Best Windows Utilities: Metapad, the Notepad Killer
February 6th, 2008If you work with text files on a Windows system then you have probably noticed that Notepad sucks. Personally, I find it barely usable. I have done a lot of research into replacements for Notepad but I haven’t found many good alternatives. I have noticed that the vast majority of Notepad replacement applications fail in exactly the opposite way that Notepad fails. Notepad fails because it only has as many features as was required to call it an application. You can see text in the Notepad window, you can change the text, and you can save the text; that’s about it. To make up for this shortcoming, most Notepad replacements try to be and do everything possible. They cram so much into their programs that they become bloated and slow. All those extra features seem like a good idea, but they just end up getting in the way.
All that I want from a Notepad replacement is to edit text quickly and efficiently. I don’t need anything fancy, just something I can easily toss on whatever system I am working on and that will let me do what I need to do. This is Metapad in a nutshell.
Here are the top selling points of Metapad for me:
1) It opens quickly. There is no splash screen and no waiting for the hourglass to disappear while the application loads its massive bulk into memory.
2) It handles large files gracefully. Metapad has no file size limit. If you ask Metapad to open a very large file then you will be hanging out for a bit while it loads but it will get there eventually. Notepad would make you wait and wait and then die before it actually opened the file. Metapad wouldn’t do that to you because it loves you and knows you need to see that data.
3) Block indent. This is such a useful feature that I can’t understand why it isn’t included in Notepad. Has Microsoft every updated Notepad or it is the same program as it was in Windows 3.1?
4) New line and tab support in Find & Replace. Notepad has no support for any special characters like \n or \t in its Find & Replace. Metapad lets you match newlines, tabs, and backslashes in the find or replace fields of a Find & Replace task. I use this constantly. For example, I needed to remove the last column from 50 “CREATE TABLE” statements in a SQL script so I replaced “,\n\tlastcolumn type\n” with an empty string. That reduced 5 minutes of tedious work to a couple seconds and it saved me from having to pull the script down from the server to my local machine to use a more complex program. I know there are a lot of Notepad replacements that have more extensive regular expression support but 90% of the time this is all I need.
To sum up, Metapad rules and Microsoft should officially replace Notepad with Metapad. If you want to try Metapad yourself (and I know you do), here is the link:
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/download.html
