Notepad++ Online Alternative

What this does

Notepad++ is a Windows program, and there is no official web version of it. This page is not trying to be one. It is a browser editor built around the handful of things people actually reach for Notepad++ to do, for the times you are on a locked-down work laptop, a shared library machine, a school computer, a Mac or a Chromebook, and installing an application is not an option.

Everything runs on your own device. Opening a file reads it locally and uploads nothing, and your open tabs are stored in your browser so they are still there when you come back.

What you get

• Syntax highlighting for about 27 languages. The language is picked from the file extension when you open a file, and can be changed from the dropdown.
• File tabs. Several documents open at once, each remembering its own language, saved between visits.
• Column and block editing. Hold Alt and drag to select a rectangle, then type to change every line at once. Ctrl+click adds extra cursors.
• Find and replace with regular expressions, match case and whole word, on one match or all of them. Ctrl+F opens it.
• Line numbers, code folding, bracket matching and highlighting of every other occurrence of whatever you have selected.
• Line ending conversion between LF, CRLF and CR, plus adding or removing the UTF-8 BOM, both from the status bar.
• Indentation control: two spaces, four spaces or real tabs, and a word wrap toggle.
• Go to line, and a status bar showing line, column, selection length and totals.

What it does not do

Being straight about this saves you time. There are no plugins, no macros, no FTP or SFTP, no session files, no document comparison and no hex editing. Those depend on a real desktop application with access to your filesystem and a plugin runtime, and a web page has neither. If you need any of them, you need the actual program.

This page is for the case where the editing itself is what you are missing, and the machine will not let you install the thing that does it.

Opening and saving real files

In Chrome and Edge on the desktop, Open shows a real file picker and Save writes back to the file you opened, in place, the way a desktop editor does. That uses the File System Access API, which those browsers support and others do not.

In Firefox, Safari and on phones, Open falls back to the ordinary file dialog and Save downloads the file to your downloads folder instead. Nothing is gated behind the newer browsers, you just get a slightly longer round trip.

Line endings and encoding

A file written on Windows ends its lines with a carriage return and a line feed. One written on Linux or a Mac uses a line feed alone. Moving a file between them is the classic cause of a script that refuses to run, a config file that is silently ignored, or a diff where every single line looks changed.

Opening a file here detects which convention it uses and shows it in the status bar. Change the dropdown and the file is saved with the line endings you picked. The encoding dropdown does the same for the UTF-8 byte order mark, which is the other invisible difference that breaks things: some Windows tools write it, and plenty of parsers choke on it.

Column editing, which is the feature people actually miss

Ask people what they miss when Notepad++ is not available and this is usually the answer. You have forty lines and you need to put a comma at the end of each one, or delete the first four characters from all of them, or turn a plain list into a set of quoted strings.

Hold Alt and drag down through the lines to select a rectangular block rather than a run of text. Whatever you type then applies to every line in that block at once. If a rectangle is not the right shape for the job, Ctrl+click (or Cmd+click on a Mac) drops an extra cursor wherever you click, and every cursor types together.

Where your files are kept

In your browser, on this device. Your open tabs go into IndexedDB, which is the browser's own storage, and nothing is sent to a server. That means nobody here can see your code, and it also means the tabs do not follow you to another machine, another browser or a private window, and clearing your browsing data removes them. Save anything that matters to a real file. The privacy policy covers this in full.

The other editors here

For plain notes without the code machinery, use the notepad or the text editor. If what you actually need is formatted text and .rtf files after Windows 11 removed WordPad, use the WordPad replacement.