Choosing (and installing) a better Notepad

After years of great service, I knew it was time to replace the venerable Windows Notepad witha more robust text-editor. A little search brought me to Notepad2, which brought just the right improvements with minimal increase in overhead. (I want my text editor to load quickly and easily, which excluded many more robust tools.)

To truly replace Notepad, we don’t just install a replacement — we have to make sure that replacement takes over all tasks from Notepad. In the old days, we just replaced notepad.exe with the replacement’s executable file. In the new days, with Windows file protection, we have to do a bit more.
I read a few blurbs around the Web describing various “proper” techniques to get notepad.exe to be replaced by a new executable of choice, but only one worked correctly: rewriting all existing copies of notepad.exe very quickly. In other words, run the following code in a batch file.

copy notepad.exe c:\windows\system32\dllcache /y
copy notepad.exe c:\windows\system32 /y
copy notepad.exe c:\windows\ /y

Of course, make sure you already changed the name of your Notepad replacement executable to notepad.exe and placed it in the current working directory… and be sure to thank Florian Balmer for a great Notepad replacement!