A free online notepad & code editor

A notepad that opens instantly and keeps nothing

This is a free online notepad and code editor: a place to paste something, think something through, clean up a list or write a script, without installing an app, making an account or handing your text to somebody's server. Open the page and start typing. Everything — syntax highlighting, find and replace, the text tools, the spell check — runs inside your own browser, and your writing never leaves your device.

It is deliberately closer to a desktop editor than to a text box. Tabs, line numbers, code folding, multi-cursor editing, column selection, bookmarks, a macro recorder and a diff viewer are all here, and your open tabs come back when you return.

What you can do with it

• Write and keep notes — multiple tabs, each restored automatically the next time you open the page.
• Open and save real files — drag them in, edit, then save straight back to the same file (Chrome and Edge) or download a copy.
• Read and edit code in 50+ languages with proper syntax highlighting, bracket matching, auto-indent and folding.
• Find and replace with regular expressions, across one document or every open tab, with a live match count.
• Edit in many places at once — Ctrl+D to select the next occurrence, Alt+Click for extra cursors, Alt+Drag for a rectangular block.
• Tidy text — change case, sort, deduplicate, reverse, shuffle, join, trim trailing spaces, convert tabs and spaces.
• Format code — one command detects and pretty-prints JSON, HTML, XML, CSS or JavaScript; JSON also minifies.
• Convert and inspect — Base64, URL and HTML-entity encode/decode, word and character counts, MD5 and SHA-1/256/512 checksums.
• Preview Markdown live in a pane beside what you are writing.
• Compare two tabs in a side-by-side diff with the unchanged parts collapsed.
• Record a macro and replay a fiddly edit hundreds of times.
• Check spelling with a real Hunspell dictionary, or proofread grammar with Chrome's on-device AI.
• Print the document as clean text, with none of the editor around it.

Getting started

1. Start typing. A blank tab is already open when the page loads. There is nothing to install, no account to make and no "start free trial".
2. Or bring a file in. File → Open, or drag one (or a dozen) onto the window. Each file gets its own tab, and the language is picked from its extension.
3. Use the tabs. The ＋ button adds one. Double-click a tab name to rename it — renaming to .md or .py switches the highlighting to match. A dot on the tab means unsaved changes.
4. Work. The menu bar across the top is the whole feature set: File, Edit, Search, View, Language, Tools, Macro, AI and Help. Everything worth a shortcut shows it on the right of the menu entry.
5. Save. Ctrl+S. In Chrome and Edge this writes back to the exact file you opened, so the editor behaves like a desktop app; elsewhere it downloads a copy. The status bar lets you switch a file between Unix (LF) and Windows (CRLF) line endings before you do.

Close the tab without saving and nothing is lost: your documents are stored in your own browser and are all there when you come back.

What people actually use it for

A text editor is one of those tools whose value is in the small jobs. Some of the ones this handles well:

• Stripping formatting from something you copied. Paste a block out of Word, a web page or an email, and what lands here is the plain text — no fonts, no colours, no invisible styling to carry into wherever it is going next.
• Cleaning up a list. Paste 400 email addresses or product codes, then Edit → Line operations: sort them, drop the duplicates, remove the blank lines, trim the trailing spaces. Four clicks instead of a spreadsheet.
• Reading a config or log file someone sent you, with line numbers, a go-to-line jump and a search that counts its matches.
• Making sense of minified JSON. Paste it, press Ctrl+Alt+F, and it comes back indented, folded and highlighted — then Tools → Minify JSON puts it back on one line when you are done.
• Drafting in Markdown for a README, a blog post or a wiki page, with the rendered result live in the pane beside you.
• Comparing two versions of a config, a contract clause or a query, side by side, without installing a diff tool.
• Decoding something. A Base64 blob, a URL-encoded query string, a chunk of HTML entities — all one menu entry away in Tools.
• Checking a download. Paste a file's text and compare its MD5 or SHA-256 against the one the publisher listed.
• Just having somewhere to put things — the scratch pad every day needs, that is still there tomorrow.

Working with code

The editing surface is CodeMirror 6, the same engine behind a lot of in-browser IDEs, so code behaves the way you expect rather than the way a <textarea> does.

• Highlighting for over fifty languages, chosen from the file extension and overridable from the Language menu or the dropdown in the status bar.
• Structural editing — auto-indent, bracket and tag matching, automatic closing brackets, and a fold arrow beside every block, function and object so you can collapse what you are not reading.
• Comment toggling that knows the language: Ctrl+/ writes // in JavaScript, # in Python and <!-- --> in HTML.
• Word autocomplete drawn from what is already in the document — useful for long identifiers, and switched off in View if you would rather it stayed quiet.
• Bookmarks on the left margin (click it, or Ctrl+F2) with F2 to cycle through them, for hopping between the few lines of a long file you actually care about.
• A change marker in the gutter beside every line you have edited since the last save.
• Formatters for JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XML and JSON, either from the Tools menu or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F and letting it work out what the file is.

