If there are two things you can expect to find with direct replacements for Notepad, they’re tabular displays and line counters. Notepad will convert the character sets to ANSI or UTF-8, which not all files play nicely with. It is possible for Notepad to corrupt files containing foreign characters if you absent-mindedly save them. Limitations to Notepad can be quite niche, but they are there and can cause problems if you run into them. Chances are you want to be able to do more or know more. However, if you’re reading this article we’re not going to assume you’re an average user. This is a good question to begin with, and the answer is for the average user, Notepad does everything it needs to with its short list of features. Unsurprisingly, alternatives exist, and we’ll show you some of the best.

There haven’t been any appreciable changes since Windows 2000, if not earlier, and it can still stop a system from shutting down until you choose whether to save a file or not. Development of Notepad has mostly stagnated.

Notepad++ alternative windows 7