I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with iamcal’s Noted, a lightweight text editor that is everything Notepad ought to be. It has toolbar search and replace. It can read and convert linebreaks from (or to) any OS. It has an unlimited buffer size. It has no associations in the annoying editor wars. It counts lines and even lets you jump to them! And that’s almost exactly all it does. Noted is great.

The only things it doesn’t have that I wish it had are a tabbed interface like Firefox and a word counter so I could stop using stupid MS Word. The former would probably be very complex to implement, but the latter shouldn’t be too hard. I checked the Noted page again today to see if its source was available. It is! So I poked around and discovered that it’s written in… Pascal.

That’s really weird. People still write in Pascal? (Maybe not, as Noted hasn’t been updated in a couple years.) I used it as a training language in my sophomore year of high school–it was fun but bad for me, as it gave me lots of procedural habits that I had to break before I got good at OOP. A glance at Noted’s code just now mostly made sense, although it also shows some indications of classes, which I don’t recall in Pascal. For that matter, I never knew Pascal could do native Windows GUI apps.

I do realize that there are form-based web pages that count words, but unfortunately I haven’t found one as smart as Word’s tool, which isn’t all that smart. I also realize that I could write a form-based PHP script that would be as smart as Word’s word-counter (and probably will do so), but I’d really rather have it in a text editor; Noted is almost perfect for my needs, and browser textboxes aren’t.