Encyclopedia
- For the item of stationery, see notebook.
Notepad is a simple
text editor included with all versions of
Microsoft Windows since
version 1.0 in 1985.
Overview
Notepad 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 .
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.
Up to Windows 95, Fixedsys was the only available
font for Notepad. 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 .
For many uses, Notepad has been superseded by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. Also, Notepad is much faster and easier to use than WordPad or Microsoft Word, even though it lacks 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 makes use of a built-in window class named "EDIT".
Notepad also has a built-in simple logging function, which simply inserts a new timestamp each time the file is opened. To activate this feature, the first line of the text file must be ".LOG", without the quotes.
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 LicenseThere are many freeware third-party replacements for Notepad with additional functionality, for example
TED Notepad,
EditPad Lite,
Notepad++ and
Notepad2.
Unicode detection
The Windows NT version of Notepad has the ability to detect Unicode files that are missing a byte order mark. It does this by using a Windows API function called IsTextUnicode. This function is imperfect, with the side effect that some small, all-lowercase ASCII text is incorrectly identified as UTF-16.
On May 18, 2006 it was reported that, given a file containing a phrase like "this app can break", Notepad will interpret the file as two-byte Unicode and attempt to display it as such. If the correct Chinese font is installed, Chinese characters will be displayed. The bug is caused by a specific string of characters, divided by spaces. This string is four letters, space, three letters, space, three letters, space, five letters. This can be done with any word, or phrase that fits into that place. The
bug was considered to be an
easter egg, but is not any longer.
See also
References
