It has a search box, status bar and an action bar. The first requires a click to start a search and the latter has buttons to add empty lines, remove empty lines, export visible text as png and export note as png (both saved on the desktop). These final two features may not be the most common or useful and one created a very large non word wrapped png file that needed zooming to to be legible.

Further options include changing the text encoding, changing the font for both the note area and the tree list and a toggle for word wrap.

InDeep Notes is portable, runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and requires .Net Framework 2.0

QText offers to create a new tab either in text or rich text with each having a slightly different toolbar. It features URL support, quick auto save and ‘regular’ auto save intervals that can be changed from the default 3 and 60 seconds.

Hot keys Ctrl+Shift+Q (also configurable) bring up the program from the tray area and a carbon copy feature is available to keep a back up of the notes in another location, this is off by default but can be activated from the options. QText’s other features are zoom and formatting options (upper case, lower case and title case) plus sorting lines in ascending or descending orders.

Version 3.0 in beta is coming soon with more improvements and changes to the portable version. It currently -  even in the portable version – saves notes in the application data (appdata) folder.

QText is available in portable and installer versions and requires .NET framework 2.0.

Notepad Enhanced does have a few additional features and they are contained within panels, activated using the View menu. The Document Info Panel has the word, charater and sentence count. The Preference Panel houses the program settings which among others lets the user choose how the program opens, with new blank tab or not, and also if more than one instance of Notepad Enhanced can be opened at the same time. The File View Panel is a bit more interesting or unusual though perhaps not so useful. Here Notepad Enhanced scans local drives, ‘common places’ or Windows’ recent files to load a list of text files it finds. This can be filtered and is presumably a part of the program to ease the search for files to edit.

Notepad Enhanced requires the .NET Framework, is open source and is a simple addition to the list of many freeware text editors.

DocPad (Version:10.0 as of this post) is a text editor and an enhanced alternative to Notepad. Beside the typical plain text editing it offers the following and more.
Adding or removing indentations. Bookmarking specific lines. Jumping to a specific line. Removing extra spaces. Converting case. Converting between formats like Base-64, UTF-7 and others. Dragging and dropping files or chunks of text. Spell checking.
DocPad has built in calculator, calendar and character map tools as well.

AH Note is a young entry in the notepad alternative universe. AH Note’s capabilities are all visible via its icons around the program interface. Its features, those not common to all simple notepad alternatives are listed below.

Copy options to copy the current file name and path. Indent selected text by 1 column increments. Add bullet points to selected text. Add images to any text document. Zoom in and out of pages. View the page in a browser and finally convert selected or all text to lower or upper case.

AH Note can open many text files formats and save them in its own native *.aht format in addition to *.txt, *.rtf and others. AH Note is obviously a young project, one area which makes that clear is the tool tips (hover the mouse over menu buttons). As of this review – version 1.0 – some tool tips are not properly labeled and are still the likes of ‘ToolStripSplitButton’, a mark of the programming language used to code AH Note. AH Note is one self contained executable file that doesn’t require installation, just download it and run it.

Notepad X is an open source text editor, with a lot of customization options created to help users managing text documents, featuring tab navigation

Notepad X stands at 1.8MB including its plug-ins and icons. It is a simple no frills tabbed Notepad alternative with the usual shortcuts including the likes of Ctrl+D1, D2, D3, and so on to go to the first, second, third and subsequent open tabs. It offers the standard features but also syntax highlighting for such languages as Boo for example. It also comes with a set of included plug-ins which include a File Explorer sidebar, a Google translate sidebar and a Snippet sidebar. It is possible to write one’s own plug-in by going through the C# tutorial. Notepad X also includes a BBcode toolbar that works on highlighted text (see image above)

Notepad X is available in a zip format or alternatively one can download the program’s installer. It is also translated to a good number of languages. A final important note: Using the zip format it was not possible to activate the aforementioned plug-ins (on a XP machine).

It comes with a built-in spell checker, a ‘task list’ pane and a pane to keep track of a favorite folder or two. The latter can be useful for immediate navigation to a folder for opening or saving notes. Jotx works and saves in plain text and RTF formats and via its options, among others, one can change the background color and the font used. It is also possible to set a default folder for immediate access when opening files.
Jotx is somewhat unusual in that it includes links to a religious book and blog in its menu options (both within the program and the windows start menu).

Caderno, the notepad replacement and alternative reviewed here is at version 2.10 now. Some notable and new features include the following:

• Code folding.
• A better and more complete UTF (UTF-16) support.
• The portable version that was in the works earlier. Also an U3 version, the format that is especially created for USB flash drives.

Dexpot has reached version 1.5, it was originally reviewed here, and offers a number of interesting and useful features like the following:

• The Dexcube plug-in, for some 3D effects features.
• The SevenDex plug-in, to make maximum use of the the taskbar on the new Windows 7.
• Task switcher and desktop switcher, which increases access and efficiency in using applications that reside on different desktops.

Caderno is a remake of the common program “notepad”

Another point the author likes to emphasis is that Caderno attempts to re-create a Firefox like experience. One important feature of Caderno that makes the aforementioned statement true, and the program very much Firefox-like, is that it comes with a ‘find as you type’ feature to search .txt or other files. It also features tabs for opening multiple documents. A session management console allows a user to work with a set number of documents and be able to reload them together. The revert feature – found under the file menu – can reload the last saved version of an open document. Caderno also supports PHP code completion, syntax highlighting for a growing number of languages and an improving though yet not full support for utf documents. A portable version is also in the works and should arrive after the author makes decisions on how to handle the program’s built-in crash recovery when working with a USB thumb drive.
Caderno is a relatively young project and a very interesting one, it should run on all more recent versions of Windows.

Text Master is a plain text editor with extra features and is a good alternative of NotePAD.

Text master, of course, looks a lot like Notepad and the additional features are mostly categorized into one menu item, or toolbar. Those features include the following. Add Date in various formats. Analyze Text to get character, word, line and other counts. Combine Lines that are separated by a configurable separator, such as a comma for example. Crypto, a beta feature I did not test, to scramble lines. Delete Unnecessary Lines to delete empty or identical lines. Extract text has a few parameters that belong in a more solid programming setting rather than a notepad like software. Filter Lines chops or shortens lines starting from both their start and end. Generate Email List looks for emails in the open text document. Generate Word List converts the open document into an alphabetical list of the words it contains. Import Picture As Text only works with bitmaps. Insert Numbers adds line numbers. Insert Text adds text to the beginning or ending of all lines. Keypress Simulator is a time waster more than anything else, presenting the open document with a type writer effect. Randomize Lines and Reverse Line Sequence and Line Contents are also more fancy effects than anything else. May be the same can be said about Sort Lines and Trim Lines (from both, left or right sides). Finally Uppercase & Lowercase converts text into one of all uppercase, first letter uppercase or all lowercase.

It is also possible to use F11 to maximize the workspace and additionally find or find and replace text. Text Master runs on all Windows versions and is a 560KB download.