Notepad, an easy to use text editor that is included in every copy of Microsoft Windows, is also the most essential program on your computer with a very simple UI and restricted functionality. This perhaps explains why there is approximately a flood of notepad replacements in the market – applications that are not just superior to the default notepad program but most of them can be used for free as well.

Today I am taking this opportunity to use another notepad substitute and after spending a time with the program, I am influenced that it is going to be my new default text editor substituting Notepad.

The program is known as Bend. Bend has all that you wish was present in notepad – tabs, better find and replace (with support for regular expressions) and even syntax highlighting. All this comes in an extremely striking and elegant UI.

After installing Bend, go to Settings and put together the text editor with your Windows Explorer. Then right click any file, you’ll have the choice to open it in Bend directly even if the extension of the file is something other than txt.

So have you tried using Bend yet?