I was going through my review of WordPad and Notepad replacements and found out that I’ve missed Angelic Software’s promotional freeware, Angel Writer. It was one of the first WordPad replacements I tried out about five or more years ago. I was issued a computer for the office that was so brand new that it didn’t have software apart from the Windows 98 operating system it came with. So for a time, I was without MS Word, a standard in the other offices. I used WordPad for typing memos and lectures. WordPad however has a very limited functionality. It does not support the insertion of graphic files (although one can always paste it from clipboard), nor does it give the possibility for highlighted text. It cannot even produce tables.

Fortunately, Angelic Software was giving out its RTF editor, Angel Writer, which was more functional than WordPad. Just consider its formatting toolbar and you’d find that it has features not available in WordPad. The other nice thing about it is that it looks so much like WordPad that no learning curve was involved in using it. This, apart from the fact that it loads faster than MS Word, made it my preferred RTF editor even when MS Word was already installed in my computer.

Now here is the thing…

Angel Writer is now in its 3.1 version and it is getting better all the time. Now, when Angel Writer is downloaded from its website, it comes as an application that one needs to install into one’s computer. What I’ve done is to modify it so that it can work in a USB FlashDrive. No reverse engineering was involved here, just a matter of extracting files from the setup program. I followed the instructions from PortableFreeware. It can be downloaded from an excellent filehosting service I just came across today. Just uncompress the RAR file (you will have to use WinRAR for this)

and copy the contents into a directory in your FlashDrive.