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Notepad makes use of a built-in window class named "EDIT".

It is one of the most common text-only editors. The resulting files—typically saved with the .txt extension—have no format tags or styles, making the program suitable for editing system files that are to be used in a DOS environment. Notepad can edit files of almost any format.

Early versions of Notepad offered only the most basic functions, such as finding text. Newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function, as well as [Ctrl-X] for "cut" and similar keyboard shortcuts. In older versions such as those included with Windows 95, 98, ME and 3.1, there is a 64-kilobyte limit on the size of the file being edited, an operating system limit of the EDIT class.

In the Windows NT-based versions of Windows, Notepad can edit traditional 8-bit text files as well as Unicode text files (both UTF-8 and UTF-16, and in case of UTF-16, both little-endian and big-endian, see endianness).