Just Notepad
The same menus, the same shortcuts, the same calm. Nothing to learn and nothing nagging you.
Free and open source · Windows and Linux
The Notepad you remember, minus the bloat.
npad is a tiny native text editor that opens in about 40 milliseconds and behaves like Windows 10 Notepad. It quietly adds what Notepad never had: crash recovery, saves that can’t destroy your file, dark mode and print preview.
Signed installer, MSI and portable .exe · Windows x64 · MIT licensed
Click a screenshot to enlarge it.
- ~400 KBone native executable
- ~3.4 MBof RAM per window
- ~40 msfrom launch to a usable window
- 0AI features, telemetry or services
Measured by the maintainer on Windows, with a warm start; your hardware will vary.
Familiar on day one. Better every day after.
npad follows one rule: out of the box it behaves like Windows 10 Notepad. Extras that can’t hurt you are enabled. Anything that changes how Notepad works stays off until you ask for it.
Genuinely fast
Written in C against the native Windows API. No framework, no runtime, no waiting.
Safe by default
Crash recovery and atomic saves are on from the start, so a bad day never costs you a file. Add a 100,000-step undo history, where Windows 10 Notepad’s undo is single-level.
Yours to tune
Dark and Solarized themes, per-window zoom and fonts, optional Markdown tools. All opt-in.
Opens like it’s already open.
One small executable, loading only what it needs when it needs it. Each window is its own process, and the cost stays linear: thirty windows measured about 104 MB in total.
~40 ms
process start to usable window
~3.4 MB
RAM per window
Your work is safe, even from you.
- Crash recovery snapshots on your first edit and every 30 seconds after. Snapshots never touch your file.
- Atomic saves write a temporary file, verify it, then swap it in. A failed save can’t destroy the original.
- Encodings and line endings are detected and preserved, and a warning appears before an ANSI save would lose characters.
- Write your text to a temporary file
- Verify what was written
- Rename it over the original
- If anything fails, your file is untouched
What happens on every save.
Dark when you want it. Notepad-light when you don’t.
Choose light, dark, follow the system, or Solarized Light and Dark. Changes apply live to every open window, including the title bar, scroll bars and drop-down menus. Even the app icon can follow your setting.
A status bar that actually does things.
See your position, zoom, font mode, line ending and encoding at a glance, then click any of them to change it: go to a line, reset zoom, switch to monospace, convert CRLF to LF, pick an encoding. Optional word, character and line counts sit on the left.
Power tools, only if you ask.
Turn on the optional Markdown list tools and Tab, Enter and Ctrl+X learn new tricks. Off by default, because they change how Notepad behaves.
- Indent or unindent selected linesTab
- Continue a list on the next lineEnter
- Cut the whole current lineCtrl+X
- Sort and de-duplicate linesMarkdown menu
- Paste HTML as MarkdownMarkdown menu
Available once Markdown tools are enabled in Preferences.
And the rest of what you’d expect
Everything Notepad does, plus the small things it should have done years ago.
Find & Replace
Direction, match case, whole word, wrap-around, a live match count and optional highlight-all.
Print & preview
Page Setup, header and footer codes, and a Print Preview with paging, two-page view and zoom, measured against your default printer.
Per-window zoom and fonts
Ctrl+Scroll to zoom, Ctrl+M for monospace. Separate monospace and proportional fonts, with an OpenDyslexic option.
Unicode throughout
UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16 LE/BE and ANSI are detected and kept exactly as they were.
Open it your way
Drag and drop, Ctrl+Drop to insert, a recent files menu, npad file.txt from any terminal, and “Open with” for any file.
Line endings on tap
Convert between CRLF, LF and CR from the Format menu, with Ctrl+E, or by clicking the status bar.
The little things
Go To Line (Ctrl+G), time and date (F5), word wrap (Alt+Z) and a context menu with everything you’d expect.
Settings that travel
Plain JSON settings, with export and import for backups or moving machines. Changes apply live to every open window.
Where npad runs
Native on each platform: Win32 on Windows, GTK 3 on Linux.
Windows Available
Win32 API. Installer, MSI and portable .exe, all code-signed.
Linux Available
GTK 3 on X11 and Wayland from one binary, from signed apt and dnf repositories. Preferences and the Markdown tools are still being ported.
macOS Planned
A native Cocoa build is on the roadmap.
Terminal Planned
ncurses and Windows Console builds are planned.
What npad leaves out
Simplicity is the feature. These are deliberately outside npad’s design goals.
- No AI
- No spellcheck
- No syntax highlighting
- No rich text
- No bloated frameworks
- No runtime to install
- No forced features
- No forced or silent updates
- No background services
- No telemetry
Questions
Is npad free?
Yes. npad is open source under the MIT licence. If it saves you time you can sponsor the project (opens in a new tab), but you never have to.
Will it replace Windows Notepad?
It installs alongside. The installer can optionally register file types and a notepad alias for Win+R, and npad appears in “Open with” for every file type. In setup, text files (.txt), PATH and the notepad alias are ticked by default and every other file type is unticked, and you can change associations later in Preferences > Associations.
Does it send any data anywhere?
No. There is no telemetry and no background service. The only network requests npad makes are update checks and downloads: automatic checks are off until you turn them on, and Help > Check for Updates runs only when you choose it.
Why does SmartScreen warn about the download?
Releases are code-signed, but SmartScreen builds a publisher’s reputation over time. Right-click the file, choose Properties, tick Unblock and Apply. Details.
What about tabs, spellcheck or syntax highlighting?
Spellcheck, syntax highlighting and AI are deliberately out of scope. An optional tabbed interface is on the roadmap.
Where are my settings?
In a plain JSON file: %APPDATA%\Platima\npad\settings.json on Windows and ~/.config/npad/settings.json on Linux. Preferences can also export and import them.
Get back to just typing.
Download npad, open a file, and see how fast a text editor can feel.
Download npad