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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

I use notepad++ on windows and have open all the time. Any more I want to write down I open a new tab. Notepad++ keeps the tabs even if not saved and automatically reopens them next time you start it. Combined with search in open files feature it makes it extremely useful.

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I love notepad++ and use it a lot when I need raw text.

I do like WordPad since it will do fonts, embedded pictures, etc. I really hate that MS is moving things to the cloud. I'm often in places that don't have wifi/cell coverage so getting to the cloud is impossible.

I use the autosave and take notes plugin in notepad++ which makes it perfect for this use case. I have it set to autosave when the window loses focus. And the take notes plugin lets me set a default filename with timestamp and save directory, which I set to my dropbox. The plugin also has an option to delete all empty text files when notepad++ is closed.

It feels as friction free as writing on a physical notepad with a paper and pencil.

Just keep in mind that at least in the old versions it had bugs that lead to occasional loss of all the autosaved files.

I don't know if they fixed them since, I haven't used it in three or four years.

This situation happened to me, and just in case it helps someone I thought I’d mention that the files are all saved on the disk - just go into settings and look up the location of the temporary save directory. Open that in explorer and you’ll have all the temporary files available.

No, I meant that the "temporary" files themselves got deleted!!

There were different bugs, some deleted session.xml and some the files themselves.

I had actually found the reasons and prepared bug reports, but then had some life messes and lost the reports themselves.

Maybe I'll try to see if I can find the code again (it was plain calls to "deletefile" or something like that ended up being called by an error handler, if I'm not mistaken - it was so reckless code that I moved away from Notepad++)

I've never run in to that issue in the last 10+ years of using notepad++ with these plugins. Since my autosave location is dropbox, it's automatically backed up the moment the file is saved. I've set my control+n to a new note and not an empty file. The take notes plugin doesn't rely on the built in temp auto saves.

If a file is saved and then gets corrupted for whatever reason, I can also use dropbox to grab the previous known good version. I've tested it, but I've never had to actually use it.

Yes, BBEdit on the Mac has always done that, too. I often open a new tab and paste something in there to keep it around for some indeterminate time. BBEdit saves the temp content until I decide to close the tab or to formally save it and give it a name. It does that even when closing the app or rebooting.

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