Two notepads, one set of notes
The switch above the editor flips between Basic and Advanced. Both modes read and write the same notes, so a list started in Basic shows up as a tab in Advanced, and nothing gets lost when you switch back. The page remembers your mode, font size, and wrap setting for the next visit.
| Feature | Basic | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Look | Light window, monospaced text | Cream paper tones with an amber accent, in monospace, sans serif, or serif |
| Notes on screen | One at a time, with New starting another | Up to 20 tabs |
| Search | Your browser's Ctrl+F | Find and replace, match case, regex |
| Line numbers | No | Yes, with word wrap off |
| Text cleanup | None | Sort, remove duplicates, trim, number, change case |
| Status bar | Line, column, words, characters | Adds selection size and reading time |
| Export | .txt | .txt, .md, print |
Basic suits a quick note you want out of your head. Advanced pays off once you paste in 200 email addresses or a log file and need the list cleaned before sending the text anywhere else.
Where your notes live
Every note sits in localStorage, a small store each browser keeps per website. Nothing uploads. Toolexe has no copy of your text, no account system, and no sync. Five facts follow from this.
- Most browsers give a site about 5 MB of localStorage. A 300 page novel in plain text runs near 600 KB, so the cap rarely bites. If a save fails, the marker in the title bar turns red and reads Not saved.
- Private and incognito windows wipe the store once the last private window closes.
- Clearing cookies and site data for toolexe.com deletes every note.
- Notes stay on the device and browser where you typed them. Chrome on your laptop and Safari on your phone hold two separate notepads.
- Safari on iPhone and Mac removes stored data for sites you have not opened in seven days.
For anything you want to keep, press Save .txt. A file on disk outlives every browser setting on this list.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Keys | Action | Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Ctrl+S | Download the note as .txt | Both |
| Ctrl+O | Open a text file as a note | Both |
| F5 | Insert the local time and date at the cursor | Both |
| Ctrl+F | Jump to the Find box, prefilled with the selected word | Advanced |
| F3 or Enter in Find | Next match | Advanced |
| Esc | Leave full screen | Both |
On a Mac, use Cmd in place of Ctrl. The F5 time stamp copies Windows Notepad, where the same key does the same job. F5 still reloads the page when the cursor sits outside the text box. The shortcuts only fire while focus is inside the notepad, so the rest of the page keeps the normal browser keys.
Cleaning a list with the line tools
Switch to Advanced and press Load sample. A short launch checklist opens in a new tab. Two lines repeat, one of them with stray spaces at the end, and two bug notes differ only by a capital B. Open Line tools in the side panel and work down the list:
- Remove duplicates drops two lines, the second meta title check and the second Firefox test. Leading and trailing spaces do not count as a difference.
- Both bug lines survive. Case counts, so Bug and bug stay as two lines. Run lowercase on them first if you want them merged.
- Sort A to Z puts blank lines at the top. Remove empty lines clears them out. Numbers sort by value, so item 9 lands before item 10.
- Select a few lines before pressing a tool and only those lines change. With nothing selected, the tool runs on the whole note.
Each tool writes through the browser's own undo, so Ctrl+Z brings back the earlier text. Sentence case lowercases everything before capitalizing, which means names and the word I need a manual fix afterward.
Find and replace with patterns
Tick Regex to search with JavaScript regular expressions. ^ and $ match at the start and end of each line, not only the whole note. In the replace box, $1 drops in the first captured group.
Say you pasted a column of addresses such as sana@toolexe.com and want the names alone. Find (\w+)@toolexe\.com, replace with $1, press Replace all. A broken pattern shows the browser's error under the buttons instead of freezing the page. A pattern matching only empty text, such as a lone ^, reports no matches, since there is nothing to select.
Where this notepad falls short
- No sync. Two devices mean two unrelated notepads. Use a notes app with an account when you need the same text on your phone and laptop.
- Two browser tabs share one store. An edit in one tab appears in the other within a moment, but typing in both at the same time loses whichever change saved first.
- Plain text only. No bold, no images, no tables. Paste from Word or Google Docs and the formatting drops.
- Undo history resets per note. Moving to another tab clears Ctrl+Z for the note you left.
- Line numbers need word wrap off. With wrap on, one long paragraph fills several screen rows yet counts as a single line, so the numbers would drift. The status bar shows the line and column either way.
- Files over 2 MB are refused. Three of them would fill the browser's storage. For large logs, Notepad++ or VS Code handles the job better.
- Files open as UTF-8. A file saved in an older Windows encoding such as Windows-1252 shows � in place of accented letters. Re-save the file as UTF-8 in a desktop editor first.