Installing Notpad

Please note that Notpad is 32 bit and will only work on Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51 or later.

To keep the download size of Notpad to an absolute minimum, I have decided to forego an install program in preference to concise instructions for installation and removal in the readme file. That information is duplicated here:

1 If you haven’t already got the MFC 4.2 DLLs on your machine (MFC42.DLL in your Windows system directory), then grab them from http://www.naughter.com/download/vcredist.exe.

2 You must have the HTML Help Run-time components installed as this is required to view the documentation which as of v2.62 of Notpad is now in compiled HTML format. The simplest way to accomplish this is to have Internet Explorer 4 or later installed on your machine. The HTML Help Run-time Components and the HTML Help Update are available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwMicrosoftHTMLHelpDownloads.asp.

3 If you do not want to sell your soul to Microsoft <g> and would rather not be forced to install Internet Explorer to use Notpad, then as of v2.64 of Notpad there is now a plain HTML help option. To turn this option on, use the option 'Use plain HTML help instead of Compiled HTML' on the Advanced tab from the menu item 'Tools -> Options'. You will also need to download the 'notpadhelp.zip' file from the author's web site and unzip the files inside it into where you have Notpad installed.

4 Unzip the zip file to the directory where you want to install Notpad to.

5 Run Notpad. It should come up with a dialog asking you if you want Notpad to become your default text editor. If you click yes, then Notpad will modify the registry such that you can double click a text file in the shell and Notpad will be invoked directly. 4 other options are also provided on this dialog. They are: ‘Add to Send Menu’: This adds a shortcut for Notpad to the Explorer Send To Menu, ‘Add Explorer Speech menu items’: This adds two items to Explorer context menus to allow Notpad to speak the contents of the file selected, ‘Add an App Path entry to the registry’: This allows Notpad to be run from anywhere in Explorer just by typing notpad.


See Also

Installing the Text to Speech features of Notpad

Installing the Spell Checker

Uninstalling