Although it fills the same role, plain text editing, it has many advantages:
- 10-level undo
- Alphabetization
- Block indent/unindent
- Bookmark
- Case conversion
- Encoding conversion
- File history
- Jump to line
- Jump to offset
- Keyboard macros
- Print preview
- Search and replace
- Spell checking
- Statistics
- Variable pitch font.

Update Description:
Version 5:
- Added the Character Set submenu to the Options menu.
- Added the ability to print page numbers.
- Added the Full path on caption option.
- Added the Show toolbar option to the toolbar's context menu.
- Added to the help file a description of the Options menu.
- Improved and added skins.
- DocPad will no longer initialize Winsock until a feature that requires it is used.
- Currently, only the Check For Update and Send Feedback features use the Internet.
- This is in response to a CNet review that complained that DocPad accesses the Internet when launched.