metapad

"metapad is a great choice for those who like their text editors small, fast, and free" - ZDNet Downloads

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/Vista 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.

metapad's enhanced feature set includes:

• 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
• No file size limit! (under Win9x)
• Hyperlink support
• Over 30 customized UI language plugins

What's New (news archive)

March 20, 2009:  The metapad has turned 10 years old today! To celebrate, I've finally released the source code. I've also written a new post about metapad on my personal blog.

November 22, 2008:  Website cleanup time.

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!