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Text Editor The PC Workshop other pages database | spreadsheet | word processor

What is it?

Notepad, EditPad, MetaPad, NoteTab

The essence of a text editor is simplicity. It doesn't have many features on purpose. Although Notepad does the job for small files, EditPad Lite will open much larger files and it has a more sophisticated search and replace. I have also heard geeky-types say good things about MetaPad, though I've never used it.

You'll find Notepad in the Start | Programs | Accessories menu. Right-click and select Create Shortcut. Then drag the shortcut to your desktop, where it will always be visible. To keep your desktop more tidy, you could drag the shortcut icon to your taskbar and then delete it from your desktop.

Notepad is very functional and very basic. It will serve you well. However, I use Fookes Software's NoteTab Light every day, and I recommend it to you as an alternative to Notepad. It has a lot of nifty click-saving features.

Skills

managing unformatted text
deformatting proprietary text ("washing")
scanning text

NoteTab has some of the utilities that you'll find in Word but not in Notepad. I use NoteTab to:

compose email

view the HTML source code underneath web pages

save email from AOL before I strip out the HTML tags and store the email on my desktop

wash HTML and Microsoft formatting from web pages and .doc files

adjust margins

adjust capitalization

search and replace (especially in scripts such as the one for the Bistro)

edit PERL and JavaScript scripts

To make NoteTab the default viewer and editor for .txt files and HTML source code, I changed the association for those file types in the Folder Options dialog box.

Save text from the Web

Cogitum software

Co-Citer v1.04

A tool for creating the collections of texts from the Internet. It captures the selected text, its Internet address, its title and date of adding to the collection.

Image Co-Tracker

A tool for creating the database of images from the Internet. It captures the image itself, its Internet address, the Internet address where it refers to, its name and date of adding to the database.