Hidden Notepad.exe feature…

It’s JUST Notepad right?

I mean your normal every-day geek uses it all the time. There’s nothing new under the sun there?

OK, not everyone knows that hitting F5 will insert the date, but I’d bet MOST medium to high level geeks do. Heck, it’s on the menu… And sure to enable goto line you have to turn off word wrap. But I was shocked to learn a new notepad feature today.

According to John TP , it’s an Easter Egg, but I would call it the log feature.

The process is simple. If you need a step by step, go to John’s site. Otherwise save a text file with the first line consisting only of .LOG. Then EVERY time after that you safe the file, you get the date and time added to the end of the file…

Kinda nifty…

I’m not sure how I’d ever use that, but it obviously had a use for MS… Wouldn’t you have to macro this to take advantage of this feature?

I achieve the same thing by having a batch file in my All Users startup group that contains:
@date /t >>c:\Temp\boot.txt
@time /t >>c:\Temp\boot.txt

Then I have an (extra extra) record of everytime my machine is rebooted. Except that now that I’ve blogged about it, any unauthorized boots will be edited out.

But this all makes me wonder what else is in notepad.exe that I don’t know about… a hex editor doesn’t reveal .LOG in string format in the exe. So, who knows… there could be more stuff like this out there…