Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Replacing notepad with notepad++

I discovered notepad++ and wanted to replace windows notepad with it. The instructions are here in the middle of the page under heading "Notepad Replacement". Well it turned out it's not that easy to delete notepad.exe. It kept on reappearing. So I found instructions here and it helped, I am reproducing instructions in case they disappear.

Create backup copy of c:\WINDOWS\notepad.exe
Change Explorer view options to show system files
In temporary folder: Have your new notepad.exe file ready
Copy the exe file into the clipboard ( select the file and hit Ctrl-C )
Open folder C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 in Explorer
Ctrl-V
Open folder C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache in Explorer
Ctrl-V, Backspace
Ctrl-V, Backspace
Ctrl-V, Backspace

*Just for your information Ctrl-V pastes the new notepad and Backspace moves you up a directory. By doing this as outlined above you replace all of the default Windows notepad.exe files. Make sure you copy the notepad.exe that you want to use first by selecting that file and hitting Ctrl-C

Also one other note, for the first step where I said to replace notepad here:
C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386

on some computers it might actually be: C:\WINDOWS\i386 and notepad will have the name like: notepad.ex_ -- Simply copy the notepad.exe over the notepad.ex_ and make sure you keep that same file name with the underscore (or whatever symbol its using)

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