Notepad3 — The Complete Guide: A Light, Fast Replacement for Windows Notepad

Notepad3 from Rizonesoft is a small Windows text editor based on Notepad2 and the Scintilla component. It opens instantly and is meant to replace the built-in Notepad without adding the weight of a development environment. It is open source under the BSD licence and free for any use, company work included.

Notepad3

Rizonesoft

Light, fast Windows text editor that replaces Notepad — syntax highlighting, regex, encoding and line-ending conversion, plus a portable build.

Get it from the vendor

What you get

Syntax highlighting — for many languages and formats, with code folding and bracket matching.
Regex find and replace — clean up columns, spaces and stray characters in a data file.
Encoding conversion — switch between UTF-8 and older encodings, handy for non-English text.
Line endings — convert between Windows, Unix and Mac before uploading to a server or controller.
Portable build — runs from USB with no installation.

When to choose it

When you need to open a config file, a machine log, a CSV file or the input file of a calculation program quickly and fix a few lines. It has no plugins, projects or terminal, and it is Windows only. Download it only from the Rizonesoft site or the official GitHub page.

Related tools

For an editor with plugins and multi-file work — Notepad++. For a light editor that can build and run code — Geany. For a full editor with extensions — Visual Studio Code.