Are you tired of the blunt look and limited functionality of the Notepad application that comes with Windows? DeviantArt user Solo-Dev has developed a nice little notepad replacement application WordPad 2009 that boasts some great features that might make you start using Notepad again.

The major visual that you might love right from the beginning is the Ribbon UI of Office 2007. It looks pretty cool and more functional than the plain-old Notepad menus. Some of WordPad 2009’s cool features include,

• Ribbon Toolbar
• Line Numbers
• Multiple Tabs
• Font previews on the font selection box
• Drag and drop files to open in a new tab
• Drag and drop images
• Support for more file types (.txt, .html, .css, .ini, .inf, .bat, .cmd)
• Windows 7 icons

The current release is a RC1 and for what we can expect in the future releases of WordPad 2009,

• Syntax highlighting for Multiple Scripting and Programming languages
• "Save as PDF" functionality

These would be pretty cool to have on an application like WordPad 2009.

Keep in mind, there is no install for WordPad 2009, it just comes in as a .zip file and the executable and supporting files can be zipped into a folder. Once unzipped you can create a shortcut for the “Wordpad2009.exe” or you can see below on how to replace your Notepad with WordPad 2009. Also, keep in mind that WordPad 2009 requires .NET Framework 2.0. If you are running Windows Vista you should be just fine. If you are running Windows XP you might want to download and install .NET Framework 2.0.

Replace Notepad with WordPad 2009

If you don’t prefer to click on the “Start” button to locate a much used program like WordPad 2009 or if you don’t like program shortcuts and would rather prefer to use shortcut keys to launch this often used program, there is simple trick to replace the current Notepad on your Windows with WordPad 2009. Follow these steps to replace Notepad with WordPad 2009 so you can launch WordPad 2009 with the shortcut keys,

1. Backup existing Notepad.exe under c:\windows\ and c:\windows\ to a safer location just in case things go wrong.
2. Rename Wordpad2009.exe to notepad.exe.
3. Find c:\windows\notepad.exe and c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe and set the owner to ‘Administrators’ and grant Administrators full control to both the files.
4. Using Windows Explorer, drag and drop the renamed Wordpad2009.exe to c:\windows and c:\windows\system32 effectively replacing Notepad.exe.

Download WordPad 2009.

I hope you find WordPad 2009 useful and handy. If you have any comments or questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.