First and foremost, NOTEPAD has been my dependable friend or companion so to speak even from the start of my IT career. Waaaaay back in my high-school days when I was taking notes and doing some HTML, on my college days when I was learning JavaScript I have used notepad.exe for editing HTML and viewing it on IE on Windows 98. I learned DHTML and even editing perl and bash scripts using notepad, still it has filled its purpose. This is not to mention doing some batch files (.bat) and other cmd prompt scripting, and creating some registry settings (.reg). Enuf of our history, my age is showing 🙂
Today when teaching and coaching junior programmers and developers what does it mean to create a good software, I always give NOTEPAD as an example. Well for one, I never crashed a notepad nor had a notepad crashed the entire operating system. It is stable, intuitive to use, had a wide range of use and highly dependable.
Okay, another thought would be, it has been with Windows 98 as far as I can remember (sorry guys, never had the chance to use 95 so go figure out the history for your selves). If you have a software that has been included in almost all of the Windows operating system, it must be a good software. So love your notepad.
With this example, you may be surprised that Notepad has another use, creating notes that has autodates – even without scripting!
All you have to do is put a “.LOG” (All CAPS, without quotes) on the topmost of your notepad file, like the one on the sample below.

Close and save your file.

for this example I will use this as my notes so I will name this file as “myNotes.txt”

So after saving, just open the txt file that we created.

You will see that there is now a time stamp right after the .LOG. This is automatically generated everytime you close your txt file.


Try it your self, a notepad (txt) file with a auto time stamp, cheers!

