What people say about TED Notepad
I received many messages regarding TED Notepad, for which I am very grateful. Let me pick some of them:
Tudor: I'm so grateful you took the time to write this terrific piece of software, which is exactly what I (and, I'm sure, many many people) needed. You correctly anticipated even the most demanding user's needs, and you seem to have thought of every detail possible (not only the obvious ones missing in Notepad but also other, much more subtle ones), and it's just great to see such outstanding work being made freely available.
Mike: Such a fine job you have done with my favorite editor. You have, whether you know it or not, reached a height that all engineers should strive to achieve: as I have used this notepad for going on 2 years now, and it is something I use daily, because it does what it does well and gets out of my way when I want it to, it has in some way improved my quality of life. This is the mission, above the accumulation of wealth or fame, for these are the things that truly matter.
Erwin T.: Congratulations for having made the best Notepad replacement in the market! I just replaced MetaPat (the second best) with TED Notepad.
Geoff: Great job with TED! Small footprint and extremely fast -- just the way I like it.
Cyber Geek: This notepad is really becoming a brilliant application and can no longer be seen as an alternative to the standard notepad because the default does not even come close ;-)
Curtis: I have been using the new 4.0.1 version of TED Notepad, and it's terrific. I want to thank you for making it available to the public.
Kyle: I just downloaded TED notepad (4.5.1), and have been using it for a few days. It hasn't crashed, it's done everything I've asked of it, and it's got transparent unix support. Microsoft should just replace notepad with this utility.
Mike: Two months ago I picked Ted Notepad over all freeware notepads (metapad, thegun, Tiny Editor, edxor, Notepad2, NotepadEx...). TED Notepad is the maxipad of notepads. It's bloody great!
Kenny: Hi, Just a short thank you for TED! I listed it on my recommendations for favorite applications...
David H.: Hello, Your excellent program Ted Notepad is pretty charming. Especially it contains so many features in such a small size. Really wonderful.
Andrew Y.: Great program. It's the first "notepad replacement" that isn't bloated. Keep up the good work.
Dale: Hi, love the plugin architecture (very happy:-)
Nick: Hi, I love TED pad, I am glad that somebody finally made a notepad replacement without all the buttons, and graphics.
zy106: A perfect alternative of windows' notepad. Very easy to use. Maybe more features are required in the future, you can make another new product for that and just keep this one small and simple.
Anonymous: Great notepad! Tabs, you need tabs for multiple documents. Cosmetic, supeficial,........ of course. But that's what people are looking for these days.
JohnTheAngel:
"The most successful method of programming is to begin a program as simply as possible, test it, and then add to the program until it performs the required job."
(PDP8 handbook, Pg 9-64) Good work! Go on!...
MyOpera Forums > Off-topic > The Lounge > Insanity&us: All of this reverse stuff got me looking for something to do this easily so I found this snazzy little program via google (looks like a damn good freeware notepad replacement so far). The install file will automatically rename the default notepad.exe as notepad.old if you want it to.
Dan: while searching for a nice notepad replacement with a search & replace option (as wordpad.exe has) i found ted. i was so surprised from your program that i sent it to all my friends. we are all webdesigners and will probably use ted a lot now. i am also thinking about a donation as sson as you post an email address where i can send money via paypal to.
Frederic V.: Hi. TED seems a great soft to me. Lots of functions pretty useful. Just one missing feature to me: one cannot edit several text files at once...
Manuel M.: Hello! Congratulations for your nice program TED!! It is really amazing, and very useful.
Logan West:
I'm the type of guy who likes to use Notepad for just about everything, including all of my text editing, draft e-mails...making notes...an html editor etc. etc. I use it constantly. I never use a spell-checker so Notepad is fast and perfect for just about everything.
I was looking for something a little better though, something that would be able to perform a few more operations. I am sometimes a guide writer (for video games) and a friend of mine developed a program that would suit the guide (or FAQ writer) and one feature he included was the ability to import from another text file by just hitting a shortcut key. In guide writing, this saves a lot of time! For example, I could just hit a key and get a customized header:
<--------------------------------------------------->
Or something like that. Very useful. The program was designed in Visual Basic though and therefore wasn't as fast and clean as I wanted.
