Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself switching away from Microsoft Word and Google Docs for taking notes, and moving to the humble text file. I now take notes in Microsoft Notepad/Wordpad and my notes take up half the size and use half the ram to view, and contain the same amount of information. Personally I think Notepad is the perfect text editor for well… editing text. It does its job, little extra, and it does it very well. Wordpad is for when you need things like embedded images, or anything plain text cant handle, so a rich text file is used. Wordpad is more like diet word, but still manages to be lighter weight. Personally I think both editors are great in their own regards, but notepad is literally perfect for its job. Now what about other operating systems… MacOS has TextEdit which is more akin to Wordpad, so I have a hard time counting it as a replacement for Notepad, and Linux has a bunch. The common problem between both MacOS and Linux text editors however is they all seem to do way too much. Now ever since the software minimalism crowd has invaded the text editor space, text editors have slowly become less about editing text, and more for editing code. In my text editor for taking notes, I don’t need syntax highlighting and line numbers, especially if those come at the cost of performance, and I sure as hell don’t need whatever emacs is doing. In my travels for the notepad of Unix however, I have stumbled upon my old friend, nano. Nano is almost perfect in my eyes. It is small, starts up instant, and does its job. There is little extra. While it does support syntax highlighting and line numbers, these do not seem to impact it negatively, and come disabled. Another runner up would be vi (not vim). Anyway, if any of you have a suggestion to add to my search, feel free to drop it below. Please nothing more complicated than Notepad however, I don’t want to be taking notes in vscode.