I started a thing at work where I keep a kind of TODO list in a text file. It’s a little different from a standard TODO list in that it also has a history of updates for each todo item. It lets me quickly see the list of things that are going on, and what the latest state of each thing was.
I’ve been using notepad to edit this file, but I get a little annoyed with it.I think the biggest reason is that “ctrl+backspace” doesn’t work, which seems bizarre. I mean, isn’t it a standard thing in editor widgets?
Anyhow, so I’ve been mini-obsessed with notepad replacements. The three that I’ve found that are worth mentioning so far are metapad, notepad2, and notepad++.
Metapad is the most minimal of the bunch. Not really geared toward programmers, but still extremely handy. Aside from supporting Ctrl+backspace, it’s other handiest feature is that it auto-linkify’s URL’s. When half of your state is on a wiki somewhere, this is extremely useful.
Notepad2 is more programmer oriented. It’s based on Scintilla, but doesn’t go as far as many other programmer-oriented editors go (i.e. no MDI). It’s got most of the rest of the standard programming features like line numbers, syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, external file modification monitoring, etc.
Notepad++ takes another step beyond Notepad2 and adds multi-document support as well as some basic file analysis (parsing out function definitions in a side bar, for example). My main beef with it so far is that the default syntax highlighting setup really sucks. Not only does it use different fonts for comments, but the font is proportional. EW!
Anyhow, for my task list file, Metapad is most certainly the right answer. For programming, I think it’s a toss up between the Scintilla based alternatives. It depends on your working style.