Notepad Revival

I've always been suspicious of programmers who use Notepad. And I'm not alone. As the Pragmatic Programmers  said "it's like using a teaspoon as a shovel". Perhaps I shouldn't be so prejudiced. Recently I've caught myself using this much scorned text editor. More often than I'd like to admit.

So what do I use Notepad for? The clue is in the name. Notepad is extremely good for jotting down notes. And the reasons it's good for this are that it's fast, lightweight and simple.

It's great for creating short todos, keeping a work journal or noting all those things that occur to me during a sprint but which are forgotten when the retrospective comes around.

But why the notepad revival now? The answer is Dropbox. Suddenly I can effortlessly save my jottings on my laptop, update them on my home machine and read them on my work box. 

Which doesn't mean you should even think of using Notepad to code java, create xml or check logs.