Notepad - The beginning of all word processors. The simplest, most basic, most featureless text editor you can get. Being available in all versions of Windows dating back to 1985, it is widely used.

Microsoft Notepad first came bundled up with Windows 1.01 around sixteen years ago and it hasn't changed much since then. The entire program takes up a mere 52KB and, unlike MS-Word, it opens up quickly and hardly takes up any memory. Let's run a brief comparison - Right now I have both MS-Word and MS Notepad open. Notepad is using 376K of memory whereas MS-Word is taking up a hefty 6432K! That is one of the reasons I use Notepad and not MS-Word to take quick notes while doing research.

I also use Notepad to code HTML for my website. It's a great way to start, because if you use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor like Frontpage, you usually never get around to learning HTML itself. Notepad is a plain ASCII editor and so you have to start from scratch. Unlike Frontpage, it doesn't mess around with your code and therefore it's the best way to the best web designs. Since it is a clean text editor, unlike MS-Word, it does not format your code to its liking. Because of this, it is also great for coding Javascript and CGI.

Although it opens only .txt files by default, Notepad can be used to open any kind of text file. I have used it to open files with .cgi, .js and .doc extensions as well as more unusual ones like .nfo etc. When I download a file and find a readme file with an unknown extension, I always use Notepad to open it. It might show up a little weird, but you can figure out what's going on. There's one problem though - in the Notepad versions before Windows 2000, files exceeding 64K in size can not be opened. However, the Windows 2000 version supports unlimited file sizes.

Since Notepad has no frills, it is very easy to learn and use. The interface is quite uncluttered and all the options are placed in four menus (File, Edit, Format, Help). There are no graphical buttons jumping out at you - just a clean white space which fills up with black lines as you type.

You can open only one document at a time in one particular window but, since Notepad takes up very little memory, you can have multiple instances of Notepad open without slowing down your computer.

The font can be changed, but not of any one particular paragraph. If you select a paragraph and change the font, the font face of the entire document changes. Likewise for size and style. You can not change the colour of the text. Notepad remembers your settings, so that the next time you use it, the font face, style and size will be the same as they were the last time.

Notepad is amazing for the very basics. It's ubiquitous, versatile and something I can't do without. I really doubt the existence of any computer user who hasn't come across Notepad at least once.


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