Windows 98 Text Editors Besides Notepad

While Notepad served as the primary basic plain-text tool in Microsoft Windows 98, the operating system included several other built-in utilities for creating, viewing, and editing text. Beyond the standard utility of Notepad, Windows 98 provided users with richer formatting capabilities, command-line editing environments, and specialized markup tools. This article details the alternative default text editors that came pre-installed on a standard Windows 98 installation.

WordPad

WordPad was the primary rich-text editor in Windows 98, functioning as an intermediary between the simplicity of Notepad and full-featured office suites like Microsoft Office. First introduced in Windows 95 to replace Microsoft Write, WordPad supported formatted text, custom fonts, margins, bulleted lists, and embedded multimedia objects via Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It natively handled files in Rich Text Format (.rtf), plain text (.txt), and Microsoft Word 6.0 document formats (.doc).

MS-DOS Editor (EDIT.COM)

For command-line tasks and plain-text configuration files, Windows 98 included the MS-DOS Editor, accessible by typing edit in the MS-DOS Prompt or the Run dialog. This menu-driven, character-based utility ran inside the console window or full screen. Unlike Notepad, which had a 64 KB file size limitation in Windows 98, the MS-DOS Editor could open larger text files, edit binary files to a limited extent, and view multiple documents side-by-side using split-window functionality.

FrontPage Express

Included as part of the Internet Explorer 4 component of Windows 98, FrontPage Express was a lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML text editor based on Microsoft FrontPage. While designed primarily for web page authoring, it functioned as a visual text and markup editor that allowed users to generate formatted HTML text, insert tables, and manipulate underlying source code directly.

Microsoft Write (Stub)

Although replaced by WordPad, the executable for Microsoft Write (write.exe) was still present in the Windows 98 directory. However, it was not an independent editor; running it simply redirected the user to launch WordPad for backward compatibility with older scripts and shortcuts.