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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown
- VimEscapeArtist 7mo ago10 IoT LTSC ftw!
- Longhanks 7mo agoThey’re turning Notepad into what Wordpad was (or was supposed to be). Now everyone looking for the light weightiest *.txt editor must find a new tool...
- zer0zzz 7mo agoAll we wanted back in the day was Unix line ending support, and they would give even that.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoHow about a CTRL+Z that don't undo the past 11 years of changes you've done, and instead just undos one smaller change?
- somenameforme 7mo agonotepad++ is great, though they have a dubious habit of dumping political messages on releases.
- BuckRogers 7mo agoAnd they were running on such a shoestring deployment that N++ was hacked by the Chinese last year. I'd stick with VS Code.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- reactordev 7mo agoSublime is good too without the political rhetoric. It boggles my mind that windows users refuse the ways of vim.
- vunderba 7mo agoWas hoping to see Sublime mentioned here. Super stable and available for nearly everything (Windows, Linux, Mac).
- throw4re2ef 7mo agoI remember a few years back there was an update where it would actually type the political message when you created a new text document. I abandoned it ever since. The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.
- zzrrt 7mo ago> The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports. Why would someone express political messages without being selective? It’s understandable not wanting overt politics in your software, but this line is odd.
- wk_end 7mo agoI don't have any use for Notepad++, but reading about this makes me wish I did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messag... The possibility of software being a personal, creative, expressive endeavor (which often includes politics), something I believed in back when I was in university twenty years ago, is a feeling that's receded deeply into the past. That might be as much about me as it is about the world, but I miss it.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoI think that different people want different things. It seems to me like these days the idea of software being a personal expression is in vogue more than not, but there are always going to be those who want that and those who don't. That said, if software is a personal creative expression, one must be prepared for the possibility that some people aren't going to like what one has to say. Often when the politics angle comes up with Notepad++, people will say "it's his software project, he has the right to put in political messages if he wants" as if that somehow compels people to be ok with the political messages. The author certainly has the right to use Notepad++ as a platform for his political opinions, and I would never dream of saying otherwise. I don't want him to go to jail, or get fired by his employer, or anything like that. But I similarly have the right to decide that I don't want to see his political opinions and use another piece of software. You pick up both ends of the stick, as the old saying says.
- pharrington 7mo agoWhere is the place you'd like to see someone say "Declare variables, not war"?
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoOn their blog I guess? Not in my text editor, that's for sure. I'm busy trying to get work done; I neither have time for nor want to hear about the author's opinions on current events.
- 7mo ago
- SamuelAdams 7mo agoFor the absolute lightweight, there is vi, eMacs, nano, etc. For a UI I’ve been using VSCode. It is quite quick when you disable all extensions and most settings.
- tmtvl 7mo ago> absolute lightweight > eMacs I love Emacs, but I don't see how a Lisp platform with a web browser, a Tetris implementation, and 4 terminal emulators (shell, term, ansi-term, eshell) can be considered 'lightweight'.
- SamuelAdams 7mo agoHa, fair. Lightweight in this context is relative to Notepad or any modern Windows application.
- kibibu 7mo agoNotepad.exe used to be <200kB. Emacs is tens of megabytes
- CSm1n 7mo agoNotepad was just a wrapper around some default win32 controls. Judging alone by exe size is not right, although probably a “statically linked” notepad would still be smaller than emacs
- eviks 7mo agoIt is right by definition. Link emacs to those controls, shed some statically linked weight, and it will also become lighter!
- 1bpp 7mo agoTo be fair you can say that of anything with a scripting engine, you could have all that in vim or stripped down emacs
- hypeatei 7mo agoNotepad++ is solid but they had a recent kerfuffle involving their security practices and the response didn't inspire much confidence. But if you turn off auto-updates then it's a good alternative if you're still on Windows.
- voidfunc 7mo agoI love Notepad++ but yea, zero confidence in that dev right now. Its programma non grata on my machines at the moment. Theyre also very political and giving them access to my machine now feels even more risky.
