I had a million Notepad files open, with unsaved to-do items, meeting notes, etc.

My employer pushed a mandatory update with a mandatory reboot, while I was out of the room. I lost all those Notepads.

Notepad++ with the auto-save plugin can be configured to restore all those not-yet-saved files.

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You can make Notepad++ really replace Notepad (pervasively) by setting up Notepad++ as a debugger for Notepad! See https://mysoftwarenotes.wordpress.com/2012/07/