Windows comes with Notepad which is easiest and lightweight text editor for all kinds of text files. But it is not secure. The information you save in a text file using Windows Notepad can be read by anyone. If you want to save your text information securely without having to encrypt and decrypt the files using external tools like AXCrypt, then you can make use of the free SafePad program. It is lightweight like Notepad, has rich text features like Wordpad and saves text files in encrypted format automatically.
You can download SafePad from its CodePlex website. The download is available as a setup installer. It is designed using Microsoft .NET 4.5 technology, so it would work only if you have installed .NET 4.5 framework installed in your PC first. After installation, you can run SafePad from its desktop shortcut. It looks just like any other text editor.
You can start typing whatever you want in this text editor window. It has rich text features that you would find in Windows Wordpad. You can make text bold, italicized or underlined. You can increase or decrease the indent and align the text in the left, right or the middle. When you are done typing the text in the SafePad window, you can click on the Save button in the toolbar to save the file. It would ask you to enter a pair of passwords two times before saving the file.
The file is saved with an SCP extension which is associated with SafePad. You can later double-click on this file, enter the password pair that you used to save it and open it. This file is encrypted and cannot be opened by any other software without the knowledge of the passwords that you have used.
SafePad is an ideal choice for keeping your information private. It uses the powerful AES 256 bit cipher to encrypt the files, so it is impossible to decrypt them even for professionals. It would have been better if they had a portable version of this application, so that we can just copy it to a USB key and use it from there.
You can download SafePad from http://safepad.codeplex.com/.