Notepad! is a good-looking Windows Notepad replacement with plenty of advanced features, yet is still easy enough for anyone to use.

The excellent interface looks like a cut-down Office, with all its main features clearly presented in a three-tab ribbon. You'll have the basics figured out in seconds.

If your editing needs are simple, there's not much to learn. Open a document, type as normal, use the standard editing keys, save the file and you're done.

You'll still notice immediate benefits over regular Notepad. This program opens huge files, even greater than 4GB, at speed. You can open more files in other tabs, and switch between them. And support for drag and drop editing means you're able to select a block in one part of the document, and drag it somewhere else.

The "Document Map" displays a sidebar with a thumbnail of your document. Click on an area you recognise - a list of items towards the end of the document, say - and Notepad! displays it right away.

Click "Split Editor" and a second pane opens with another view of the current document. This allows you to view distant areas of the document at the same time, maybe to compare them, or to drag and drop text from one pane to another.

A "Find in Files" dialog is as powerful as some stand-alone search apps. You can locate files by name, location, content, created/ modified/ accessed dates, size, all attributes (Reparse Point, Sparse File and more), and with your mix of include or exclude filters.

Programmers will benefit from syntax highlighting covering more than 35 languages.

A hash mode calculator supports CRC32, MD5, RIPE-MD160, SHA1, SHA256 and SH512.

You also get line trimming, sorting and cleanup features. A simple bookmark system. Configurable hotkeys, hugely customisable headers and footers for printing, a touch mode for easier tablet use, and more.