wllis/notepads

A modern, lightweight text editor with a minimalist design.

Notepads

A modern, lightweight text editor with a minimalist design.

What is Notepads and why do I care?

I have been waiting long enough for a modern Windows 10 notepad app to come before I decided to create one myself. Don’t get me wrong, Notepad++, VS Code, and Sublime are great text editors. I have used them all and I will continue to use them in the future. However, they are either too heavy or look less appealing. There are times that I just wanted to use Windows notepad for things like writing notes or editing config files. So I decided to create a win32 notepad replacement here and try to give it a modern look and feel. Most importantly, it has to be blazingly fast and appeal to everyone.

So here comes the “Notepads” 🎉 (s stands for Sets).

• Fluent design with a built-in tab system.
• Blazingly fast and lightweight.
• Launch from the command line or PowerShell by typing: notepads or notepads %FilePath%.
• Multi-line handwriting support.
• Built-in Markdown live preview.
• Built-in diff viewer (preview your changes).
• Session snapshot and multi-instances.

******* 📣 Notepads App is still under active development. *******

Status update

[08-12-2019] Status update and KPI report

Shortcuts:

• Ctrl+N/T to create new tab.
• Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab to switch between tabs.
• Ctrl+Num(1-9) to quickly switch to specified tab.
• Ctrl+"+"/"-" for zooming. Ctrl+"0" to reset zooming to default.
• Ctrl+L/R to change text flow direction. (LTR/RTL)
• Alt+P to toggle preview split view for Markdown file.
• Alt+D to toggle side-by-side diff viewer.

Platform limitations (UWP):

• You won't be able to save files to system folders due to UWP restriction (windows, system32, etc.).
• You cannot associate potentially harmful file types (.cmd, .bat etc.) with Notepads.
• Notepads does not work well with large files; the file size limit is set to 1MB for now. I will add large file support later.

Downloads:

Notepads is available in Microsoft Store. You can get the latest version of Notepads here for free: Microsoft Store Link.

You can also use Windows Package Manager to install notepads:

winget install notepads

Roadmap:

• Project Roadmap

Changelog:

• Notepads Releases

Disclaimer and Privacy statement:

To be 100% transparent:

• Notepads does not and will never collect user information in terms of user privacy.
• I will not track your IP.
• I will not record your typings or read any of your files created in Notepads including file name and file path.
• No typings or files will be sent to me or third parties.

I am using analytics service "AppCenter" to collect basic usage data plus some minimum telemetry to help me debug runtime errors. Here is the thread I made clear on this topic: 0x7c13#334

Feel free to review the source code or build your own version of Notepads since it is 100% open sourced.

You might notice that I work for Microsoft but Notepads is my personal project that I accomplish during free time (to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more😃). I do not work for the Windows team, nor do I work for a Microsoft UX/App team. I am not expert on creating Windows apps either. I learned how to code UWP as soon as I started this project, so don’t put too much hope on me or treat it as a project sponsored by Microsoft.

Contributing:

• How to contribute?
• Notepads is free and open source, if you like my work, please consider:
  • Star this project on GitHub
  • Leave me a review here
  • 

Dependencies and References:

• Windows Community Toolkit
• XAML Controls Gallery
• Windows UI Library
• ColorCode Universal
• UTF Unknown
• DiffPlex
• Win2D

Special Thanks:

• Yi Zhou - App icon designer, Notepads App Icon (old) is greatly inspired by the new icon for Windows Terminal.

• Mahmoud Qurashy - App icon and file icon(s) designer, creator of the new Notepads App Icon.

• Alexandru Sterpu - App Tester, who helped me a lot during preview/beta testing.

• Code Contributors: DanverZ, BernhardWebstudio, Csányi István, Pavel Erokhin, Sergio Pedri, Lucas Pinho B. Santos, Soumya Ranjan Mahunt, Belleve Invis, Maickonn Richard, Xam

• Documentation Contributors: Craig S.

• Localization Contributors:

  • [fr-FR][French (France)]: François Rousselet, François-Joseph du Fou, Armand Delessert
  • [es-ES][Spanish (Spain)]: Jose Pinilla
  • [zh-CN][Chinese (S)]: lindexi, walterlv, Jackie Liu
  • [hu-HU][Hungarian (Hungary)]: Csányi István, Kristóf Kékesi
  • [tr-TR][Turkish (Turkey)]: Mert Can Demir
  • [ja-JP][Japanese (Japan)]: Mamoru Satoh
  • [de-DE][German (Germany)]/[de-CH][German (Switzerland)]: Walter Wolf
  • [ru-RU][Russian (Russia)]: Pavel Erokhin, krlvm
  • [fi-FI][Finnish (Finland)]: Esa Elo
  • [uk-UA][Ukrainian (Ukraine)]: Taras Fomin aka Tarik02
  • [it-IT][Italian (Italy)]: Andrea Guarinoni, Bunz
  • [cs-CZ][Czech (Czech Republic)]: Jan Rajnoha
  • [pt-BR][Portuguese (Brazil)]: Lucas Pinho B. Santos
  • [ko-KR][Korean (Korea)]: Donghyeok Tak
  • [hi-IN][Hindi (India)]/[or-IN][Odia (India)]: Soumya Ranjan Mahunt
  • [pl-PL][Polish (Poland)]: Daxxxis
  • [ka-GE][Georgian (Georgia)]: guram mazanashvili
  • [hr-HR][Croatian (Croatia)]: milotype
  • [zh-TW][Chinese (T)]: Tony Yao
  • [pt-PT][Portuguese (Portugal)]: O.Leitão

• Notepads CI/CD pipeline: Built with ❤ by Pipeline Foundation

Stay tuned 📢:

• Notepads Discord Server