neophob.com

This is a bink.nu ripoff! Like most peo­ple, I use notepad when I need to put together a script. I never actu­ally looked at the help file for notepad (well, why would you?!?) until I hit the F1 key by acci­dent recently. As a result I found quite a few tricks that notepad pro­vides that I never knew existed. They are turn­ing out to be pretty help­ful so I thought I’d share them below:

• When edit­ing a file, press the F5 key to insert the sys­tem date and time
• Change or add head­ers & foot­ers by select­ing file | page setup
• Press ctrl-G and enter a line num­ber to go to (VERY use­ful when debug­ging VBScript errors)
• Select view | sta­tus bar to dis­play the line/character num­ber as you nav­i­gate the file (another ben­e­fi­cial debug­ging aid)

Another tip I found was the abil­ity to main­tain a log file with time­stamps. This is use­ful when trou­bleshoot­ing a prob­lem where you need to record what is hap­pen­ing at spe­cific times:

• open notepad
• set the first line to be (with­out the quotes and in upper­case) “.LOG”
• press enter and save/close the file
• every time you open the file, notepad will auto­mat­i­cally insert the sys­tem date/time at the end of the file and add a new line where you can begin typing

But can edit those Reg­istry Key’s: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftNotepadStatusBar and fWrap and set them to 1. Then Word­Wrap and the Sta­tus­bar are enabled.

One final note: When you want to save a file with notepad, and the file-extension is not .txt use quotes arround the file­name, so notepad will not add .txt to the filename.

Another final note: dis­able Word Wrap to enable ctrl+g and the sta­tus bar!