Today, we will see some free Notepad software for Windows PC. These Notepad alternatives or replacements are programs like Notepad, but better than Notepad, feature-wise. The built-in Notepad in Windows is a basic text editor you can use for simple documents or for creating Web pages. Although there are a few basic Notepad tips that will help you get the best out of it, if you are looking for a feature-rich Notepad, you may want to check out some of these freeware Notepad replacements for your Windows 11/10.

Free Notepad alternative software for Windows

Here is a list of some of the best free Notepad alternative software for your Windows 11/10 PC:

Notepad++
FluentNotepad
Bend
PSPad Editor
NoteTab Light Free version
TinyEdit Text Editor
Notepad2
NotepadTabs
TabPad
Glass Notepad

Let us take a look at them.

1) Notepad++

Notepad++ is a popular free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License. Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size.

2) FluentNotepad

FluentNotepad is a simple but sleek notepad replacement for Windows operating systems. It has a ribbon UI and a graphical interface similar to Microsoft Office 2010.

3) Bend

Bend is a modern text editor. Bend takes off after the Zune client but doesn’t constrain itself to it. It has a Find on page borrowed from Apple Safari. The tabs are Google Chome inspired. This text editor aims to be elegant, clean and a pleasure to work in. It exploits XAML / WPF to render beautiful hardware-accelerated text; each feature is carefully selected to balance performance and style.

4) PSPad Editor

PSPad Editor for Microsoft Windows operating systems is a universal freeware editor. It is especially useful for people who work with Plain text, Create web pages and want to use a good IDE for their compiler. There is no complex installation process; PSPad is ready to work immediately without requiring customization. The editor supports many file types and languages, with syntax highlighting. There are macros, clip files, and templates to automate repetitive tasks. Integrated HEX Editor, Project support, FTP Client, Macro Recorder, File Search/Replace, Code Explorer, Code page conversion… these are just some of the many features that PSPad offers.

5) NoteTab Light Free version

NoteTab Light Free version handles many documents at once through a lean tabbed interface. It offers comprehensive Accessibility Mode for sight-impaired users and people with other disabilities and supports UTF-8 and Unicode files, as well as ANSI documents based on non-Western character sets. Its Power-Search allows multi-line search-and-replace across open documents or search any file on disk. It also integrates the PCRE regular expressions engine for flexible wildcard search-and-replace operations and its Text statistics tool shows a number of characters, words, and frequency of each word in a document.

6) TinyEdit Text Editor

TinyEdit Text Editor is a free text editor, an ideal tool as a good Notepad replacement, have many powerful features for Web page developers and programmers, supports syntax highlighting more than 26 languages source code, include Java, C/C++, HTML, CSS, PHP, XML, SQL, Perl, Python, JavaScript, and VB Script and more.

7) Notepad2

Notepad2 is a fast light-weight Notepad replacement. Notepad2 is open-source editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation and does not touch your system’s registry.

8) NotepadTabs

NotepadTabs is a basic Notepad replacement that lets you view multiple text files in a single notepad and easily switch from one file to another through tabs at the top of the frame.

9) TabPad

TabPad is a basic no-frill Notepad replacement. A Notepad with only tabs! TabPad was designed to look almost identical to Notepad. You can make it your default editor if you please, TabPad supports files being opened by Explorer, or you can simply use it standalone. Drag and drop support is also included. TabPad includes auto-recovery, allowing you to salvage anything you were working on in the event of a program/system error or power outage.

10) Glass Notepad

Glass Notepad has a completely glassed surface which goes well with the “Aero” theme on Windows.

If you are a Notepad power user looking for a feature-rich application, check these out:

Know of any more such freeware Notepad replacements or have any experience with them, please do share.