For the
Windows programmers out there, it is quite obvious what
Windows Notepad actually is:
Notepad.exe is really nothing more than a window with an (
rich text)
edit control (one of the
Windows Common Controls). Standard
edit controls have a limit, and have limitations as to what they can do. Quite easily written (very few lines of code, notepad.exe itself is quite small). It is maintained and updated regularly with the standard Windows
suite of utilities. Proof of this would be to look at the about screen. It has gotten simple new features, but why go overboard when other (better) mini-apps are included, such as
WordPad.
Of course, it is not as simple as I make it
sound. It has other text helping features: printing, search and replace functionality, drag and drop to load, and basic font support.
Windows Notepad is not meant for
industrial text editing, or anything with strange ASCII characters. For large files (code and the like), I'd suggest a third-party text editing program. Notepad, because of it's
simplicity, does not perform memory mapped file access, and thus pales in comparison to an editor that has those features (such as
Visual Studio).