How to open a text editor in Windows 7. Alternatives to the standard Windows notepad

Note 1

From $1985$ into the set standard programs The Windows operating system includes the simplest text editor Notebook(NotePad), which has minimal tools for entering and editing texts, but sometimes the minimality of these tools is its advantage.

To run the program you need to run the commands Start - All Programs - Accessories - Notepad. The composition of the program window is minimal: a work area and a small menu bar.

Figure 1. Notepad window

The program's capabilities are quite limited. You can enter text in upper and lower case letters, set automatic transition to new line when the right border of the window is reached ( Edit - Word Wrap), set the indent from the left edge (key Tab), also use tabulation to format the text in the form of a table, and search through the text (Search - Find). Notepad only supports insert mode (the character you enter expands the previously entered characters). Files created in Notepad have the extension .txt.

Menu item File

Menu item File contains several subparagraphs:

• Create– using this function creates new file program, and, basically, the last created file remains open.
• Open– allows you to open files with the extension .txt, opens other text files with a changed encoding (various characters are displayed instead of the content).
• Save– used to save a file for the first time or changes made into the already created one.
• Save as...– used to change the document saving folder.
• Page Options...– Allows you to customize paper size, orientation, page margins, and header and footer. Contains a document page view window.
• Seal…– contains standard document printing settings.
• Exit– closing the program.

Figure 2.

Menu item Edit

Figure 4.

Menu item Format

• Word wrapping– turns on the mode of placing text within the program window frames that goes beyond these frames.
• Font…– allows you to select the font type from the proposed ones, its style and size. It is also possible to use additional fonts that are downloaded to your computer. It is necessary to take into account that when changing the font, all the text in the document will change, because Certain parts of text in Notepad are not formatted.

Figure 5.

Menu item View

Contains only one sub-item, which allows you to enable or disable the status bar in the document.

Figure 6.

Program Notebook supports the possibility in various ways(via a menu or a key combination, i.e. “hot keys”) to execute the same command is an element of a flexible interface, and the ability to receive a tooltip is an element of a user-friendly interface.

Other program features

By using Notepad You can also create and edit web pages using HTML.

By default, Notepad creates, opens, and saves documents with the extension .txt, but you can use it to open files with the extensions .ini, .inf, .log. To open files of other types, use the command File – Open – File type field – All files – desired file.

Notepad allows you to work with texts in ANSI and Unicode encodings, as well as convert from one format to another. To do this, when saving the document, you need to select the required encoding in the appropriate field.

Note 2

A special feature of the program is also that if you change the font of one document before closing, then the next time the Notepad program will use the last font that was used in it.

Alternatives to Notepad

An alternative to Notepad is the MS-DOS text editor (edit.com), which can be called from command line with the "edit" command. Among the many free more functional programs, which can replace the standard Notepad program, text editors Bred, AkelPad, PSPad, Notepad++.

The new document in Notepad is called Nameless.

Instructions

To create a text file using Notepad, you must first open the program itself. To do this, call the Start menu. In it, hover your mouse over the line “All programs” and select the line “Standard” in the menu that appears. In the list of standard programs, click on the "Notepad" line once with the left mouse button.

After starting the program, a window with an empty text file will appear in front of you, which you can immediately change as you need (type the text you need or copy it from other text files). files).

If you need to create empty file with the extension ".txt", then in the Notepad window, click the "File" button located in the upper left corner of the screen. In the menu that appears, select the “Save” line. A file saving window will open in front of you, in which you must specify the location directory, file name and format. After specifying all the information you need about the file, click the "Save" button.

There is another way to create a Notepad file. To implement it, open the directory you need, in which the future text file should be located. Then right-click on any empty space in the selected folder once. In the action selection menu that appears, hover the cursor over the “Create” line. In the pop-up list of types files select the line "Text document". After this, a text file with the extension ".txt" will appear in the folder you selected, which you can immediately rename. To change this file just double-click on it with the left mouse button.

Useful advice

When copying finished text documents In Notepad, file formatting is automatically removed. In this case, only the copied text itself and its breakdown into paragraphs are saved.