I searched around a little bit and found Metapad. It's a very good program and I liked it a lot and have been using it for several months. But the author was not working any further on it (and hadn't been for three years) and some features seemed as though they had been added on as an afterthought and things were a bit jumbled. So I kept looking.
I tried programs such as JEdit, Notepad++, Notepad2, NoteTab, Editpad and many many more (I had no idea there were so many!) but all of them were too advanced for what I was looking for. Just a simple, basic Notepad replacement that would perform better and have simple text editing functions.
I stumbled on TED Notepad (which I now fondly refer to as "TED pad") and installed it, not really knowing what to expect. What a pleasant surprise! It's the first program I've found (besides Metapad) that is what it claims to do: Replace Notepad in every way!
Features I liked:
1. Clipboard was very, very good. Metapad had something like this but was restricted to only one line.
2. Cleanness. Everything was in its proper place. I'm a sucker for a clean interface! I noticed right off that it didn't have any buttons, but just menus. This encourages the user to use shortcut keys, which I love anyway, and at the same time cleans up the text area. Very nice! All the menus had everything laid out nicely and easy to find.
3. Very fast, very simple, yet with a lot of powerful features. I especially like the sort function for arranging a list alphabetically!
4. Another feature that was a must for me (as a guide writer) was the Commit Word Wrap function. Metapad had it, most programs did not. Yet TED Notepad also had an UNWRAP function, something I'd never even seen before, yet how handy THAT could be sometimes! For editing old guides etc. It's great!
And many others. It has nearly everything I want or could need, very powerful, simple text editing tools.
Thank you so much. I am planning on donating on your site once I have a some spare time online to do so. Very soon!
I have some suggestions that can make it better though, I'll send it in my second e-mail so as to keep them somewhat separate.
Logan West (The Shadow)
Mike Welch:
This is a long "note", but I thought you spent a lot of time on TedNPad, so I could spend 45 minutes crafting a note of thanks.
I spent quite a bit of time digging in the freeware trenches for a simple yet capable Notepad replacement. Win32Pad had been my choice for well over a year, but I was tired of the clipboard being RTF and saving my chosen screen colors, so it was time for a change.
Requirements:
1. Freeware! I don't want to enter a registration code every time I change machines. I have enough of that already!
2. Quick! I don't want to wait for OLE or .NET to load. This includes small EXE size.
3. Must be able to load binary data
4. Must do at least what Notepad does
5. Must be a PLAIN TEXT viewer (no RTF, no HTML, etc.)
6. UI should MAKE SENSE
7. MUST exit with ESC!!!
To that end, I narrowed it down to three picks.
1. TheGUN (Grown Up Notepad). Pure assembler Notepad clone by Steve Hutchesson. 6K EXE size (wow!). Great for porting around, but limited in function and bogs down pretty bad on big files.
2. Tiny Editor by Igor P. Zenkov. 15K. I almost selected this as the choice. It is a complete clone of Notepad with little else, but met my core criteria and did great on the EXE size.
3. TedNotePad: As I work in Unicode and frequently get text that is in Unix format, the built in conversion was what put me over the top. The extended clipboard is simple, it will save window position info, stay on top, go to tray, and mostly, it's clearly used by the guy who wrote it because it MAKES SENSE. I'm a software engineer myself (15 years) and am annoyed by software that either doesn't work, or requires you go through a bunch of steps to do a simple task (e.g., To delete a table in ms word: File Menu, then Table, then Delete, then Table. Why not <DEL>?).
Well done. I think you've done a fine job balancing the trade-offs between usability and features with size, speed and simplicity. I think if you keep your focus to TEXT, you'll continue to be on the right track.
Remember, we software geeks have an overlooked and often forgotten mission in life: to improve the day-to-day quality of life for others by (1) Keeping it simple (2) Using what we produce so we know it works and makes sense and (3) Listening to our users. I am impressed with the effort you've put into optimization and that you continue to think of other things that could be improved. Please don't stop!
Best wishes,
Mike Welch
