Online Notepad

A notepad that opens in a tab

The box at the top of this page is already live. You can type in it without signing up, installing anything, or waiting for an app to start. A moment after you stop typing, what you wrote is written to your browser's own storage, and it is read back the next time you open this page in the same browser. The word, character and line counts update as you go.

When the note needs to be somewhere else, Copy puts it on your clipboard and Download .txt saves it as a plain text file that opens in any editor on any operating system. Print prints the note on its own, without the page around it.

Where your notes are actually stored

Your notes are saved in this browser's localStorage, on this device. That is worth spelling out plainly, because it has consequences that most online notepads leave vague.

What it gives you: the note is there when you come back in the same browser on the same machine, it appears instantly because nothing has to be fetched, and it keeps working with no internet connection. It is not on a server, so there is no account to breach and nobody here can read it.

What it costs you, stated honestly: the note does not travel. Type on your laptop and it will not be on your phone. Open a different browser on the same computer and you get a blank page. Clearing your browsing data deletes it, and a private or incognito window throws it away when you close the window. None of this is a backup. If the machine dies, the note dies with it.

That trade is the design, not an oversight. Nothing leaves your device, which is precisely why there is no sync, no share link and no password. If a note matters, download it.

Which of the three editors you want

This page is the plain text one, and for most notes that is the right answer. If you are editing code, a config file, JSON or a log, you want line numbers, syntax colouring and more than one file open at a time, which is what the Notepad++ alternative gives you. If you are writing something with bold text, headings or bullet points, or you have a stack of .rtf files and Windows 11 has taken WordPad away, use the WordPad replacement. All three save to your browser the same way.

Keyboard shortcuts

What people use a browser notepad for

Stripping formatting out of text. This is the most common reason anyone opens Notepad on Windows, and it works the same here. Paste text copied from a website, a Word document or an email into the box, then copy it back out. The fonts, colours, sizes and hidden markup are gone and you are left with the words, ready to paste somewhere that will not inherit somebody else's styling.

A scratchpad that survives a closed tab. Order numbers, a phone number read out to you, a snippet you need in two minutes, the shape of an email before you write it properly. A note that is one tab away and needs no filename is a genuinely different thing from a document you have to name and save.

Writing without the machinery. No formatting toolbar to fiddle with, no suggestions, no cursor from a collaborator appearing halfway down the page. Some drafts go faster in a box that cannot do anything except hold text.

Typing on a computer that is not yours. A library machine, a shared desk, a client's laptop. Nothing to install and no account to sign into, which also means no session left behind. Clear the note when you are done and there is nothing on the machine except a browser storage entry you can wipe with the site data.

What this notepad cannot do

No accounts, no sync between devices, no shared or collaborative notes, no share links, no password protection, and no version history. Every one of those needs your text sitting on a server, which is the one thing this tool is built not to do. If you need any of them, you need a different kind of product, and it is better to know that now than to find out after you have typed two thousand words.