There are two main categories of Notepad replacements. The first category provides the same functionality as Notepad, but in a tabbed environment, allowing you to open multiple documents in a single window (in the same way as Firefox, Opera or IE7 internet browsers). Crimson Edit, PSPad and NoteTab are editors which fall into this category. UltraEdit and EditPlus are also contenders, although they are no longer Freeware.

My personal favourite in this category is Crimson Editor, although PSPad is useful for developing code and comparing documents.

The second category is note taking applications such as EverNote, KeyNote and TreePad. Despite the fact that KeyNote has not been developed since 2003, it is fine for simple note taking using a tree like structure to categorise your notes. It also offers better formatting options (numbered and bulleted lists) than Treepad. Treepad looks fresher as it is still being developed. However, its Lite version seems to be very limited, even being restricted to a single top-level node. EverNote has many more features, such as to do lists and checkboxes as well as the ability to categorise your notes in multiple categories. However, I found its clipping feature (which is is beta at the moment) to be very buggy. For example, copying the list of files in a directory resulted in multiple imstances of Explore opening up and it trying to run any executables it found.

If you get the error 

Cannot save to EverNote base.  FILE_SHARING_ERROR

followed by 

Cannot create Web clip.  Unspecified error

when using the Evernote WebClipper for Firefox extension, then make sure to close the EverNote window before clipping your web content and try again. This error existed in version 1.0.0.81

Alternatively, if you get the popup 

Can't clip

and the error 

You either didn't select anything or the application you are trying to clip from  doesn't support copying information onto the system clipboard.  Try screen capture instead.

when using the Universal Clipper, but you are able to paste the web clip by going to another application such as Wordpad and pasting it, then the problem is possibly that the Universal Clipper cannot locate the database. This is normally located in 

My Documents\\My EverNote Files\\DataBases\\EverNote.enb

. This bug existed in v1.0.0.32.

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