- cogman10 7mo agoIf you'd like a lightweight replacement, here's Kate. It's somewhere around a zed featureset, a little less. A key benefit of it is that it's not an electron app. It's an old C++ app that's still just chuggin' along. https://kate-editor.org/get-it/ https://kate-editor.org/get-it/
- ruszki 7mo agoWhich response are we talking about which was problematic?
- Someone1234 7mo agoThe issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances. So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad." Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not.
- reactordev 7mo agoVim is The Way.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- soupfordummies 7mo agoPlease show me the few sentence prompt to create a windows 10 level notepad.exe clone that I can quickly open and use by hitting win+r
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- soupfordummies 7mo agowhile this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter, adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc. Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- javascriptfan69 7mo ago>Are you moving the goalpost? I mean you did originally claim that this was something that was "for the masses" and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use. Not that I doubt it couldn't one shot something this simple with a .exe wrapper.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago
- canistel 7mo agoTextadept is lightweight, and more...
- scoopr 7mo agoWell, at least they brought back edit[0] [0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit
- tracker1 7mo agoIf this was actually (pre)installed with Windows, I wouldn't mind the changes to notepad nearly as much.
- Someone1234 7mo agoWhile I'd love it installed by default, I still very much mind that they're ruining Notepad. Plus this Markdown preview functionality just caused Notepad to have a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in it.
- tracker1 7mo agoOh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.
- Someone1234 7mo agoAgreed. Resurrecting Wordpad and making it really cool/useful would make everyone happy. They can add as much AI and Markdown as they want to Wordpad as far as I'm concerned. Just leave my dumb featureless utility alone.
- noinsight 7mo agoIt is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...
- jsrcout 7mo agoEdit is unironically one of my favorite text editors these days. It opens incredibly fast compared to everything else I use, it's easy to use, works fine on Linux. It's not going to replace emacs or VS Code, but it's incredibly handy for basic editing chores.
- dmitrygr 7mo agonotepad.txt now joins calc.txt in my list of EXEs i bring from an old WinXPx64 install to all new windows installs
- mkup 7mo agoI also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.
- accoil 7mo agoProbably better to get the Win 10 version if you can as it eventually got better line ending support (i.e. both LF & CRLF).
- jwrallie 7mo agoI got curious about the Wine version, if it has feature parity it may well be the best supported version of notepad right now ;)
- accoil 7mo agoIf not anything else, I guess it could be added :) Makes me wonder though if that's a limitation of text boxes in Windows (so a translation will need to be made during loading/saving).
- BubbleRings 7mo agoEvery few years I find some need or excuse to install Brief somewhere. I miss that editor.
- blell 7mo ago… .txt? :D
- jasomill 7mo agoWhile I probably haven't played either in a decade, I bring sol.exe and winmine.exe on general principle, as both had their "Copilot in Notepad" shark-jumping moments all the way back in Windows 8 with the introduction of achievements and in-app purchases.
- vee-kay 7mo ago[dead]
- smusamashah 7mo agoYou can just uninstall this modern notepad. It will bring back plain old notepad.
- petee 7mo agoI found when I did that I lost the ability to associate any program with .txt files; like popup errors when trying to assign a default You can make old Notepad be the default cmd line by going to Apps > Advanced app settings > App execution aliases, and disable the Notepad setting
- prmoustache 7mo agoI used to use scite in the early 2000's (scintilla editor), is it still around? EDIT: yes it does and it has actually been updated yesterday. https://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html https://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaHistory.html https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaHistory.html
- petee 7mo agoI like EmEditor, it has a compact ui and some useful features, and 16TB file support -- https://www.emeditor.com/ https://www.emeditor.com/
- al_borland 7mo agoThe whole point of Notepad was its bare bones simplicity. EmEditor looks like it’s loaded full of stuff, and has a subscription fee. Assuming most people don’t need to open 16TB files, they might as well use VS Code.
