Notepad replacement

[Midas]

We all have different ways of dealing with the issue of substituting the creaking old but always faithful Windows Notepad; most of them involve renaming or wiping its executable out, which is tricky since it's a protected system file and it sometimes even comes back from the dead without us noticing. There's an easy solution I was unaware of up until today, although it has been making rounds all over the Net -- it's most notoriously found at Notepad2's home-site (see http://www.flos-freeware.ch/doc/notepad ... ement.html). I reckon it should be documented here at TPFC too, so here:

Create a 'notepad-replace.reg' with the following content:

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\notepad.exe]
"Debugger"="\"C:\\PATH\\TO\\YOUR\\TEXTEDITOR.exe\" /z"

Dont' forget to replace that bogus file path with an existing one or the bees might go away for good...

[lautrepay]

If you prefer to make the change without "making your hands dirty", Notepad Replacer is a good option.
IIRC, needs .NET, but I'm not sure.

[m^(2)]

I used to use Notepad 2, but recently I switched to GEdit. It's fast and light yet fairly powerful, more than N2.

[lautrepay]

I used to use Notepad 2, but recently I switched to GEdit. It's fast and light yet fairly powerful, more than N2.

(Off topic) Weren't you a Programmer's Notepad user?

[I am Baas]

This metapad's faq detailes a few options:

http://liquidninja.com/metapad/faq.html#Q3

[Midas]

I was a faithful Win32pad user, but recently had to switch to AkelPad due to my move to Windows XP Pro x64 -- not as many native 64 bit text editors yet -- hence the discovery...

[m^(2)]

I used to use Notepad 2, but recently I switched to GEdit. It's fast and light yet fairly powerful, more than N2.

(Off topic) Weren't you a Programmer's Notepad user?

I still am. I use GEdit, PN and PSPad for different purposes. GEdit is the generic notepad. PN - for coding when I don't want IDE (this applies to all that I do at home recently). PSPad - when I need its features. HTML, XML, some specific functions like text sorting. I also have TextPad connected to some older scripts, so it launches sometimes, but this is just legacy stuff.

[Midas]

May I note that an IDE is not exactly a "notepad replacement"? OTOH, I keep lots of text editors around, just in case -- the last I checked, there was over half a Gig of them...

EDIT: After finding AkelPad settings stowing away in the registry, it seems that this notepad replacement procedure has the evident downside (at least in AkelPad's case) of preventing the app from being fully portable. Funnily, those settings are virtually indistinguishable from the ones set in akelpad.ini -- it might be the case that it starts AkelPad with the ini settings and they get written to the registry afterwards; is anyone able to detail what gets read or written?

[guinness]

The registry key 'Image File Execution Options' can also be used for other system applications too e.g. Task Manager. Just replace the notepad.exe part with tskmgr.exe and then the alternative path.

I wrote about this before >> viewtopic.php?p=47352#p47352

[Midas]

Further testing seems to show that only the recent opened files list get rewritten... I can live with that for the time being -- I didn't find a way to completely set it off from AkelPad, but it's easy to cleanup with a regfile:

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Akelsoft\AkelPad\Recent]

Thanks for the pointer, guinness.

[lautrepay]

Further testing seems to show that only the recent opened files list get rewritten... I can live with that for the time being -- I didn't find a way to completely set it off from AkelPad, but it's easy to cleanup with a regfile:

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Akelsoft\AkelPad\Recent]

Thanks for the pointer, guinness.

From the AkelPad database entry:

How to extract:

1.
2.
3. Open the "Settings" dialog from the "Options" menu
4. Under "Registry" set "Save settings" to "INI File" and set "Recent files" and "Search history" to "0"

Stealth [?]: Yes. If you set Recent Files and Search History to 0 as these are stored in the registry.

[Midas]

Duh... I only needed to do 4.