To take quick notes on your computer, you generally click with the right mouse button on the desktop and create a new text document that can be opened with the Windows historical Notepad application. This program, which has always been present on Microsoft operating systems, has always remained the same, without improving or worsening, with practically no additional options or functions.
To find alternatives to the best Notepad of the default Windows Notepad and with more writing options, we see here the best free programs to take quick notes on the computer, to mark notes on the fly and to write free texts. There is therefore no mention of writing documents, for which adequate formatting of the text that can be obtained with programs such as Word is required, but only a notepad
NOTE: The Notepad has improved in Windows 10 with new features and you can download the new Microsoft Notepad as an app .
1) First of all, one must distinguish between a use of the Notepad for taking notes and a use for opening files with textual form but which are programming languages or logs.
The first alternative to Notepad, in fact, is Notepad ++, which serves more than anything else to write or read log files and programming languages such as html, xml and so on.
2) The WordPad is another program included in Windows that can be used to write notes and free texts, even if it is a word processor.
In another article, we described the differences between Wordpad and Notepad
3) Syncplify.met Notepad is a notepad program that includes some Notepad ++ functions and a little Word, becoming very useful and flexible both for writing code and writing with formatted text and images.
4) Linked Notes is a Windows program that combines the editing of rich text (thus also replacing the Wordpad) with a wiki-style interface . The notes taken from time to time appear in a tree on the left so you can create links between the various texts. Each page is listed in the sidebar of the program for immediate access, without having to search for it. In Linked Notes there are also basic commands for formatting text such as changing fonts, bold or italics and adding lists or lists on pages.
Linked Notes was not created to replace Word but to replace Wordpad and Notepad once and for all, for the speed and accessibility of taking notes written and clearly presented to the eye. The ability to create trees and hierarchies of notes in the notepad is a plus that should not be underestimated if you want to keep the sheets organized as you would a document collector . Notes can also be exported as plain text or rich text documents. The Pro version of Linked Notes adds encryption, the capture screen and clipboard protection.
5) WikidPad is the most popular open source program for creating wikis on the computer and tree-structured notes.
6) EditPad Lite is a perfect program to replace the Windows Notepad, to take quick notes to use as simple notepad without paying too much attention to formatting, with ease of finding and cataloging each note and with many additional functions. The best feature is the support of tabs, so as to keep multiple text sheets open together as you would with a web browser.
7) QOwnNotes (LTN) is a Linked Notes-like tool for taking notes in an organized way.
8) Going back to pure note taking instead, a better notepad program to write things on the computer on the fly by taking notes can be Focus Writer . Focus Writer is a program for Windows, Mac and Linux.
It presents itself as a fast notepad that has, as its main feature, the interface, customizable in colors and graphics and designed to avoid distractions and to concentrate the user on writing. As a text editor it is minimalist, with a toolbar that remains hidden if you don't move the mouse over the top of the program window. There is also a timer for counting the time you spend writing. At the bottom there is another options bar that summarizes the word count and the tabs of the various documents open simultaneously.
9) Tinypad is a program similar to Focus Writer which makes lightness its strong point and which is proposed to replace the Windows Notepad . Tinypad allows you to create and open multiple notes sheets in tabs, has basic text formatting commands and you can create bulleted lists. TinyPad has a very effective search function to find words in notes and a highlighter function. Another very useful feature of Tinypad is the automatic saving of what you write. A special function that can become decisive in the choice is the ability to synchronize text documents written with the notepad, on the internet, creating a protected online copy, which can be visible from any computer you use to always have your notes at hand but no. In addition, thanks to this function, you can also share notes with other people or publish them as tweets on Twitter.
10) TextBrowser can open multiple documents simultaneously in a tabbed interface. The toolbar offers basic file operations, editing actions and allows you to quickly switch between tabs quickly. Textbrowser is a free notepad that also works well for writing programming code thanks to the function to highlight the syntax and compare different files to find the differences. With the display options for Line Numbers and special characters, this program is very similar to NotePad ++.
11) As a modern and web option, I remember the Evernote programs, one of the best online services to mark notes, to-dos and reminders and above all Microsoft's OneNote, which synchronizes notes between multiple computers and phones.
Linked to this topic and as an alternative to notepads on the computer there are programs to write post-its on the desktop that also act as reminders with alarm.
