Notepad is a simple text editor included with Microsoft Windows.

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.

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For many uses, Notepad is superseded in Windows by WordPad or any word processor, such as Microsoft Word.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, where as WordPad cannot. 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.

See also

• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors

External links

• notepad.org - An unofficial website with no relationship with Microsoft.