A minimalistic text editor faithfully recreating the classic Windows Notepad experience on 16-bit Windows 3.x.
This is a downgraded version of the Wine Notepad application, adapted for the osFree Win16 Personality project — an open-source implementation of the 16-bit Windows environment.
This application brings the familiar Windows Notepad to Windows 3.0/3.1. It is derived from the source code of Wine’s Notepad, modified to compile and run correctly under the constraints of the 16-bit Windows API. The user interface, behaviour, and supported features are intentionally kept as close as possible to the original Notepad, offering a comfortable editing tool for plain text files.
The port removes dependencies on 32-bit Windows specifics and replaces them with equivalent Win16 APIs. It remains a clean, self-contained C89 program that can be built with OpenWatcom.
- Basic text editing – Open, edit, and save plain text files (
.txt) - File management – New, Open, Save, Save As
- Clipboard support – Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Select All
- Word wrap – Toggle between wrapped and unwrapped display mode
- Find and replace – Simple search dialog with exact text matching
- Time/Date stamp – Insert current system date and time at cursor position (
F5) - Status bar – Shows cursor position (line, column) when not in wrap mode (Windows 3.1 style)
- Keyboard accelerators –
Ctrl+N,Ctrl+O,Ctrl+S,Ctrl+C,Ctrl+X,Ctrl+V,F5, etc. - About dialog – Classic Help → About Notepad window
- INI persistence – Remembers window position, word-wrap setting, and other preferences in
WIN.INI - Clean C89 code – Strict ANSI C, compiled with OpenWatcom 1.9
| File | Description |
|---|---|
main.c |
Application entry point, window procedure, menu handling |
notepad.h |
Header file — constants, resource IDs, prototypes |
notepad.rc |
Resource file — menus, accelerators, dialog templates, version info |
makefile |
Build instructions for OpenWatcom Make |
notepad.ico |
Application icon |
shot.png |
Screenshot of the running application |
readme.md |
This documentation file |
Contributions are welcome! Please follow these guidelines:
- Bug reports – Open issues in the WIN16 repository Issues or in the Notepad repository.
- Pull requests – Send your improvements and fixes via PR.
- Code style – The project uses C89; adhere to existing conventions.
- Documentation – Help improve this README and other project documents.
The osFree Janus Notepad code is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
- osFree Win16 Personality (WIN16) – the main project to create an open-source clone of Windows 3.x
- osFree Project – the parent project for an open-source OS/2 clone
- Control Panel – a clone of the Windows 3.x Control Panel
- winver – a clone of the About dialog
- Reversi – a port of the OS/2 Othello game
- Taskman – a clone of Task Manager
- Original Wine Notepad — copyright by the Wine authors and contributors
- Win16 adaptation — (C) 2026 Yuri Prokushev and the osFree team
Last updated: May 30, 2026