Why would one be using Notepad? I mean, I have been programming for Windows since Windows 2.0 and always thought Notepad was a horrible development editor. There are tons of free editors available that are at least able to display line/column numbers, have better Find/Replace functionality and usually are even able colorize markup. In fact, I can't imaging living without color in my editor anymore! If I found myself on a platform that didn't have one, I would write one myself :-)

If you really use Notepad, what prevents you from downoading a better editor? Or does word 'Notepad' actually mean 'my favorite free text editor'? :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    Mainly because it's rock solid stable, and fast (in terms of loading itself). Also, it doesn't try and be "smart" - it doesn't go into a special mode when I drag a binary file on it, it doesn't try and reformat what I type, it doesn't pop up autocomplete suggestions and it basically just lets me get on with what I want to do.

    Too many programs try to do more than their remit - I don't need colour, help, advice, or formatting rules forced down my throat when I just need to throw together something quickly. I don't care what format it's saved in. I don't care about the character set. I don't care that someone else has modified it. I just need to type quickly, and for that, Notepad is perfect.
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    metapad is my personal favorite...
    http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    Vi and Emacs are not quite Notepad :-) I don't use much of intellisense myself, but I do find coloring useful.
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    People who use Notepad on anything other than an emergency basis are, universally, people who don't really understand technology, and who see Notepad as the only usable alternative to swizzy GUIs.


  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    I'd be pretty annoyed if I found one of my developers using Notepad as their exclusive coding environment - to be ABLE to use Notepad for development is fair enough - to use it exclusively will reduce productivity. Some people see stuff like Intellisense, color coding and drag-n-drop editing as 'eye candy', to me they're productivity boosters, anything which lets me concentrate more on the structure and functionality of my application and less on the actual process of typing in the code itself is a boon.
    The 'purists' and 'l33t hackers' who insist that 'real coders' only use VI or Emacs / Notepad with the exclusion of any IDEs (and I include the likes of Visual Slickedit, IntelliJ IDEA etc...) have likely not developed real, enterprise level apps - or at least they haven't finished them yet :-)
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    Mike, does one tongue-in-cheek balance the other one out? :) My first statement was a generalization in itself.

    I am with you on the Notepad being a lousy editor. Hey, if there was a better baseline plain text (or even XML) editor in Windows, wouldn't that be great?

    Mikhail, who do we talk to here about having an XML/XHTML editor being built into Longhorn? :)
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    I know some people :-) There is also plenty of LH bloggers on MSDN :-) However, you know what happens if something begin coming with Windows... ;-)
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    Well, that's how we users are. We either whine that you don't have a feature or we whine that you do. It's what I call a "whine-whine" situation :)
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2004
    Seriously ... I have 2 machines on my desk at work, servers galore, machine at home, VM on machine at home, Mom's, friends ... Notepad is on all of them. Nothing else is. And its paid for on all of them.
  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2005
    I know several people who are consultants and often works on other peoples computers. They usually limit themselves to notepad since that is what is always availble.

    Personally I just started using the e text editor http://www.e-texteditor.com. It is not exactly a power editor, but it is small and fast, and it has the tabbed editing feature I can't live without. It also have a really cool visual undo feature which I have never seen in any other editor.
  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2005
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  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2006
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