Notepad has been an excellent lightweight tool since the beginning of Windows. But lately, it isn’t changing much with the new fluent design language of Windows 10. However, there are some excellent third-party alternatives to Notepad. Since the version 2004 (May 2020 Update) of Windows 10, now we can uninstall Notepad easily. So you can get rid of Notepad altogether if you are satisfied with following 3rd party alternatives. :-
Notepads
Notepads App
Notepads is yet another opensource alternative to Notepad with fluent design and tabbed view. Even their GitHub page says that their motivation behind this that they have been waiting long before modern Notepad to be released before he decided to do it by himself.
Quick Pad - is also open source and comes with the fluent design. QuickPad is closer to Microsoft Notepad as there are no tabs and have classic menubar. There are some extra features though,
Quick Pad in compact overlay mode
like focus mode which removes all the extra options from the screen and compact overlay mode switches it to something like a sticky note.
There is one problem with both of the apps. If you use the hibernate feature or your laptop is set to hibernate after a few minutes of sleep, then while resuming, your previously running instance of app will not resume. This means any unsaved text is lost and that doesn’t happen for Win32 apps like Notepad or Notepad++. I think this has something to do with UWP app architecture because the same is happening for Windows Calculator. I hope it is fixed or they’ll be able to find a workaround.
Till then always remember to save the file before leaving your PC unattended or disable the hibernate feature.
There are some other problems though such as not able to write to system folders, unable to handle large file. But don’t hamper me in day to day usage because I don’t use it for more advance text editing. For me it is simply Notepad replacement which anyway I wasn’t using for anything complex.
