I just found Notepad2 from a Lockergnome RSS feed. I’ve only used it for a grand total of about two minutes, but it looks pretty good so far.

What’s this?

The original Notepad shipped with Windows is probably the handiest program of all times, small, fast, without frills! Notepad2 tries to follow this principle, it’s a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages.

Features

• Customizable syntax highlighting:

• • HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, CSS, Perl/CGI

• • C/C++, C#, Java, VB, Pascal, Assembler, SQL, Python, NSIS

• • INI, REG, INF, BAT, DIFF

• Drag & drop text editing inside and outside Notepad2

• Basic regular expression search and replace

• Useful word, line and block editing shortcuts

• Rectangular selection (Alt+Mouse)

• Brace matching, auto indent, long line marker, zoom functions

• Support for Unicode, UTF-8, Unix and Mac text files

• Open shell links

• Mostly adjustable

It appears to offer more features than NotePad+, which I’ve used for quite a while. It also seems to be even faster. The “Windows 2000 Issues” page for NotePad+ is still handy if you want to replace the default notepad.exe with Notepad2, and have to get around Windows’ builtin file protection stuff. I’ll have to use Notepad2 some more, but it doesn’t look good for NotePad+ at the moment.

It’s also open source too. If there’s something that you don’t like that can’t be changed from within the program, you can edit the program itself.