Many professional writers have their own favourite word processor. Many of them avoid the commercial word processors and favour more of a lightweight text editor, which enables them to draft their words as quickly as possible, without delay.

Programmers have a similar point of view. If you know your code, you simply want a tool that enables you to write up your code as quickly as possible. Once you need to debug, you can move across to a IDE tool and then finish off and compile your code.

Notepad hasn't really progressed with Windows and is too basic for most serious users. There are numerous tools available that are aimed at the 'Notepad replacement' market.

EditPad Lite is a similar tool that contains more functionality than Notepad, but certainly couldn't be described as a word processor.

It supports a number of Unicode formats, enables you to open both Windows (CR+LF) and Mac (CR only) text formatted documents.

It supports multi-tab documents, so you can open and compare previous work and with its unlimited undo/redo option, you can quickly go back to a previous paragraph that you deleted hours ago.