Notepad3

A fast, lightweight, Scintilla-based text editor for Windows

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Notepad3 is a free, open-source text editor with syntax highlighting for Windows. Built on the Scintilla editing component and Lexilla lexer library, it has a small memory footprint while being powerful enough for professional programming and everyday text editing.

Notepad3 is based on code from Florian Balmer's Notepad2 and XhmikosR's Notepad2-mod. MiniPath is based on Florian Balmer's metapath.

Features

Editing

• Code folding with toggle-all support
• Bookmarks for quick navigation within files
• Word auto-completion with configurable fill-up characters
• Mark all occurrences of a selected word with occurrence count display
• Find and Replace with PCRE2 regular expression engine
• Undo/Redo that preserves selection state
• Visual Studio–style copy/paste of the current line (when nothing is selected)
• Virtual space rectangular selection (Alt+Drag)
• Accelerated word navigation with configurable delimiters
• Insert GUIDs directly into your document

Syntax Highlighting

Over 55 languages supported, including:

ANSI Art, Apache Config, Assembly, AutoHotkey, AutoIt3, AviSynth, Awk, Batch, C/C++, C#, CMake, CoffeeScript, CSS, CSV, D, Dart, Diff, F77/Fortran, Go, HTML/XML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, Julia, Kotlin, KiXtart, LaTeX, Lua, Makefiles, Markdown, MATLAB, Nim, NSIS, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Python, R/S-Plus, Registry, Resource Script, Ruby, Rust, Shell Script, SQL, SystemVerilog, Tcl, TOML, VBScript, VHDL, Verilog, Visual Basic, YAML, and more.

File Handling

• AES-256 Rijndael encryption/decryption (in-app and command-line batch tool)
• Encoding detection powered by uchardet
• File change monitoring with configurable check intervals
• Emacs file variables support (encoding, mode, tab-width, etc.)
• File history that preserves caret position and encoding
• Portable design — runs from USB drives with relative path storage

Search

• grepWinNP3 — integrated search-in-files tool with regex support (Ctrl+Shift+F)
• Hyperlink hotspot highlighting — Ctrl+Click to open in browser, Alt+Click to load in editor

User Interface

• High-DPI aware with high-definition toolbar icons
• Dark mode support with customizable colors
• Customizable status bar with 16 configurable fields (line, column, encoding, TinyExpr evaluation, Unicode code point, and more)
• Customizable toolbar labels — display function names next to icons
• Zoom from 10% to 1000% (Ctrl+Scroll or toolbar buttons)
• Transparent window mode with configurable opacity

Localization

27 language translations:

Afrikaans, Belarusian, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Dutch, English (US & UK), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Spain & Latin America), Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese

Companion Tools

• MiniPath — fast file browser plugin (Ctrl+M)
• grepWinNP3 — powerful search-and-replace across files

System Requirements

• OS: Windows 8.1, 10, or 11
• Architectures: x86 (Win32), x64, x64 with AVX2, ARM64

Download & Install

Notepad3 is fully portable — no installation required. Extract the archive and run Notepad3.exe. Settings are stored in Notepad3.ini alongside the executable. See Replacing Windows Notepad for system-wide integration.

Building from Source

Notepad3 is built with Visual Studio 2022 (toolset v143) targeting the Windows SDK.

# Restore NuGet packages (required once)
nuget restore Notepad3.sln

# Build a specific platform
Build\Build_x64.cmd Release

# Build all platforms (Win32, x64, x64_AVX2, ARM64)
Build\BuildAll.cmd Release

# Or use MSBuild directly
msbuild Notepad3.sln /m /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64

Run Version.ps1 before building to generate version headers from templates in Versions\.

Configuration

Notepad3 uses a portable INI file for all settings. Press Ctrl+F7 to open it directly in the editor.

• UI settings ([Settings]) — managed through Menu → Settings
• Advanced settings ([Settings2]) — edit manually; most require a restart
• Status bar ([Statusbar Settings]) — customize field layout, order, and width
• Toolbar labels ([Toolbar Labels]) — show function names next to icons

📖 Full configuration reference: doc/Configuration.md

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Here's how to help:

1. Report bugs — Open an issue with steps to reproduce
2. Submit pull requests — Fork the repo, create a feature branch, and submit a PR against master
3. Translate — Add or improve translations in the language\ directory
4. Spread the word — Star the repo and share with others

For support, visit rizonesoft.com/contact-us.

Credits

Notepad3 builds upon the work of:

Reviews

• Notepad3 is an advanced text editor that supports many programming languages — gHacks
• Notepad3 review on Nsane Forums — Nsane Forums

License

Notepad3 is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.

Copyright © 2008–2026 Rizonesoft. All rights reserved.