I have continually monitored notepads over the past year and tried out most of them. I've settled on this one due to its superior search capability (3 different modes from local to global--I use global mostly), responsive user support (I've made about 10 requests in the past 2 months and ALL of my feature requests have been added), and its encryption capability (can protect individual notes). It has all the standard formatting features plus it is the only notepad I have found that includes highlighting capability (one of my feature requests). Also, no problem copy/pasting or dragging images into the notes.

I also like the fact that the program remembers all of my setting each time I launch it: ruler, window placement, etc. In a number of other notepads I would have to reset these things every time I open them.

Finally, it has nice import capability, allowing one to drag and drop collections of rtfd note files that can be exported from other notepad programs.

While the author may be Japanese, his English seems to be as good as mine. I've found no grammatical mistakes whatsover by him during extensive emailing back and forth about feature requests. The English documentation is excellent.