Upgrade notepad with this great notepad replacement

If you ever use Start > Run > notepad.exe then you owe it to yourself to try this notepad replacement.

It’s called Notepad++ and it does everything notepad does but better. 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/

After you download, install and try this wonder, if you’re like me you’ll want to replace notepad.exe but it’s not too easy at face value.  First I tried just replacing the notepad.exe with the EXE from notepad++ but windows security is rather ugly and the EXE doesn’t have it’s supporting files nearby.

Instead, I used a small executable that does this job nicely:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/npplauncher
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/commun/misc/NppLauncher.bin.zip

In my case (Windows 7), I had to replaced the notepad.exe under the \windows\system32\ folder.  But that first required taking ownership of the notepad.exe file:

To take ownership of a file:

Go to c:\windows\system32 and then the properties of notepad.exe:

The Security tab:

Then Advanced:

Then the Owner tab:

Then click the Edit button and click your username then OK to change the ownership of the file to yourself.

Now you should be able to rename the existing notepad.exe to something like notepadbackup.exe.

This now makes it possible to copy the notepad.exe that you already downloaded from here and place it in c:\windows\system32.

Now every reference to notepad.exe (most importantly, the one that I use, start > run > notepad.exe) should launch Notepad++!

 

I’ve read that some people also need to do this to the notepad.exe file that exists in these locations but I didn’t have to:

\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386
\Windows\System32\dllcache
\Windows