This section provides usage guidelines for Black NotePad, focusing primarily on its unique features and key operational instructions. Standard operations typically function similarly to other plain text editors.
File-opening mechanisms (such as the Open dialog and drag-and-drop) support batch processing. For security reasons, batch opening is limited to a maximum of 20 files simultaneously, and only files with a .txt extension will be processed. Notifications are displayed for any skipped files.
Legend for the "Recent Files" and "Favourites" Menus:
Red: This file is currently open in the active tab.
White/Black: This file was open when Black NotePad was last closed.
Selected - Comparison: Searches for the highlighted text of the current tab across all other tabs. If matches are found, they appear as a menu under an icon in the application's bottom status bar. Legend for matches:
Red: The source tab containing the original selected text.
White/Black: Content that is identical to the target search text.
View - Monospaced Font Type: Monospaced fonts are highly recommended to fully experience Black NotePad's feature set. A dedicated configuration panel is accessible through this menu. Although the application supports proportional fonts, they may degrade the user experience in certain contexts (e.g., Hex View). It is strongly advised to assign a monospaced font to at least one of the three available font profiles (A, B, and C), allowing you to toggle between them with a single click.
Others - Encoding: Default encoding settings can be reverted if necessary based on this screenshot reference. The "Default" encoding option shown in the menu refers to the native settings of the user's operating system, rather than a hardcoded default within Black NotePad itself.
Others - Tab Restore: Contains a list of tabs closed during the current session. This list is generated automatically in the background, allowing you to reopen closed tabs. If multiple closed tabs point to the same file path, they can only be restored if the "Enable Duplicate Path" option is checked. Please use caution when enabling this! This list can accumulate a large number of items, which can be manually cleared by the user. Once cleared, these items cannot be recovered.
Others - Insert Line Number: Inserted line numbers become a permanent part of the text body. If you continue editing, these line numbers will not dynamically update. Therefore, this action is only recommended for finalized texts. It is highly advised to save a backup of the original text before proceeding. If you need to edit text that has already been saved with line numbers, they can easily be removed using the options within the "Selected - Trim" menu.
Quick Panel: Provides single-click access to critical operations. When enabled, a vertical toolbar appears when moving the mouse cursor to the left edge of the Black NotePad window. Holding down the Control key temporarily overrides the Quick Panel's current toggle state (making it appear if disabled, or hiding it if enabled).
Selected - Miscellaneous - Join Wrapped Lines: Removes fixed-width line breaks (typically at 72 or 80 characters) from the selected text and merges related lines into a single continuous paragraph. Leading space-based indentation is removed, while blank lines are preserved. The content of the text is not modified.
The purpose of this feature is to restore the editability of text documents formatted with fixed-width line wrapping. Depending on the document, the conversion may require multiple steps. In such cases, multiple selections, repeated Join Wrapped Lines operations, and other tools available from the Selected menu may be required.