/Notepads

A modern, lightweight text editor with a minimalist design.

Primary LanguageC#MIT LicenseMIT

Notepads

A modern, lightweight text editor with a minimalist design.

Store link Releases Platform Discord

What is Notepads and why do I care?

I have been waiting long enough for a modern Windows 10 notepad app to come before I decided to create one myself. Don’t get me wrong, Notepad++, VS Code, and Sublime are great text editors. I have used them all and I will continue to use them in the future. However, they are either too heavy or looks less appealing. There are times that I just wanted to use Windows notepad for things like writing notes or editing config files. So I decided to create a win32 notepad replacement here and try to give it a modern look and feel. Most importantly, it has 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.

Screenshot Dark Screenshot Markdown Screenshot DiffViewer Screenshot Light

******* 📣 Notepads App is still under active development. *******

Status update

[08-12-2019] Status update and KPI report

image

Shortcuts:

  • Ctrl+N/T to create new tab.
  • Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab to switch between tabs.
  • Ctrl+Num(1-9) to quickly switch to specified tab.
  • Ctrl+"+"/"-" for zooming. Ctrl+"0" to reset zooming to default.
  • Ctrl+L/R to change text flow direction. (LTR/RTL)
  • Alt+P to toggle preview split view for Markdown file.
  • Alt+D to toggle side-by-side diff viewer.

Platform limitations (UWP):

  • 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 (.cmd, .bat etc.) with Notepads.
  • 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:

Notepads is available in Microsoft Store. You can get the latest version of Notepads here for free: Microsoft Store Link.

You can also use Windows Package Manager to install notepads:

winget install notepads

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 including file name and file path.
  • No typings or files will be sent to me or third parties.

I am using analytics service "AppCenter" to collect basic usage data plus some minimum telemetry to help me debug runtime errors. Here is the thread I made clear on this topic: 0x7c13#334

Feel free to review the source code or build your own version of Notepads since it is 100% open sourced.

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, 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
    • ko-fi

Dependencies and References:

Special Thanks:

Stay tuned 📢: