Metapad is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be u ...

for Microsoft Windows 9x/NT/XP/Vista/7, developed by Alexander Davidson since 1999. The aim of Metapad is to provide a near drop-in replacement of

Notepad A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbooking. History ...

in Windows. Metapad was distributed as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

for the first ten years of its existence. On March 20, 2009, the 10th anniversary of its initial release, the Metapad source code was released under GPL-3.0-or-later. Some of its key features include: *No file size limit under Windows 9x *UNIX text file support *Commit

word wrap Line breaking, also known as word wrapping, is breaking a section of text into lines so that it will fit into the available width of a page, window or other display area. In text display, line wrap is continuing on a new line when a line is ful ...

*Tab and

newline Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

search *Hyperlinking support *Auto-indent mode *Block indent and unindent *Toolbar button for always on top *Language plugin support (though English is British-only) *Can replace Windows Notepad *A ‘portability mode’ to leave no traces in Windows Registry or export your metapad settings to a new computer Metapad is programmed in pure

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and th ...

with the

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations ...

API. There are two versions of Metapad: a full and LE (light edition) version. The full version uses the RichEdit control which boasts more features, while the LE version uses the faster Edit control.

Reception

Metapad received 3.5/5 score in a 2013 PCWorld review.

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.liquidninja.com/metapad/ Windows text editors Notepad replacements Windows-only free software Free text editors Formerly proprietary software 1999 software 2011 software Software using the GPL license

Reception

See also

References

External links