Window’s Notepad is actually a nice lightweight text viewing application. Unfortunately, it has several major draw backs.

• Horizontal scroll bar does not work on large files
• Takes a lot of time and memory to load large files
• Changing word wrapping on and off reloads the file, no good for large files
• Does not handle Unix files

I have been searching for a suitable replacement for sometime. My only criteria were that it was lightweight and it only displayed 1 file (i.e. no tabs). Metapad was pretty close, but it wasn’t great at large files. It’s not really supported any more as it is kind of feature complete. Next I tried Notepad++ which had more features. The most annoying thing was the tabbed windows. When one associates a helper program with a text file, I like to get one application per file so that I can deal with them separately. One just seemed to spend all of one’s time switching between tabs with the mouse because the tab switcher wasn’t any good. I’m used to ALT+TAB so having to switch to ALT+CTRL+TAB while in one application was cumbersome. The final problem was that it had a huge memory footprint of 10MB+ depending on how many files you had loaded and it did start to grind. But, now I think my quest is over, with Notepad2. The entire application is only 248K. Here are the speed tests. The test was done with a text file 100MB long. The file was preloaded so that it was in the disc cache (i.e. not freshly loaded from disc on the first test and loaded from disc cache on the second test).

	Notepad2	Notepad
Load time (sec)	3	17
Change text to wrap (sec)	2 first time, 0 after	50

Well the results speak for themselves.