Notepad is perhaps the most basic of all Windows applets, with little changed since it first appeared in Windows 1.0, back in 1985. It doesn't seem that Microsoft are too interested in adding more features, then, so if you'd prefer a more powerful text editor then you'll probably have to locate and install one yourself. And we have the perfect candidate in mind.

Notepad2 loads quickly, looks a lot like Notepad, and is primarily designed to work with plain text files - but it manages to cram in many extra features. So there's direct support for many different encodings (ANSI, Unicode, UTF-8) and line endings (Windows, Mac, Unix), helping ensure that your recipients can read whatever you create. Line numbers and automatic text indents are particularly useful. And the Find and Replace dialogs are greatly extended, with options to match case, match whole words, match just the beginning of a word, use regular expressions, and more.

Automatic syntax highlighting makes it easier to read HTML, JavaScript, CSS and XML documents. There are syntax schemes for many programming languages, too, and if your favourite isn't included then you can add support yourself.

A range of other developer-oriented features will help to clean up source code: select a block of text and you can indent or unindent it, strip trailing blanks, compress white space, remove blank lines and so on.

And perhaps best of all are the productivity-boosting features that just make your life easier. So, for example, you're able to open multiple document windows, view recently opened documents, or save commonly-used files in a Favourites window for speedy access later.