- Notepad
infobox software
name = Notepad
caption = Notepad inWindows Vista
developer =Microsoft
latest release version = 6.0.6001.18000
latest release date =February 4 2008
operating system =Microsoft Windows
genre =Text editor
license = MS-EULA
website = [http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/5d18d5fb-e737-4a73-b6cc-dccc637202311033.mspx Notepad]Notepad is a simple
text editor included with all versions ofMicrosoft Windows sinceWindows 1.0 in 1985.Overview
Notepad is a common text-only (also referred to as
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 that are to be used in aDOS environment.One notable feature of Notepad is that it does not support formatting of any kind - if text is copied from a web page and pasted into a word processor, the formatting and embedded metadata comes along with the text, and can be difficult to remove. However, if text is copied from a formatted web site, pasted into Notepad, then copied again from Notepad before being pasted into a destination program, Notepad will have stripped all of the formatting. As an interesting aside, Notepad does support both left-to-right and right-to-left based languages, and one can alternate between these viewing formats by pressing and releasing the arrow key followed by Ctrl+Shift, using the right or left arrow and shift keys to go to right-to-left format or left-to-right format, respectively.
Notepad can edit files of almost any format; however, it does not treat
Unix - or Mac-style text files correctly ("see newline"). (Wordpad however does.)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 (Ctrl + "H"), as well as Ctrl + "F" for search and similar
keyboard shortcuts . In older versions such as those included withWindows 95 ,Windows 98 ,Windows Me andWindows 3.1 , there is a 64k 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 availablefont for Notepad.Windows NT 4.0 and 98 introduced the ability to change this font. InWindows 2000 and XP the default font was changed toLucida Console .Up to
Windows Me , there were almost no keyboard shortcuts and no line-counting feature. Starting withWindows 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 asUnicode text files (bothUTF-8 andUTF-16 , and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian; seeEndianness .)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. [ [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/81067 Features of LOG and Time/Date Command in Notepad] ] [ [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260563 How to Use Notepad to Create a Log File] ]
Notepad may be used as a text-based
HTML editor for its pure simplicity and more control overWYSIWYG editors. However, since it lacks many features, such assyntax highlighting , web developers may favor more specialized editors for this purpose ("seeList of text editors ").Unicode detection
The Windows NT version of Notepad, installed by default on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, has the ability to detect Unicode files even when they are missing a byte order mark. To do this, it utilizes a Windows API function called
IsTextUnicode()
[ [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/unicode_81np.asp IsTextUnicode() at MSDN.microsoft.com] URL last accessed July 3, 2006.] [ [http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms776445(VS.85).aspx IsTextUnicode() at MSDN2.microsoft.com] ] . However, this function is imperfect, incorrectly identifying some all-lowercaseASCII text as UTF-16. As a result, Notepad interprets a file containing a phrase like "aaaa aaa aaa aaaaa" as two-byte Unicode text file and attempts to display it as such. If a font with support for Chinese is installed, Chinese characters are displayed.A few people misinterpreted this issue for an easter egg.Fact|date=June 2008 Many phrases which fit the pattern (including "this app can break" and "
Bush hid the facts ") appeared on the web ashoax es. Experts correctly attributed it to the Unicode detection algorithm.Fact|date=June 2008This issue has been resolved in
Windows Vista version of Notepad.Competing software
For many uses, Notepad has been superseded by
WordPad or anyword processor , such as Microsoft Word. 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, since Notepad lacks advanced formatting functionality, many people find its simple interface faster and easier to use for basic text operations. 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.There are many third-party replacements for Notepad with additional functionality, including both
free software (e.g.Notepad++ andNotepad2 ) andfreeware (e.g.TED Notepad ).Notepad lacks many features available in other text editors, such as
regular expressions ,macros , block-select, andMDI .See also
*
List of text editors
*Comparison of text editors References
External links
* [http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/win_notepad_whatis_intro.mspx?mfr=true Notepad] at Microsoft.com
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