Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Metapad is my text editor of choice for quick edits in Windows

By Vasudev Ram



Metapad is a great lightweight replacement for Windows Notepad.

Metapad is my preferred editor for light and quick editing tasks when on Windows. I even use it to read and edit programs sometimes.

There are, of course, more powerful editors for Windows, but Metapad is great for quick work, without having to set up a lot of options in the editor. When I am on a new Windows machine, I typically just download it, and only change the font to Courier New of a reasonable size, depending on the monitor resolution, and set tabs to 4 spaces, and I'm ready to go :)

I've been using Metapad for many years now.

Update: I should mention that Metapad does have many useful editing options that you can set, it's just that I don't use them most of the time.

But overall, it's a nice Windows software tool.

For bigger editing tasks, I use Vim / GVim, on Linux and Windows; it is one of the most powerful editors around, and I've been using it for years, and vi (the predecessor of vim), earlier.

Check out my vi quickstart tutorial if you are new to vi / Vim. It was published in Linux For You magazine, in 2003 or so. I first wrote it to help some colleagues who were familiar with Windows but not Unix, and who needed to be able to edit files on Unix. They told me that it helped them to quickly start using vi for basic editing tasks.

Interestingly, I just checked the Metapad side now, and came across these two items of interest:

Metapad turns 10

Metapad is now open sourced

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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