A worked example: turning a list into something else

Say you have 300 names, one per line, and you need them as a quoted, comma-separated list. Rather than doing it by hand, record it once:

1. Put the cursor at the start of the first line.
2. Macro → Start recording (Ctrl+Shift+R).
3. Type ", press End, type ",, press ↓ then Home.
4. Stop recording, then Run multiple times and enter 299.

Every line is now quoted and comma-terminated. Finish with Edit → Line operations → Join lines and you have your one-line list. The macro recorder captures typing, deletions, cursor movement, Enter and Tab, and the editing shortcuts — enough for most repetitive reshaping jobs, and far quicker than writing a regular expression for a one-off.

For the jobs that are better as a pattern, the find panel takes full regular expressions, including capture groups in the replacement, and tells you how many matches it found before you commit to replacing them.

Keyboard shortcuts worth knowing

• Ctrl+O / Ctrl+S — open, save. Ctrl+Shift+S saves as.
• Ctrl+F — find and replace, with case, whole-word and regex toggles.
• Ctrl+D — select the next occurrence (repeat for multi-cursor editing).
• Alt+↑ / Alt+↓ — move the current line. Ctrl+Shift+D duplicates it, Ctrl+Shift+K deletes it.
• Ctrl+/ — comment or uncomment, in whatever language the file is.
• Ctrl+Alt+G — go to a line (or line:column).
• Ctrl+F2 — bookmark a line; F2 and Shift+F2 jump between bookmarks.
• Ctrl+Alt+F — auto-format. Ctrl+Alt+M — Markdown preview.
• Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- — zoom the text. F11 — distraction-free mode.

On a Mac, use ⌘ wherever this says Ctrl.

How it compares

… to the Notepad on your computer

Windows Notepad and TextEdit are fine for a paragraph and run out of road quickly after that. This adds tabs, syntax highlighting, regular-expression search, multiple cursors, sorting and deduplication, a diff view and a macro recorder — and it is on any machine you can open a browser on, including one you are not allowed to install software on.

… to Notepad++, VS Code or Sublime

Those are better tools for a project. They have a file tree, extensions, integrated terminals and a plugin ecosystem, and if you write code all day you should use one. This is for the moment when you are not at that machine, or you just want to look at one file without a five-minute install — and it covers a surprising amount of what people actually reach for Notepad++ to do.

… to a Google Doc or an online word processor

A word processor is about how the text looks. This is about what the text is: characters, lines and encodings, with nothing invisible added. That is what you want when the destination is a config file, a spreadsheet import, a code block or a form field — and it means nothing is stored in an account somewhere.

… to a paste-bin

Paste-bins upload. That is the whole point of them, and it is the wrong shape for a password you are untangling, a log with customer data in it, or a draft you have not finished thinking about. Nothing here is uploaded, so there is no link to leak and no copy to delete later.

Limits worth knowing about

• Saving back to the original file needs Chrome or Edge. They support the File System Access API. Firefox and Safari download a copy instead, which for most purposes is the same thing with an extra step.
• Session restore has a size cap. Documents up to about 1.5 MB are kept in the browser between visits. Anything larger is still perfectly editable — it just is not held for next time, so save it to a file.
• Very large files will feel it. A few megabytes of text is fine; a 200 MB log is a job for a desktop tool.
• Spell check is English. The dictionary bundled here is en-US. Your browser's own spellchecker (View → Spellcheck squiggles) covers whatever languages it has installed.
• Nothing syncs between devices. Your tabs live in the browser you typed them in. That is the trade for nothing being uploaded — use a file if you need it elsewhere.
• AI proofreading needs a recent desktop Chrome with its on-device model available. Everywhere else, the Hunspell spell check does the spelling half of the job.

Privacy

Nothing you type is uploaded, and nothing about it is recorded. Your open tabs are saved to your browser's local storage on your own machine so they survive a refresh — that copy is readable only by this browser, is never transmitted, and you can clear it at any time by closing every tab or clearing site data.

Nor does using the editor cause a request anywhere else. The editing engine and the spell-check dictionary are both served from this site rather than a third-party CDN, so no outside party learns you opened it, let alone what you wrote. The one exception is Chrome's AI proofreader, which is a model Chrome has already downloaded onto your own machine — it runs locally too. Our full Privacy Policy sets out what the site as a whole does and does not collect.

Other tools that stay on your device

The PDF Editor annotates, edits text in, signs, redacts and reorganises PDFs; the PDF Converter converts to and from Word, Excel, images and more; the Workbook Builder lays out printable worksheets. All three run in your browser, with no upload.