Related article

IT technology experts have found that most of the problems that novice users face are not any complex tasks, but actions that do not require much knowledge. For example, how to create file document, how to copy text and paste it into another document. Creating a document file is simple and easy to do.

You will need

• Any text editor.

Instructions

A document file is a document created in any text editor. What text editors do you know? There are quite a few of them; among the standard solutions in the Windows operating system line, we can highlight Notepad and WordPad. Quite famous file manager Total Commander includes a separate product - AkelPad, and Microsoft package Office can offer the creation of a text document in MS Word. As you can see, there are plenty of applications in which you can create a document file.

Now let's look at the document in the above programs. One of all existing simple programs for working with text - this is Notepad. It can be launched from the Start menu by selecting the note icon from the list of standard programs. When you run this application, a temporary file is automatically created and saved in a folder designated by the operating system. When you exit the program, a message will appear on the screen asking you to confirm the request to save the file. You can also save the file in another way: click the “File” menu and select “Save As”. In the window that opens, specify the path to the save folder and click the “Save” button.

The next text editor from a set of standard Windows programs– WordPad. This utility is also designed for writing texts and saving, but here you can format the text so that it looks and is pleasant to read. The principle of saving a file in this editor has not changed compared to the previous opponent. True, the interface of this program in the operating room Windows system Seven has changed slightly and instead of the usual menus, separate buttons have appeared, which looks much more convenient. To save a file, you now just need to click the single “Save” button with the image of a floppy disk.

In the AkelPad editor, the principle of saving documents is the same as , so there is no point in doing the same. The text editor MS Word stands apart - with its help you can not only add formatting to the text, but also a description of some elements, it has become possible to add macros, inserts, etc. In versions of this program starting with Microsoft Office 2007, navigation bars disappeared completely and tabs for smart navigation appeared. Selected for saving separate button“Save” as a floppy disk, as in the case of WordPad in Windows 7. This operation can also be done by pressing the combination Ctrl keys+ S.

Video on the topic

Sources:

• how to create a document on a computer

Files It is customary to name certain information stored in the required format. The most used extensions are .doc (for Microsoft Word), .png, .gif or .jpg (for images), .xls (for tables Microsoft Excel) and .txt (for text files). The execution of a file creation operation is directly related to the program designed to open it.

Instructions

Right-click on an empty space on the desktop to open the context menu and select “New”.

Select the desired file type from the list of submenu that opens and enter the desired name of the created file in the desktop shortcut that appears.

Expand the folder in which you plan to create a new file and call context menu by right-clicking anywhere empty space folders to create a new file using an alternative method.

Practice shows that most users use Notepad only to view existing text documents, and edit text even when the ASCII format is required, in other, more convenient programs. However, Notepad, due to its brevity, is perfect for learning this entire class of programs: what is in Notepad is also in any other text editor.

Interface

So, the text editor Notepad is standard Windows application, which has a main menu and a text editing field. Let's start with the menu: in File there are items New, Open, Save and Save As. The first removes text (if any) from the editor, preparing the field for creating a new document. Using the Open and Save items, you can respectively load files for reading and editing and save them. If after editing you want to save the file under a different name, select Save As. The Page Layout and Print items available there will come in handy if you have a printer and want to print something from this program.

Next comes the most useful menu for a text editor - Edit. The first point is the most important conquest information industry- Cancel. That is, if you accidentally erase all the content or do something else unnecessary, use undo immediately last action(Ctrl+Z). Following Cancel there are menu items for working with the clipboard: Cut (Ctrl+X), Copy (Ctrl+C) and Paste (Ctrl+V). They may not be available if there is no selected text in the editor (for Copy and Cut) or if there is no text on the clipboard (for Paste). The Delete item allows you to delete the selected text.

Using the Select All item, you select all the text in the editor, and Date/Time (F5) inserts the current date and time in the format specified in the system. Next, in the View menu there is a very important Wrap by Word item. When it is checked, lines that do not fit entirely in the editor window are automatically wrapped. Otherwise, they will go to the right, out of view, and you will have to use the horizontal scroll bar to correct it or just read it. And finally, the Font item opens a standard font selection dialog, with which you can change the font in which text will be displayed in Notepad. In this window you select the font typeface, its style and size. All changes are promptly displayed in the Sample window. It is also useful to indicate the set of characters used - Cyrillic, otherwise you risk seeing abracadabra instead of Russian letters.

