this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
994 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
81128 readers
3716 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I miss oldskool Notepad being present on the system. Win11 Notepad is a worthless piece of shit.
But ... any computer or vm that I use for more than a few hours gets a copy of Metapad.
I've been using Metapad for ... umm ... decades.
Metapad is a simple, extremely lightweight editor, intended to just barely be better than Notepad, fixes a lot of shit that MS never did and stays simple.
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
I've been a long time user of Notepad++ after Notepad started inserting random whitespace characters in files, which messed up some jankety scripting I was doing at the time. Do you happen to know if Metapad is good about not adding unintended characters like that?
Yes. Metapad is too dumb for that shit. By design.
It's only barely smart enough to be better than Notepad.
It's not smart enough to do anything dumb.
Its free, extremely mature, and you already know how to use it.
Metapad is a feature-for-feature drop-in replacement for Notepad.
I love this. Amazing quote
Thanks! I'll check it out 🍻
I use EditPadLite and have done for a loong time. It has regex find and replace, is fast and you can tell it to display word wrapped or not, numbered lines or not, font, size, colours, syntax highlighting scheme, all based on file extensions. I have it as my default text editor and for all kinds of other files as well as text.
If I want to do major coding, I fire up the IDE and choose from my recent projects, but if I want to quickly edit some xml or a single source file, I double click it and edit it in EditPadLite.
This is the first I've heard of EditPadLite. From a cursory examination of their site, it appears to be written with the same general design philosophy as Metapad, albeit not as low profile. I'll give it a tentative thumbs up.
The EditPadLite download is 18mb. My copy of Metapad is 190k. Small and fast.
The only time it's ever in the least bit slow to load is when it's on a onedrive folder at work and Microsoft don't cache it locally so there's a delay getting the thing in the first place.
Does metapad have regex find and replace? If so, smaller and even faster is appealing.
The find and replace is based off of the Notepad interface.
It does support searching for newlines and such, but it doesn't look like it does full regex.
Ah. I use regex replace every week with matching substrings a good few times a month. It's not any slower to load than notepad and considerably less annoying.
Metapad gang +1
Back in the old Web 1.0 days I used to label my websites "Coded by Notepad.exe".
Well, you couldn't pay me to use today's Notepad. But Metapad fills that gap perfectly.
Windows 11 ltsc comes with old Notepad. Looks like the same one from Windows 10.
Hmm. This is what mine looks like.
That looks like a nightmare.
Windows 11 ltsc is interesting in that its like a time capsule. More like Windows 7 than 10. Has no Microsoft store, no onedrive, no game bar. And has old Microsoft paint, calculator, and notepad from Windows 10 with no tabs.
There's not really anything to uninstall. And it just gets security updates. Its a bare bones OS that feels closer to Linux because of that without the crap that even Windows 10 had showing tiktok and meta in the start menu to remove.
Ah. Yes, it appears I've been using the ESU option. That was the simplest thing to do.
I use the registration utility from massgrave, added 3 years to my registration.
https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
But right there on that page, they cover Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021.
It sounds like that's what I need. Stripped down Win10. I like that idea.
Thanks, friend.
Yeah, IOT is the version to choose at install with it getting 10 years of support compared to 5 years for the regular enterprise.
I have a laptop still running Win10. I'll look into this. Thx.