Notepad

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For the item of stationery, see notebook.

Template:Infobox Software Notepad is a simple text editor included with Microsoft Windows since version 1.0 in 1985.

Notepad makes use of a built-in window class named "EDIT".

It is one of the most common text-only editors. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files that are to be used in a DOS environment. Notepad can edit files of almost any format; however, it does not treat Unix-style text files correctly (see newline).

Early versions of Notepad offered only the most basic functions, such as finding text. Newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function, as well as [ctrl-f] for "search" and similar keyboard shortcuts. In older versions such as those included with Windows 95, 98, ME and 3.1, there is a 64-kilobyte limit on the size of the file being edited, an operating system limit of the EDIT class.

Originally, Fixedsys was the only available font for Notepad, through Windows 95. Windows NT 4.0 and 98 introduced the ability to change this font. In Windows 2000 the default font was changed to Lucida Console.

In the Windows NT-based versions of Windows, Notepad can edit traditional 8-bit text files as well as Unicode text files (both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian; see endianness).

For many uses, Notepad is superseded in Windows by WordPad or any word processor, such as Microsoft Word. However, Notepad does not require a lock on the file it opens, so it can open files already opened by other processes, users or computers, whereas WordPad cannot. Besides, Notepad is much faster and easier to use than WordPad or Microsoft Word however lacking in the advanced formatting tools of those respective applications. The DOS EDIT text editor, especially as updated in Windows 95, where it became an MDI application, also provides many features never offered by Notepad.

Notepad was, until recently, a Windows-only application, but can now be run natively in the open source ReactOS operating system. The program included with ReactOS is derived from WINE and is open source itself under the GNU Lesser General Public License

There are many freeware third-party replacements for Notepad with additional functionality, for example TED Notepad, EditPad Lite, [[Notepad++]] and Notepad2.

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