Then there are the search items - Find, Find Next (F3), Replace and Go. If you have not performed a search since opening the program, selecting Find or Find Next will open a search window. In it, in the Sample line, enter what you are looking for, and then click on the Find Next button. If the Case sensitive option is enabled, then when searching, lowercase and capital letters will vary. For example, if you write “Moscow” and search with case recognition enabled, the program will be able to find the word “Moscow” in the text, but not “MOSCOW”. If the option is disabled, both options will be found. Finally, Direction determines whether text should be searched up or down from the current cursor (carriage) position.

Another great feature of Notepad is the ability to not only search for text, but also replace it. To do this, from the Edit menu, select Replace (Ctrl+H). Moreover, if you had a selected piece of text at the time you called the replacement window, it will immediately be entered into the search bar (What). After determining what to look for, all that remains is to enter in the replacement line (With) what you want to replace what you are looking for, and click one of the buttons Find next, Replace or Replace all. The first one finds the closest match ( search is underway from left to right, from top to bottom), the second allows you to replace what was found, and the third replaces text in the entire document at once.

Entering and editing text

Text is entered from the keyboard, and the character is entered from the place where the cursor is located. To enter a capital character, use Shift, switching between Russian and English is carried out in accordance with Windows settings(usually by Alt+Shift or Ctrl+Shift). To start a paragraph or a new line, press Enter; to align text across columns (for example, if you are entering tabular data), it is preferable to use tabs rather than spaces. If you made a mistake while entering, the last character is deleted by clicking on Backspace (the button is located on the right in the main block of keys, with a left arrow drawn on it), and to delete the character following the cursor, use Delete. You can also edit text using the mouse. Double click selects a word; pressing the left mouse button and moving the pointer also selects the text. You can then perform manipulations on the selected text (it is highlighted by inverting, as shown in Error: Cross-reference source not found), such as copying or cutting to the clipboard, deleting or replacing with text from the clipboard. If at the time of pasting from the clipboard there is selected text in the program, it will be deleted and the contents of the clipboard will take its place.

Rice. 11.2.

Moving through the text in almost all editors is carried out using the same keys or their combinations - they are listed in Table 11.1.

To start highlighting from the keyboard, press Shift key and, while holding it down, highlight required text using the same keys that are used to move the cursor.

If the document is large enough, then in the best possible way moving will be a search: call the search dialog through the menu, enter the search word, symbol or phrase and click Find next. The match found will be highlighted and the document scrolled accordingly to the desired location. If the found fragment is repeated, then to find the next one, just press F3.

Printing documents

To print a document from Notepad, just use the Print item from the File menu. By default (if standard settings in Russian Windows versions XP) when printing, the header is not displayed, and the word “Page” is printed as the footer. If this does not suit you or you want to change the page orientation from portrait to landscape or change the width of the margins, then use the Page Settings item, which displays the window of the same name (Fig. 11.3).

NOTE
In fact, a header with the file name should be displayed at the top, and its number should be printed at the bottom after the “Page” owl. This does not happen for the reason that the characters used to define the parameters have been translated into Russian, while the program itself does not accept commands from Cyrillic characters.

Rice. 11.3.

In it you can specify the dimensions of the sheet, its location, and the width of the margins. All this will be schematically displayed in the sample field. In addition, if the printer has several paper feed trays, you can select the one you need from the Feed list.

As for headers and footers, you can either disable them altogether by removing everything from the header and footer fields, or you can replace their contents. So, you can write your own text and enter symbols for automatic substitution, which will be replaced with the desired values ​​when printed. All of them are shown in table 11.2.

If you want to display the “&” character itself, then you should repeat it: “&&”.

2011-07-04 // Any questions, suggestions, comments? You can

The standard package of Windows OS includes a simple text editor. NOTEBAD (NOTEPAD). It has minimal means for entering and editing texts, but it is precisely because of the minimality of these tools that it is preferred in many cases.

