Question

answer the following questions and provide a minimum of 200 words in response

Windows 7 comes with two programs you can use to edit text files – Notepad and WordPad. Why might you want to purchase another Windows text editor, such as TextPad?

Answer 1

Notepad and WordPad are bundled with the Microsoft Windows Operating System. TextPad, on the other hand, is a shareware text editor developed by Helios Software, initially released in 1992. The similarity between all these tools is that they all are text editors with varying levels of functionality.

Notepad is the simplest of all text editors. It allows you to create, open, and read plaintext files. Plain text is any text file or document that contains only text. Unlike a rich text document, a plain text file cannot have bold text, fonts and font sizes, or any other special text formatting. Plain text files are saved with the extension .txt. Notepad is the best editor for creating an HTML document.

WordPad is a free rich text editor capable of doing more than Notepad, although it is not as advanced as Microsoft Word. It does give you additional features, such as the capability of inserting pictures and text formatting. It is very good for editing formatted documents. You can change the fonts of your documents in WordPad. Graphics and pictures can be placed in the document. Hypertext links can be placed in WordPad. It can save documents in the .rtf, .txt, .docx and .odt formats.

Notepad and WordPad provide the basic text editing capabilities but TextPad provides support for syntax highlighting, regular expression search support, automatic block indentation, macros, file compare, text sorting, and much more. Some of these features like syntax highlighting and automatic block indentation are very helpful for programmers as they help in creating a user-friendly environment to write code. TextPad has the ability to call external programs. Textpad is preloaded with many pre-defined clip libraries like HTML tags and ANSI characters.