First we looked at WinPad, which seemed a little short on bling, then we gave NotePad++ a go-round, and bling it had goin’ on, but perhaps it had just a bit too much for some of us? Look no further. For the third review, I took the time to locate a notepad replacement that met my newly-minted qualifications; opens and loads files quickly, has more features than NotePad or WordPad, but doesn’t go nuts. MetaPad seemed to fit the bill.

Acquisition and Installation

   MetaPad is free, and in version 3.51 released just about a year ago, written in ANSI C by Alexander Davidson. He has no plans to do any further wok on MetaPad, and considers it complete. I downloaded it from his website, www.liguidninja.com. It was a tiny 45K in size! There is no installer, so a very basic knowledge of directory and shortcut creation is required. Unpack the EXE file to the directory of your choice and make shortcuts wherever you like. If you wish, there are instructions on the MetaPad website for replacing NotePad completely, which is the entire point of this series.

Features and Installation

   This might be the right mix for the less geeky among us. It is quite similar is appearance to WordPad, but with several additional features, such as uppercase/lowercase conversion, ‘always on top’ mode, size calculator and the ability to open external viewers from within the program.

  Under the Settings - ‘advanced 2′ tab was the ‘Quick Buffers’. These are freakin’ cool. There are fields that you can fill with text and then use a keyboard shortcut to paste into your document. Perhaps you’re creating a series of documents, with frequently repeated lines. Just type the text once into the first field, then each time you need it, simple mash ‘Alt-0′ and the text is applied. You can preset up to 10 buffers.\

  The Primary and Secondary font feature is very nice. Alex says from his site:

   It lets you have one font as a proportional font (e.g. Times, Arial, …) and one as a fixed width font (Fixedsys, Courier, …). This is an advantage because some text files look messed up in a proportional font (like source code) but some look nice (like email).

   You can switch back and forth between your two preferred fonts with a single click. Also noted was how ’snappy’ MetaPad is. Even NotePad in my experience lags a bit when pasting very large amounts of text. No delay at all here.

System Friendliness

   Considering that the EXE file is only 96K, it’s not unexpected to find it has a very small footprint. Less than 9,000K in total memory usage, but, like the others, the memory needed increases with the size of the documents you’re working on.

   As mentioned earlier, there is no installer, so removal must be manual. Hope you remember where you put it, and how to change back to NotePad.exe if you replaced it!

Pros: Free, very snappy, quick buffers are awesome, pri/sec fonts nice feature.

Cons: No installer, tabs for working multiple docs sorely missed. Manual NotePad replacement again a disappointment.

Conversation Tags: notepad, MetaPad, notepad++, software, WinPad