The program is launched using the commands Start/Programs/Accessories/Notepad .

Program window NOTEBOOK has a work area and a small menu bar. There is a cursor in the work area - a blinking vertical bar. The cursor determines the location where the new character entered will appear. Lowercase letters are entered using the alphanumeric keys. To enter capital letters when pressing the alphabetic key, you must hold down the key.

If you need to enter many capital letters in a row, it is convenient to press the key. Move to a new line by pressing the key. Using the command Edit/Word Wrap You can set automatic transition to a new line when the right border of the window is reached. Then pressing a key will end one paragraph and start a new one. The distance from the left edge is set using the key. Tabulation is also used in cases where it is necessary to arrange text in the form of a table: the key is used to align the columns.

Editing (editing) text is making changes to a document.

NOTEBOOK only works in insert mode. This means that the character you enter expands the previously entered characters.

The character to the left of the cursor is deleted with the key, and the character to the right of the cursor is deleted with the key. You can control cursor movement with the following keys:

• – moves the cursor to the beginning current line
• – moves the cursor to the end of the current line
• -[→] – forward one word
• -[←] – back a word
• - – to the beginning of the document
• - – to the end of the document
• – screen page up
• – one screen page down

The cursor can also be positioned at the desired location by clicking the mouse.

Another opportunity fast travel according to the text - use the command Search/Find . In the dialog box that opens, enter the input line Sample you need to enter the word or phrase you want to find and press the button Find next. The searched word will be highlighted.

NOTEBOOK allows you to work with blocks of text. First, a fragment of text must be selected by dragging the mouse (moving the mouse while holding down the left button) or using a key combination and cursor arrows. The selected fragment is deleted using the key. Copying or moving a fragment can be done using a buffer Windows Exchange:

-[X] – delete a fragment to the buffer -[C] – copy a fragment to the buffer -[V] – paste a fragment from the buffer

These are the “hot” keys for commands from the menu Edit .

Program NOTEBOOK allows you to work with only one document. But you can run it twice and copy blocks of text between two documents opened in different windows.

In the program NOTEBOOK The same order of saving information is used as in all Windows OS applications. Data is saved as a file. The file must receive a name, address and extension. The file address (folder) is selected by the user. If it does not specify a folder, then the folder that is used by default in this program is used. The name is chosen by the user. The extension usually does not need to be specified: the application “knows” what type the file is and will automatically substitute the required extension. NOTEBOOK assigns the extension .txt to files. If the application can save data in several formats, then you need to specify the type of file to be saved.

If the document is being saved for the first time and does not yet have a name, then you need to give the command File/Save As . In the dialog box that opens, select a folder, file type, and enter a name. Then you need to click on the Save button. If the document already has a name and was previously saved, then you can give the command File/Save . The file will be saved under the same name and will overwrite previous file. If you need to save a copy of the file under a new name, then you need to give the command File/Save As and set a new name in the dialog box.

It's no secret that most often you have to work on a computer with text information. This includes working with documents, correspondence, and browsing the Internet. There are many options for entering and editing texts. various applications and online services, ranging from office programs and ending with content management systems. Most of these software have developed over the years and at the moment represent quite complex systems for working with formatted text - i.e. text provided different fonts, symbols different sizes, colors, positioning, etc. At the same time, sometimes there is a need to work with simple, unformatted text - i.e. with text that is one continuous sequence of characters that does not contain information about appearance letters Standard Windows tool to work with such text is Notepad program. This program has rather meager functionality, which allows you to open a file in standard Windows encoding, edit the text using the keyboard and clipboard, and then save the edited information as the same text file.

Since working even with unformatted text can be quite varied, many tools have been created to replace the meager functionality of Windows Notepad. alternative programs. And one of the most popular among them is the Notepad++ program. As its name suggests, it is also called a notepad, but with the prefix “++”, which implies expanded functionality and convenience. In this article we will talk about how to use these two programs and reveal their most important features.

Installing and launching programs

Since Windows Notepad is regular program operating system, then you do not need to install it, but simply launch it through the menu item “Start / Programs / Accessories / Notepad”. And to install the Notepad++ program, you can use either the installer with official website of the program, or install portable version through . To do this, in the window for selecting programs to install, select “Notepad++” in the “Development” section.

