Notepad comes preloaded on all Windows operating systems and serves as a simple text editor that’s used for computer notes. With three bars that provide basic functionality like creating new files, opening existing ones, saving and printing as well as several searching functions including Find and Replace, Go To and Time/Date searching capabilities and supporting text zooming features, Notepad is designed for use on personal computers.
To create a new notepad file, right-click an empty space on your desktop and choose New > Text Document from the drop-down menu. Your new document will open up in Notepad but feel free to rename it for easier identification purposes. However, Notepad cannot display pictures; for this purpose WordPad would be more suitable.
Notepad’s Edit pull down menu provides access to various editing functions such as copy, cut and delete; use of Find to locate text within a document; change of word or phrase by replacing existing with newly chosen text via Replace;
Notepad makes it easy to customize the fonts you use when writing by selecting Format from the pull down menu and Font from within it. A window will appear allowing you to browse a selection of available fonts. Likewise, size from within this same menu lets you change text size as well.
Word Wrap is another feature available within Notepad that makes writing look much more professional by automatically wrapping text to a new line when it reaches the right edge of the window. By doing this, your writing will look much more polished than if left unwrapped.
Working on a large text document can make it challenging to stay on track, which is why the Status Bar at the bottom of your screen provides useful information such as current column and line number as well as whether your document is centered, Word Wrap is enabled or disabled, or if font changes have taken place.
Notepad does not support regular expressions for finding and replacing text, so other programs that offer this capability may be better suited for you if required. Nonetheless, Notepad’s search function includes an option called Wrap Around which continues the search from its starting point when reaching the end of a file.
Notepad features are comparable to other text editors like Microsoft Word; however, some users prefer it due to its lightweight and straightforward nature. In addition to basic text editing abilities, Notepad ++ includes additional functionalities like dark mode themes and search capabilities in Wikipedia, WordNet and StarDict dictionaries; furthermore it also comes equipped with a secure backup feature which saves notes to microSD card if there is an accidental deletion of data.