I’ve been looking for a replacement for notepad.exe. My requirements are that it load very fast (as fast as notepad), that it be tabbed so that when I’ve got 20 notepads open it doesn’t fill up my taskbar, and that it autosave on a periodic basis so that if my system crashes I don’t lose all of the data.

The solution I’ve found is to use Notepad++, an excellent open source notepad replacement along with the Notepad++ Autosave Plugin written by Franco Stellari.

Here’s the batch file that I threw together to use instead of notepad.exe

@echo off
FOR /F "tokens=*" %%A IN ('c:\Cygwin\bin\date +%%Y%%m%%d-%%H%%M%%S') DO set TIMESTAMP=%%A
type this-file-does-not-exist > "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\notes\%TIMESTAMP%.txt" 2>null
start "Notepad" "%ProgramFiles%\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\notes\%TIMESTAMP%.txt"