After downloading and unpacking, the program will be available in the portable programs menu.

Opening and saving files

Both programs have standard means to manage files. So the Windows Notepad program in the “File” menu section has the usual “New”, “Open”, “Save” and “Save As” items. But even in this seemingly simple matter, Notepad++ has a number of significant advantages. Here are the most important ones.

In Notepad++, you can open several files at once, switching between them through tabs in the program window.

The “File” menu displays a list of previously opened files, which is extremely convenient if you often return to the same texts. Moreover, Notepad++ remembers the list of open files when you exit the program and opens them all the next time you start it.

If the file encoding is non-standard for Windows, then in Notepad++ you can set it for the current file. For example, when editing files for Internet pages, the “UTF-8 without BOM” encoding is often used. Accordingly, you can enable the operating mode in this or any other encoding through the “Encodings” menu item.

If necessary, through the same section of the menu you can convert open file to a different encoding - for example, to be able to work with it in Windows Notepad.

Using the clipboard and search functions

Working with the clipboard is an integral part of editing text data. Therefore, you can work with the buffer in both notepad programs. The same applies to text search. In the standard Windows notepad, these options are available through the “Edit” menu item.

Of course, not only these features are available in Notepad++, but also a number of others that are not available in regular Notepad. For example:

Copy and paste vertical text blocks by selecting them with the mouse while holding down the Alt key.

Selecting multi-page text without having to scroll it when selecting it - through the menu item “Edit / Set Selection”

Clipboard history panel.

Special paste of rich text from the buffer, where not only the displayed text is pasted, but also formatting characters such as HTML tags.

Search and replace in several files at once.

Highlights all matching text fragments with a different color.

Search using special characters(line break, etc.), as well as using the so-called. regular expressions.

Setting the display type

Since unformatted text is not tied to the size of the printed sheet, it can consist of lines of arbitrary length. And if the line does not fit into the current width of the window, then you can view it only by scrolling the horizontal scroll bar. To avoid this inconvenience, you can enable line wrapping in standard Notepad.

Apart from setting the font, there are no other options for changing the appearance of text in this program. But Notepad++ has a number of important functions in this regard:

Display special characters (tab, line break, spaces, etc.).

Change the text scale using the mouse wheel or the Ctrl+Num+ and Ctrl+Num- key combinations.

Syntax highlighting for the selected programming language or markup.

Selective hiding of lines, as well as selective hiding of syntax blocks.

Operation optimization

Windows Notepad does not provide any special operations to speed up text editing. While Notepad++ has a number of useful features that can significantly increase your work speed. For example, you can convert the character case for a selected piece of text with one click. To start such a conversion, you can use the menu item “Edit / Register Conversion” or the corresponding hot keys.

An even more commonly used feature of Notepad++ is working with entire text strings. After all, for example, it is much more convenient to delete a line by pressing one key combination than to first select its beginning and end with the cursor and then press the Delete button. The same applies to deleting rows and moving them. When working with texts regularly, such small optimizations make your work easier. Moreover, the program has the ability to sort rows according to different criteria. All these operations are available in the menu item “Edit / String Operations”.

No less useful function is automatic processing spaces. After all, when working with text, it is difficult to keep track of where extra lines were inserted by mistake. whitespace characters. And so the removal operations extra spaces may come in handy. These operations are available in the menu item "Edit / Operations with spaces".

For those who are involved in preparing technical texts, editing HTML code and programming, it will be extremely convenient to use tools for code commenting and auto-completion. In addition, all users can automate many routine actions by creating their own macros. This can be done through the menu item "Macros".

To top off all these advantages of the Notepad++ program, it is worth mentioning the ability to install a variety of plugins, thanks to which you can further expand the functionality of the program.

Conclusions

Using Windows Notepad, you can perform basic editing tasks of simple text files. This is convenient because Windows Notepad is a standard program included in the operating system, and therefore is available on all computers running Windows control. If you need to work more closely with unformatted text, then it is convenient to use the Notepad++ program, which has a much wider range of functions, making the process of working with texts much easier and more convenient.