Notepad Zero

A plain text editor for Windows, written in Rust. It reproduces the feature set of Windows 7 Notepad — no tabs, no AI, no markdown preview.

Why

Windows 11 Notepad added tabs and a Copilot button. This is a replacement that behaves like the old one.

Features

• Open, save, save as (UTF-8 output; detects UTF-8/UTF-16/Windows-1252 on read)
• Find, Find Next (F3), Replace, Go To Line
• Word wrap toggle
• Font selection
• Status bar showing line and column number
• Time/Date insert (F5)
• Dirty-state tracking with save prompt on close
• Open files from the command line or by drag and drop
• PerMonitorV2 DPI awareness

Download

Each release has two files:

• notepad0-<version>-setup.exe: one-click per-user installer (no admin rights, no prompts). It adds a Start menu entry, makes notepad0 work from Win+R, and adds Notepad Zero to the right-click Open with menu for all files. Uninstall from Settings > Apps.
• notepad0-<version>-portable.zip: the exe plus LICENSE; run it from anywhere.

Building

Requires Rust (stable) and a Windows MSVC toolchain.

cargo build --release

The release binary is around 250 KB with no runtime dependencies beyond standard Windows DLLs.

Usage

Run notepad0.exe directly, or associate .txt files with it. There are three ways to open a file:

• Command line: notepad0.exe C:\notes\todo.txt (absolute or relative paths, spaces allowed when quoted)
• Drag onto the exe: dropping a file on notepad0.exe or a shortcut to it launches the app with that file
• Drag onto the window: dropping a file on a running instance opens it, prompting to save unsaved changes first

Keyboard shortcuts

These match Windows 7 Notepad exactly.

Action	Shortcut
New	Ctrl+N
Open	Ctrl+O
Save	Ctrl+S
Print	Ctrl+P
Undo	Ctrl+Z
Find	Ctrl+F
Find Next	F3
Replace	Ctrl+H
Go To	Ctrl+G
Select All	Ctrl+A
Time/Date	F5

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Claude Henchoz.

Notepad0 is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for the full text.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.