CutePad

Text documents don’t necessarily have to be created in complex applications, but it all depends on the end purpose. For instance, modifying and creating plain and rich text documents can easily be done with CutePad, a practical alternative to the Windows default tools also fitted with some extra features for character enhancement.

On the bright side of things, the application skips you the whole effort of going through a setup process, and so you can easily carry it around on a thumb drive in case you need or want to use it on other PCs. Note that stability of the target computer isn’t affected, because registry entries are not modified in the process.

Most of the space is where all text goes. It can either come from an existing TXT or RTF file, or you can take the time to manually write something, or paste from external sources. A helpful status bar shows the caret position on the canvas, as well as the total number of lines, but not the amount of characters or words.

When saving you need to manually write down the extension of interest, which can be a little frustrating. On the other hand, there’s an auto-save function which can keep text secured every 15 or 60 seconds. Needless to say that you don’t necessarily have to enable this option, but you’re not prompted to save when quitting.

What makes it a little different from default tools is text enhancement. A dedicated function can color all of your text, while changing the casing of some characters, while others are converted to numbers. However, regular text customization options are nowhere to be found.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that CutePad isn’t really prepared to deliver what it wants to. It’s fitted with a simple, intuitive design, while the cute text converter does spice things up a bit, but without basic text formatting options, or better file support, it can easily make you look for alternatives.