Is NoteTab Light.
NoteTab Light is a basic text editor designed first and foremost to replace Notepad.exe. It is named because it has tabs, a novelty back in the day. I learned about it from watching The Screensavers on TechTV in the mid-2000s, and it has been my note taking program on Windows ever since.
The producers of this fine software have always sold a Standard and Pro version. You can buy these for $39.95, but I cannot imagine anybody ever having wanted the additional features.
Because it is at its core, Notepad, but with tabs to open multiple text files at once. It does more than that, and over the years I've had moments where some of its functions have been helpful, taking text files and auto wrapping them with paragraph tags for HTML and such.
Even it is not immune to the creep of needing to do more. The optional clipbar component is a row of buttons along the bottom that bring up libraries, little commands with their own scripting language of course, to do some more elaborate work. These are absolutely ancient at this point.
There's another library for Bootstrap 2.11. Bootstrap 2 came out in 2012.
You can yell about how wasteful these are, though if you look at the installer, you can see a fully bloated install is under 5 megabytes, with the core program being 2.6. These are more trying to make a relic relevant. Back when Notepad itself was often used to create web pages, these libraries were a lot more reasonable. Of course, even if you do install them, the program is happy to let you, the user, hide them entirely.
It's a program that's been so perfected however, that after I installed it on Windows 10, I took the same zip file with the installer, put it on a flash drive, and...
Installed it on a Pentium 3 machine running Windows 98. The same program will run just as well on recent hardware as well as something from the 90s. The latest version. It sounds absolutely absurd to imagine somebody compiling their code and spitting out a Windows 10 program and that same program being a Windows 98 program. But it shouldn't be! Because NoteTab is a Notepad.exe replacement! It's a minimal text editor! It edits text files. And you can edit text files on a Pentium or a rand new i7!
This program does not need to do anything more than it already does (and if anything, those cliplibraries don't need to be there) and so it doesn't! In fact, the latest release is from 2014, predating the release of Windows 10 entirely! It didn't need to be touched, and so it wasn't!
This is how I feel when I launch the program:
(Okay, it did not have the ridiculous splash screen in the mid-2000s, but if you don't like this nice lady you can disable her from being displayed.)
