Notepad

Notepad (software)

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Notepad

A component of Microsoft Windows
Notepad on Windows 8
Details
Type	Text editor
Included with	All Microsoft Windows versions
Related components
WordPad

Notepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows and a basic text-editing program which enables computer users to create documents. It has been included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985.

Features[edit]

Notepad is a common text-only (plain text) editor. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files to use in a DOS environment and, occasionally, source code for later compilation or execution, usually through a command prompt. It is also useful for its negligible use of system resources; making for quick load time and processing time, especially on under-powered hardware. Notepad supports both left-to-right and right-to-left based languages. Unlike WordPad, Notepad does not treat newlines in Unix- or Mac-style text files correctly. Notepad offers only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding text. Only newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function. However, it has much less functionality in comparison to full-scale editors.

In all versions of Windows, Notepad uses a built-in window class named EDIT. Older versions included with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, imposed a 64 K limit on file size, which was an operating system limit of the EDIT class.

Up to Windows 95, Fixedsys was the only available display font for Notepad. Windows NT 4.0 and 98 introduced the ability to change this font. As of Windows 2000, the default font was changed to Lucida Console. The font setting, however, only affects how the text is shown to the user and how it is printed, not how the file is saved to disk. The default font was changed to Consolas on Windows 8.

Up to Windows Me, there were almost no keyboard shortcuts and no line-counting feature. Starting with Windows 2000, shortcuts for common tasks like new, open and save were added, as well as a status-bar with a line counter (available only when word-wrap is disabled).

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).

Notepad accepts text from the Windows clipboard. When clipboard data with multiple formats is pasted into Notepad, the program only accepts text in the CF_TEXT format.^[4] This is useful for stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a web page and pasting into an email message or otherWYSIWYG text editor. Formatted text can be temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to paste into the other program.

Notepad can print files, but doesn't print correctly if Word Wrap is turned on. Headers, footers, and margins can be set and adjusted when preparing to print a file under Page Setup. The date, file name, and other information can be placed in the headers and footers with various codes consisting of an ampersand ('&') followed by a letter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad_(software)