Uses for Text Files

Notepad creates, reads, and writes text files. Most other "text editor" programs and "program editor" programs use text files. Compilers (such as javac) expect the source program to be a text file. Many application programs are written to process input data from a text file and to write their output to a text file.

Java programs can be written to deal with any kind of file (since fundamentally all files are the same.) But it is particularly easy to write programs that do input and output with text files.