Edit a .txt file in your browser
Open a text file, change it, save it back to your computer. No upload, no account, no waiting for a "conversion" to finish.
Plenty of sites that claim to edit text files are really upload forms: your file goes to somebody's server, gets processed, and comes back as a download. That is a poor trade for a file format a browser can handle natively. Classic Notepad reads the file on your machine and writes the new one on your machine.
Nothing is uploaded. The file never leaves your computer, which also makes this safe for logs, config files and anything else you would not want sitting on a stranger's server.
How to edit a text file
- Open Classic Notepad.
- Choose File › Open, or press Ctrl+O, and pick your file.
- Edit it. Use Ctrl+F to find and Ctrl+H to replace.
- Press Ctrl+S to save it back down to your computer.
Your work also autosaves in the browser as you go, so a stray refresh does not cost you the edit.
What it opens
Any plain text file, whatever the extension — the format is just characters:
.txt— plain text notes and documents.md— Markdown (edited as source, not rendered).csv— comma-separated data, as raw rows.log— application and server logs.json,.xml,.yml— data and config files.ini,.env,.conf— settings files- Source files in any language
It is a plain-text editor, so there is no syntax highlighting and no validation — it shows you exactly the characters in the file, which is often precisely what you want when something else has mangled them.
What it does not open
Formats that only look like documents. .docx, .pdf,
.xlsx and .rtf are structured or compressed
containers, not text, and will come out as unreadable characters. Export to
.txt from the original program first.
Useful for
- Stripping formatting. Paste in styled text, copy out clean text.
- Fixing a config file on a machine where you cannot install an editor.
- Reading a log without loading a heavyweight IDE.
- Bulk find and replace across a whole file in a few keystrokes.
- Checking what a file really contains before handing it to something else.
Frequently asked questions
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read by your browser and written back by your browser. There is no server involved at any point.
Is there a file size limit?
No hard limit, but this is a single text area — very large files (tens of megabytes of logs) will feel slow. A dedicated desktop editor is the better tool at that size.
What encoding does it use?
UTF-8, reading and writing.
Can I open several files at once?
Yes. Each one opens as its own window on the desktop, with its own icon, and you can drag them side by side.