Notepad is a basic text editor used to create plain documents. It is commonly used to view or edit text (.txt) files, and a simple tool for creating Web pages, and supports only the basic formatting in HTML documents. It also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that initializes with .log is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file. It accepts text from the Windows clipboard. This is helpful in 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 other “What You See Is What You Get†text editor. The formatted text is temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to be pasted into the other program. Simple text editors like Notepad may be utilized to change text with markup, such as HTML. 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. It makes use of a built-in window class named edit. In older versions such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, there is a 64k limit on the size of the file being edited, an operating system limit of the EDIT class.
The Notepad2 application is a more advanced text editor for Windows developed by Florian Balmer. This program originated from the original built-in Microsoft Notepad which is why it is also effective and fast even when it is small. Notepad2 also has a lot of features such as syntax highlighting that allows a text or a source code to be displayed using different fonts and colors. This syntax highlighting feature of notepad2 allows users to write programming language easily and distinctly. This amazing function of Notepad2 is also owing to several other features it possess such as auto indentation, regular and expression-based find and replace feature, bracket matching, newline conversion, encoding conversion as well as multiple undo and redo features. These features make the function of the simple Notepad more advanced and it makes Notepad more interesting to use either to open files in .txt format or to write HTML codes. Notepad2 also supports many programming languages such as ASP, C++, Perl, Java, etc.