Two neat Notepad tricks I came across in the past few weeks:

1.The first is really a bug, but it's still neat. Originally seen on Bink.nu:

- Enter "andy ask for water" (without the quotation marks) in a new text file.
- Save and close Notepad
- Reopen the file and it'll be converted from ANSI to Unicode.

The original post says any 4-3-3-5 combo works, but that's not entirely true. It does appear that the first character of the first and second words need to be the same, but I didn't try all 26 combinations, or much else from there.


2.The second comes from Lifehacker:

- Enter ".LOG" (without the quotation marks) on the first line of a new text file, and then some text on the next line.
- Save and close Notepad
- Reopen the file. A timestamp plus CRLF will be appended to the end of the file. Enter some more text, save and close Notepad. Reopen, repeat.

An interesting journalling trick, which might be useful in some scripting situations (write .LOG to the first line of the file and then not worry about writing timestamps for each log entry [assuming the file is opened, a log entry is written and then the log is closed again]).