Notepad Alternative

As a distance learner I find myself doing a lot of research in addition to listening to the lectures and smartboard notes.

Something I've stumbled across is an alternative to notepad simply called TextPad. What's really interesting about this is that it is basically a supped up notepad. You treat it exactly as you would notepad but it has some additional features, two of which I really like.

One is the ability to install an XHTML element and CSS tag library in a sidebar. Which is an excellent resource right there where you're coding. It requires some additional files to place in the appropriate folder for it to show up in the program.

The main feature I really like is the "View -> In Web Browser" option. It is rather self explanatory but what it does is without saving out your document to an html format it'll grab your code, pop open your browser and display your page based on the code you wrote.

To be on the safe side I still prefer to copy and paste my code out into notepad, save to html, and validate when I'm finished. TextPad is shareware with an indefinite fully featured free trial providing you don't mind a brief pop-up at start. You can find it here. Info on the clip libraries can be found here.

Tim Viveiros