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Replacing notepad.exe in Vista
 

In his post, Omar directs us to a new version of Notepad2, which IMO is a must-have tool for anyone that does any heavy amount of text file editing.  Although he covers how to replace notepad.exe on a machine running XP, I had to search for the same instructions for Vista.  Courtesy of the HowToGeek, here they are:

1. Open up a privileged command line prompt

2. Take ownership of the old notepad.exe with takeown /f c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe

3. Grant yourself full control with cacls c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /G <username>:F  (replace <username> with your username)

4. Open explorer and replace the notepad.exe file with a renamed version of notepad2.exe.

Comments

torsten's .NET blog

# May 4, 2007 9:10 AM

stalker mods

you can find at sourceforge notepad ++ just try it and I hope you will like it. Imho most powerful\light editor
# May 18, 2007 2:07 PM

stalker mods

try notepad++ (you can find it at sourceforgedotnet) imho its most powerful tool
# May 18, 2007 2:08 PM

bLiTzJoN

I have used notepad++, editplus, and others out there and notepad2 is simply the best. You can assign the ESC to exit, it's super fast loading which the other 2 I mentioned lags just slightly. The clipboard pasting and recording is a time saver. If you use something like Slickrun (bayden.com) the clipboard recording is very handy!
# May 24, 2007 1:12 AM

Tiernans Comms Closet

90% of the time, when i launch an app, its notepad. But, Notepad2 is better, but i keep forgetting that

# August 1, 2007 2:01 PM

Aymeric

Thanks for the console commands. It worked. Other solutions on internet didn't work because I wasn't able to change the permissions (even though I am an admin on the machine).
# September 2, 2007 6:47 PM

Mark Monica

Notepad 2 is simply awesome. Thanks for the hack to eliminate Windows Notepad.
# December 12, 2007 11:14 PM

Jason

No workee after SP1 anyway. Access denied.
# July 29, 2008 4:06 PM

Jason

My bad, didn't have the right switches. Works great.
# July 29, 2008 4:10 PM

Lee Queirolo

Thanks! For anyone who was wondering what the GUI instructions are: 1. Right-click notepad.exe, then Properties->Security->Advanced button->Owner tab. Take ownership. Click OK. 2. Reopen the Properties dialog, Security tab. Edit permissions and grant yourself modify rights. Aymeric, the owner of all the Windows components, including Notepad.exe, is TrustedInstaller. So even if your an administrator, you cannot change the permissions until you first take ownership of the file.
# August 29, 2008 12:08 AM

dan

great post - perfect and instant solution ;-)
# September 27, 2008 10:37 AM

Grumbly

this should do the trick: set SRC=notepad.exe taskkill /im notepad.exe /f for %%X in (%WINDIR%\syswow64 %WINDIR%\system32 %WINDIR%) do ( echo Processing %%X takeown /f "%%X\%SRC%" /a echo Y | cacls %%X\%SRC% /c /G Administrators:F copy /V /Y "%SRC%" "%%X\%SRC%" )
# October 17, 2008 7:12 AM
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