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
• Focused View — filter display to show only lines matching the current word/selection (Ctrl+Alt+V), with fold, bookmark, and highlight modes
• TinyExpr++ — inline math expression evaluation with 80+ functions (type expression=? to evaluate in-place, use ${expr} in line numbering).
• 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
• Clipboard monitoring mode (/b command-line switch) — automatically appends every clipboard change as a new entry at the end of the document; stop at any time via Edit → Stop Clipboard Monitoring without closing the editor.

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
• .LOG auto-timestamp — files whose first line is .LOG get a fresh date + time appended on open, matching classic Notepad behaviour
• 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

• grepWin — 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

26 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, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese

Companion Tools

• MiniPath — fast file browser plugin (Ctrl+M)
• grepWin — 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

Channel	Link
Stable Release	rizonesoft.com/downloads/notepad3
GitHub Releases	github.com/rizonesoft/Notepad3/releases
Nightly Builds	Pre-releases on GitHub

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: readme/config/Configuration.md

🎨 Schemas, styles & themes: readme/schema/CustomSchema.md — the layered override model, the style mini-language, View → Customize Schemes (F12), and how to export / import / collect custom themes.

📄 File content flags (.LOG, Emacs file variables, encoding tags, shebang lexer hint): readme/config/FileContentFlags.md — markers you can put inside a file to control how Notepad3 opens or styles it.

Command-Line Options

Notepad3 accepts a rich set of command-line switches inherited from Notepad2 / Notepad2-mod, plus several Notepad3-specific extensions. All switches are case-insensitive and may be prefixed with either / or -.

Notepad3.exe /utf8sig /crlf d:\temp\Test.txt        :: Open as UTF-8 BOM + CRLF
Notepad3.exe /g 250,5 src\Notepad3.c                :: Jump to line 250, column 5
Notepad3.exe /m TODO main.c                         :: Open and find first "TODO"
Notepad3.exe /b /i                                  :: Pasteboard mode, start in tray
                                                     :: (hold Ctrl during the brief
                                                     :: pre-minimize window to keep
                                                     :: the editor visible)
Notepad3.exe /v report.log                          :: Print silently and exit
Notepad3.exe /?                                     :: Built-in help dialog

Coverage at a glance:

• File arguments & multi-file — positional paths, +, -, /y, /z
• Encoding — /ansi, /unicode, /unicodebe, /utf8, /utf8sig, /e <name>
• Line endings — /crlf, /cr, /lf
• Navigation & search — /g, /m with regex / case / backslash modifiers
• File watching — /l, /l0, /l1
• New documents — /q, /qs, /c
• Pasteboard / clipboard collector — /b (with deferred-minimize and Ctrl-skip when combined with /i)
• Lexers — /s, /d, /h, /x
• Window placement & behaviour — /p (with presets), /t, /i, /o
• Window reuse / single-instance — /n, /ns, /r, /rs, /rp
• Printing — /v, /vd
• INI & elevation — /f, /f0, /u
• Shell integration — appid=, sysmru=

⌨️ Full reference: readme/cmdln/CmdLnOptions.md — every switch with arguments, examples, persistence notes, and Notepad2/Notepad2-mod compatibility.

Menus & Commands

User-facing description of every entry in Notepad3's menus and context menus, structured to mirror the in-app menu tree. Covers File, Edit, Search, View, Appearance, Settings, Help, plus the four context (right-click) menus — with the keyboard shortcut, behaviour notes, and links into the relevant deep-dive docs for each command.

📋 Menu reference: readme/MenuEntriesAndCmds.md

File-Path Handling

How Notepad3 turns clickable links, selected text, and path-shaped tokens into real files — including bare paths with line specs (file.c:42, file.c(42)), file:/// URLs, relative-path anchor rules (current document's directory → working directory), environment-variable expansion, and the two new selection commands Open Containing Folder of Selection / Open File from Selection.

🗂️ File-path reference: readme/paths/FilePathHandling.md

Keyboard Shortcuts

Every key combination Notepad3 understands — file, editing, view, search, customization — grouped by menu, with Notepad2 → Notepad3 reassignments flagged.

⌨️ Notepad3 shortcuts: readme/KeyboardShortcuts.md 🗂️ MiniPath shortcuts: readme/minipath/KeyboardShortcuts.md

FAQ

Common questions inherited from Notepad2 / Notepad2-mod, updated for Notepad3 — installation, portable settings, regex (PCRE2), encoding, file change notification, .LOG and Emacs file variables, replacing Windows Notepad, and more.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions: readme/faq/FAQ.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:

Project	Author	Role
Notepad2	Florian Balmer	Original editor
Notepad2-mod	XhmikosR	Extended fork
Scintilla 5.5.8	Neil Hodgson	Editing component
Lexilla 5.4.6	Neil Hodgson	Syntax highlighting
PCRE2 10.47	PCRE2 Project	Regex engine
TinyExpr++	Blake Madden	Expression evaluator
uchardet	Mozilla / freedesktop	Encoding detection
Fugue Icons	Yusuke Kamiyamane	Toolbar icons

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.

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