Today I was starting work on a new PHP project in Symfony on my netbook and realised that I was still using plain old notepad, the default windows task switcher and unknown files still showed that awful “Would you like to use the web to find out how to open this file?” dialog.

I usually fix these on my machines but I had neglected to do this on my netbook, and so I thought I would share a few really good applications for replacing things in Windows.

Notepad2 – Notepad

I love a good IDE, Netbeans 6.7 for PHP/Android and Visual Studio 2008 + ReSharper for .NET (although it is getting painfully bad on performance these days), but sometimes you just want a plain old text editor. Notepad is good but still lacking in my book and one of the first things I was pointed to when I started my new job was Notepad 2, a free open-source Notepad replacement built on Scintilla which provides some much needed functionality such as syntax highlighting, code folding, line highlighting, line numbers and much more but it is also very compact and lightweight. Kai Liu who has contributed to the Notepad 2 source also has an extended version which among other things, installs Notepad 2 as the default text editor in Windows.

Making Unknown Files Open In Notepad / Notepad2

Ok, So we have a lightweight notepad replacement, how do we get rid of the annoying dialog that asks you what you want to do with unknown files? I have found that 9 times out of 10 I want to open a file like that in a text editor, otherwise I will choose the extension myself. The following registry change (copy into a text editor and save with .reg as the extension and then double click to run) fixes this by automatically opening unknown file extensions in notepad but will also allow you to use the normal open dialog box by right clicking and accessing it from the context menu.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Unknown\shell]
@="notepad"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Unknown\shell\notepad]
@="Open with Notepad"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Unknown\shell\notepad\command]
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\NOTEPAD.EXE %1"

This will create a new action for unknown files on the context menu called “Open with Notepad” and then make it the default action. The normal Open menu is preserved (in XP SP3 and above) so you can still access the Open With dialog if you need to.

If you are using Notepad 2 described above and have it intercepting calls to Notepad, this will launch unknown files in Notepad 2 instead.

TerraCopy – Explorer Cut/Copy & Paste

Most of us are no stranger to the rather indecisive estimates that the windows file transfer window can generate so why not replace it for something better? TerraCopy is a utility which can completely replace the Windows File Transfer UI and offers batch operations, queuing, pause / resume and error recovery plus it is faster to boot.

TerraCopy is free for personal use and requires a Pro license for commercial use costing 14.95 €.

VistaSwitcher – Task Switcher (Alt+Tab)

Despite the wonderful new taskbar in Windows 7 which includes live preview thumbnails (brought in with Vista), my main way of getting between windows is alt+tab. Back in the days of Windows XP a very nifty alt+tab replacement called TaskSwitch XP was developed by NTWind Software. It brought some very nice features to the desktop including preview thumbnails, themes, customisable task list and context menu support.

An updated version of the software was released for Windows Vista and 7 called VistaSwitcher. It provides much the same functionality but with integrated Aero support which makes it look rather nice, even with Aero disabled as well as live window and desktop previews, multi-selection support for window organisation and the addition of 64-bit support. This is a truely wonderful app and is well worth a look for those who frequently use alt+tab and want to spruce it up a bit.

Console – Command Line Shell

The next handy utility I want to share is an open source command line replacement called Console. Console is written in .NET and offers some significant enhancements over the standard shell including tabs, good select/copy/paste functionality, excellent configuration options, alpha transparency, and quite a bit more. If you use SSH or even just the command line a lot and get frustrated by the size limitations of the command prompt or simply want tabs, Console will be a breath of fresh air. A very nifty app indeed.

Launchy – Keystroke Launcher

This isn’t so much a replacement as an addition since the Windows Vista/7 start menu can do something similar with the new start menu. Launchy presents you with a styled textbox into which you can type the name of a program or file and it will attempt to match against a user-configurable catalogue of start menu items, desktop icons and files on your computer. The default activation shortcut is alt+space however this can be changed through the options menu. It supports plug-ins which allow you to add more applications and websites to the catalogue and out of the box comes with plug-ins for Google, Wikipedia, Calculator and GCalc. If this isn’t enough to convince you and you happen to use linux as well as Windows (or even just Linux), then you will be pleased to hear that Launchy works on Linux too.

Launchy saves me so much time as I don’t have to trawl through my start menu looking for applications or sift through folders looking for an EXE, it takes care of all the searching for me in a sleek, minimalistic way.

Hopefully you will find some or all of the utilities I have talked about useful, they certainly make my life easier. I am interested to hear about other replacements that people use so if you have one to share please post a comment.

Links

• Notepad 2 – http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
• TerraCopy – http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
• TaskSwitch XP – http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp.html
• VistaSwitch – http://www.ntwind.com/software/vistaswitcher.html
• Console – http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
• Launchy – http://www.launchy.net/