What is Notepads and why do I care?
I have been waiting long enough for a modern Windows 10 notepad app to come so I decide to create one myself. Don’t get me wrong, Notepad++, VS Code, and Sublime are great text editors. I have used them and I will continue to use them in the future. However, they are either too heavy or less interactive. I had a desire to replace a win32 notepad.exe with a software that was lightweight and looked impressive to get things done as quickly as possible (for example, as a turnaround text editor to quickly modify config files or write some notes). Most importantly, it had to be blazingly fast and appeal to everyone.
So here comes the “Notepads” ? (s stands for Sets).
- Fluent design with a built-in tab system.
- Blazingly fast and lightweight.
- Launch from the command line or PowerShell by typing:
notepads or notepads %FilePath%.
- Multi-line handwriting support.
- Built-in Markdown live preview.
- Built-in diff viewer (preview your changes).
- Session snapshot and multi-instances.
******* ? Notepads App is still under active development. *******
Status update
[08-12-2019] Status update and KPI report
Shortcuts:
- Ctrl+N/T to create new tab.
- Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab to switch between tabs.
- Ctrl+"+"/"-" to zoom font size. Ctrl+"0" to reset font size to default.
- Ctrl+L/R to change text flow direction. (LTR/RTL)
- Ctrl+P to toggle preview split view for Markdown file.
- Alt+D to toggle side-by-side diff viewer.
- You won't be able to save files to system folders due to UWP restriction (windows, system32, etc.).
- You cannot associate potentially harmful file types (.ps1, .bat, .xaml, etc.) with Notepads.
- If you drag a file into Notepads, file save picker will ask you to save it before closing due to UWP restriction.
- Notepads does not work well with large files; the file size limit is set to 1MB for now. I will add large file support later.
Downloads:
Please head over to the Github Releases section to download the latest release. You can also get the latest version of Notepads in the Microsoft Store.
Roadmap:
Changelog:
Disclaimer and Privacy statement:
To be 100% transparent:
- Notepads does not and will never collect user information in terms of user privacy.
- I will not track your IP.
- I will not record your typings or read any of your files created in Notepads.
- No typings or files will be sent to me or third parties.
I might use analytics tools to collect basic usage data such as how many times the program has been downloaded or been used plus some minimum telemetry to debug runtime errors.
Feel free to review the source code.
You might notice that I work for Microsoft but Notepads is my personal project that I accomplish during free time (to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more?). I do not work for the Windows team, nor do I work for a Microsoft UX/App team. I am not expert on creating Windows apps either. I learned how to code UWP as soon as I started this project which is like only a few weeks back. So don’t put too much hope on me or treat it as a project sponsored by Microsoft.
Contributing:
- How to contribute?
- Notepads is free and open source, if you like my work, please consider:
- Star this project on GitHub
- Leave me a review here
Dependencies and References:
Special Thanks:
Stay tuned ?:
