Notepad2 - Yet another Notepad replacement...

This one is really quite neat. It’s a 540KB single executable with the following features:

• Syntax highlighting for most popular file formats
• Regular expression search and replace
• Handles Mac, Windows and Unix line endings.
• Plenty of other neat things for coders including bookmarks, bracket matching and code manipulation.

The real advantage is when you replace the original notepad.exe with this one. Replacing this executable is a bit tricky as Windows will restore the original exe as soon as you copy over the new one. The trick is to copy notepad2 to all the locations Windows can restore from! Here’s how you do this:

1. Download notepad2 from here.
2. Rename notepad2.exe to notepad.exe
3. Close all existing instances of notepad.exe
4. Copy it to %windir%\system32\dllcache\ overwriting the existing file
5. Also copy it to %windir%\ServicePackFiles\i386\
6. And to %windir%\system32\
7. And finally to %windir% itself

%windir% represents the Windows installation folder (typically C:\Windows).

You should now have successfully replaced notepad with notepad2. Notepad2 is also open source with the code available here for all those interested in tweaking it.

Enjoy your shiny new notepad!