Notepad
Encyclopedia : N : NO : NOT : Notepad
- For the item of stationery, see notebook.
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 (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.
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 (both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian; see endianness).
For many uses, Notepad has been superseded by WordPad or any word processor, such as Microsoft Word.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 License
There 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 the standard FF FE header. It does this by using a Windows API function called IsTextUnicode(). [IsTextUnicode() at Microsoft.com] URL last accessed July 3, 2006. This function is imperfect, with the side effect that some small, all-lowercase ASCII text is incorrectly identified as UTF-16. ["This api can break."] URL last accessed July 3, 2006.
On May 18, 2006 it was reported["This api can break."] URL last accessed July 3, 2006. that, given a file containing only the 18 characters "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. Some reports demonstrate the same bug using the text "bush hid the facts" as a political statement, erroneously referring to the bug as an Easter Egg.
See also
References
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