

txt files but that’s about it if you try to open up a. Since we’re talking about an older program, I thought it would be fun to go back a decade and work with an article I wrote about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) back in 2011. You might well have used Notepad in the past, or its big brother Wordpad, but let’s have a quick refresher. You can go even more old school by opening up a Terminal and using a command-line editor, but that’s probably going a bit too far into the world of simplicity! On a Mac, the Notepad equivalent is TextEdit, another program that has resisted the creeping featurism of so many programs on our computers. Yes, you’ve probably ignored or even shunned it because it doesn’t have all those fancy bells and whistles of the big programs, but sometimes that’s just what you need as a writer. In fact, it’s been included in Microsoft Windows since the very beginning: Notepad. While you can hide the ribbons, toolbars and other features that make modern document editors so complicated, there’s actually a really slick – and very basic – text editor included with Windows 11 that’s a great alternative.
