Notepad as your primary editor?

Mikhail asks the provocative question, “Why would anyone use Notepad as a primary editor?”.  Some interesting responses already.

One that I haven't seen mentioned is that it's available with the system.  You know that any random Windows machine you walk up to will have it available.  For people that have to do their work on systems that aren't their own (like sysadmins or testers that do a lot of investigations on random lab machines) it can be painful to get used to all the bells and whistles of a whiz-bang editor and then have to do work under pressure without those crutches.

Back in the early DOS days I had a coworker that did everything in edlin for that very reason.  Maybe that was going a little far (I used to carry a floppy with my copy of the Norton editor with me in those days...).

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  That's a pretty good idea unless you have a machine with no USB or has it in a non-accessible place.
  
  
  What would be nice is if visualNotepad.NET would have a better editing interface. Something with better search/replace, formatting abilities would be nice. Not needed, but nice to make it a little better.
  
  
  
• Anonymous
  July 27, 2004
  I used to carry around QC (QuickC) editor on a floppy. I honestly never used Notepad over 15-odd years of my Windows developer career beyond very simple editing of INI files or something like that :-)