A Beautiful Replacement for your Notepad

Notepad, a light-weight text editor that is included with every copy of Microsoft Windows, is also the most basic program on your computer with an extremely simple UI and limited functionality.

This probably explains why there is almost an avalanche of notepad replacements in the market - applications that aren’t just better than the default notepad program but most of them are free as well.

notepad replacement

A Better Alternative to Notepad

Today I had an opportunity to try another notepad replacement and after spending a couple of minutes with the program, I am convinced that it is going to be my new default text editor replacing Notepad. The program is called Bend.

Bend has everything that you wish were available in notepad – tabs, better find and replace (with support for regular expressions) and even syntax highlighting. All this packed inside an extremely beautiful and elegant UI.

Once you have installed Bend, you can go to Settings and integrate the text editor with Windows Explorer. Later, when you right click any file, you’ll have the option to open it in Bend directly even if the file extension is something other than txt.

I am using Bend with Windows 7 but the developer says that it should work on Windows XP and Vista systems also as long as you have .NET 4.0.

Related: How to Edit Hosts File with Notepad

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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Awards & Titles

Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

Google Developer Expert

Google Developer Expert

Google awarded us the Google Developer Expert award recogizing our work in Google Workspace.

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

Our Gmail tool won the Lifehack of the Year award at ProductHunt Golden Kitty Awards in 2017.

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft awarded us the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for 5 years in a row.

Google Cloud Champion

Google Cloud Champion

Google awarded us the Champion Innovator title recognizing our technical skill and expertise.

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