Find and Replace Text in Notepad in Windows 10  

Try3 said:

I know Notepad in Windows XP & in Windows 10 Version 1709 always started with Find set to Down every time you used Find even during the same Notepad session & even if you had set it to Up the last time you used it.
- You can extract the Notepad.exe from one of your old [Ver 1709 or earlier] system images and use that in your current version if the thing matters to you that much.

Oh, it does. It SO does!

That said, I thought of that before (putting an older version), but dismissed the idea because I just assumed Windows would always replace it again with the newer version. But now I'm thinking that worst case, it will get replaced only on Windows Updates. Which don't happen every day or even every week, and so replacing it again after that really would not be too much hassle.

So I have done it, and thus far my life is wonderful again as far as my Notepad experience. Thank you for putting that idea out there!

Try3 said:

By the way, I do not understand why you are doing so much work in Notepad. It is very limited in capability. Even the other built-in component [WordPad at "%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe"] is more capable than Notepad and even the free versions of other word processors are.

Fair point.

What I do with it is a logfile of daily activities. A place where I just keep notes of . . . everything. Like a police detective keeps a notebook and just write pertinent stuff in it. Or some people keep a journal of their daily lives. I just jot down a note about "it" when almost anything happens that I might want to refer back to later. I put a date and some descriptive words that help me find it later, and use the "Find" function to search for those words when looking for something. And I will go back to something from before and add more info to that entry, putting the date of the added info next to it, so the whole thing does not "flow" in chronological order at all. Many different things are grouped together all throughout it, having evolved over the years.

And I've been doing that since even before Windows. I said over 20 years, in fact more like 26 or 27 -- and that's just how long I've been using Windows to do it, since Windows 3.0 in late 1993 give or take. I used it as a DOS-based program for almost 10 years before that!

I started using it 1984 or early 1985, exactly the way I still use it today -- just to keep notes of things I wanted to be able to find and come back to later, some with addresses or phone numbers, or other details. By the mid-90s, I would also keep website URLs too.

In fact, it was the first thing that got me to try a "mouse" when they first began to appear. I didn't use Microsoft Word at that time, I liked WordPerfect, which did not have mouse support. And WordPerfect was not well suited to a log file, as it always kept page breaks on all the pages.

By the time I started to use Windows, I began to use MS Word, but I found it much too top-heavy for my simple log file. It did have a way to format as a web page (so no page breaks, you could just go on and on and on); but it still formatted like a Word processor, and not suited at all to a page width of 100 characters (today I use lines of about 190 characters). And a Word file to store the same info took up 10 times more space. 360k and 1.2m floppy drives were common and even though we'd had hard drives in our computers for 10 years by then, we still wrote a lot of stuff to floppy discs, and I really did not need a file that took up half of a floppy disc.

I became aware of WordPad in the mid-late 90s, and tried that for saving my log file; it was not as top-heavy as Word, and would allow me to do things like bold certain words, italic certain words, and various other stuff. But it was always formatted as a word processor, which did not play nice with many pages of very wide-paged text, and I scrapped it for my log files within about a month. Which cause me to go thru withdrawals for a while when I went back to Notepad, and "lost" the ability to bold, italic, underline etc on selected words or lines!!

I was never aware of Notepad++ for a lot of years, only first having encountered it about 5 years ago. And I have never tried it. Some have told me that I would like it for my log files, because it handles very long files of many many lines, has a few more features than Notepad, and that it is all around a better choice. I was tempted to try it about a year or so ago, when I started noticing this new "Feature" in Notepad that remembered settings from a prior Find and applied them automatically. But I just never did, and have just been "coping" with the annoyance of the new Notepad.

Sorry, didn't mean this a trip down memory lane, but you did ask what I do with it and why I would stick with it for so long, and no short answer is the complete answer, so there you go!

But even with you did not understand why I would want to do this, you embraced my problem and offered solutions. And for that I am very grateful, even if it ultimately doesn't work. And it DOES seem to work for now, so double thanks!!

Try3 said:

Jeff,

Welcome to TenForums.
Denis

Thank you!!

Try3 said:

It's really worth making time to browse through the Tutorial index - there's a shortcut to

it at the top of every page.

I found that before, and have used it in the past

(according to my log file in Notepad, I used it in 2016 for a solution to my mom's computer, to run Windows 7 Spider Solitaire on her new Windows 10 machine. And my record of it then was what led

me to it for this problem)

A MOST useful resource! Thanks to all of the people who work on it and keep it!

Try3 said:

You have not completed your system specs. www.tenforums.com/profile.php?do=extra This can be very useful for

respondents [depending on what problems you're investigating].
- At least, for the time being, fill in the model number and OS lines.
- If you click on the bottom-left of any of my posts, the "My computer" entry, then you'll see that I do just about the same myself.
- You can worry about the other details later.

Done! At least the pertinent front stuff! Yer right, I will have to come do more later . . .




And as of today, the older version of Notepad has not been accosted by Win 10 at all, and EVERY TIME I open "Find" it now defaults to "Down" and I smile big and wide every time

THANKS DENIS