Once upon a time, one of the most useful programs for everyday use was known as Microsoft Notepad. I realized that Notepad was quite powerful and did a lot of what I wanted in a simple text editor. Yet I found the user interface to be unlike most 32-bit Windows applications and actually quite poor...

metapad is a small, fast (and completely free) text editor for Windows 9x/NT/XP with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.

• Persistent window placement
• Dirty file notification
• Intelligent Find and Replace
• External viewer support (e.g. web browser)
• Usable accelerator keys (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+N, etc.)
• Dual customizable font support
• Optional Quick Exit (Esc key)
• Configurable tab stop setting
• Auto-indent mode
• Go to Line/Column
• Seamless UNIX text file support
• Block indent and unindent (Tab, Shift+Tab)
• Recent files list
• WYSIWYG printing
• Snazzy status bar & funky toolbar
• No file size limit! (under Win9x)
• Hyperlink support
• User interface language plugins

November 27, 2005:  I've decided to release a minor new version that fixes the benign but annoying "Can't open clipboard" random message bug. Grab it here if you've ever experienced that problem.

July 6, 2003:  I've given the entire site a facelift. Looks better, no?

November 19, 2002:  Not only is metapad 3.5 the most stable version yet, thanks to the hard work of the translators it's available in more than 25 different languages! Thanks also go out to the many folks who sent nice comments (and the few who sent not-so-nice ones too, ya punks). Although I doubt I'll be adding many more features I would like to release the source code at some point. Stay tuned!