- petee 7mo agoYou're not wrong, and I could have elaborated. While loaded with stuff, I find the ui can be pared down, and has a similar load time and screen space as notepad. The subscription isn't awesome, but it works fine without it, and doesn't pester alot
- snvzz 7mo agoKDE's kate runs well on Windows. It can be installed easily via chocolatey.
- kuschku 7mo agoIt's also in winget
- roger110 7mo agoThe problem is usually when you're using notepad, it's in some situation where you don't want to install another exe. Like you're using someone else's PC or a random one in a library or something. This needs to be built in.
- eviks 7mo agoSo build it in Wordpad?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tencentshill 7mo agoIt's becoming Word-lite, like Wordpad used to be. Paint is becoming Photoshop-lite, and now has conflicting functionality with the Photos app.
- awakeasleep 7mo agoWhat happened to WordPad? Is it still a thing? I hope they give notepad a keyboard shortcut to transition to ascii only like textedit has on the Mac
- rideontime 7mo agoGone since Windows 11 24H2, according to Wikipedia.
- aldousd666 7mo agoWord and wordpad are terrible for editing code snippets tho, markdown solves this problem.
- TiredOfLife 7mo agoWord and wordpad were rich text editors. Markdown is plain text
- baal80spam 7mo agoUh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/ https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
- CivBase 7mo agoIs the value add for Notepad not that it is litterally the most bare bones graphical text editor available in Windows? Microsoft has already positioned VS Code as its code editor and OneNote as its notetaking app. Why should Notepad compete with these offerings?
- embedding-shape 7mo agoWhy not? Microsoft's approach seems to be "the more the merrier" even if they have the same intended audiences. Not sure how it makes sense, but considering the company is still around, maybe in some twisted way it does make sense?
- CivBase 7mo agoI'd think the answer to "why not?" would be because in being a bare bones, dead simple text editor is Notepad's core feature. And by adding these redundant featues, they are effectively removing Notepad's core feature without even providing a replacement.
- akgoel 7mo agoIn a Copilot world, Notepad is now meant to render Copilot output, which LLMs do a good job of spitting out Markdown.
- avadodin 7mo agoWhy not remove the human trying to use Windows from the loop and have a server at Redmond feeding Copilot slop to a Copilot agent on the next server forever? Anyone's got the CEO's number? Tell him I don't charge for my genius management advice most of the time.
- Fervicus 7mo agoStopped using notepad when they added co-pilot. Stop shoving AI down our throats.
- p_ing 7mo agoJust disable Copilot?
- miroljub 7mo agoPlease show us the magic Windows settings that would disable Copilot everywhere.
- bool3max 7mo agoAt a certain point I used some "windows 11 debloat script" and I haven't encountered a bit of Copilot or any other AI nonsense anywhere in Windows since.
- avazhi 7mo agoEven with all the debloat scripts you can’t get rid of it in places like Edge. And if your solution is to tell me to use a different browser then… exactly lol.
- jmclnx 7mo agosimple, replace Windows with Linux or a BSD :)
- Crosseye_Jack 7mo agoSure, Its the first thing I plan on doing once Autodesk port Fusion to it.
- p_ing 7mo agoAre we so uncurious that we can’t even look in notepad settings? I’d expect better from an HN user.
- 7bit 7mo agoCan Microsoft please stop? If I need Copilot and Markdown Support I use VS Code or any other software that supports it. I recently used Windows Sandbox and was surprised that it does not have notepad. And why? Because it's a Store App now and that's unsupported inside the Windows Sandbox. Notepad is supposed to be dumb, not Microsoft!
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> Can Microsoft please stop? If I need Copilot and Markdown Support I use VS Code or any other software that supports it. I can't even get visual studio code to stop showing that right-hand sidebar every time it opens up, regardless of what settings I use. It seems to work for a while, and then it appears again like magic. I'm not sure how many more times they have to hit you straight in the face before you realize you're a victim here and need to get away from the abuser as much as you can, not try to "salvage" the situation.
- Avicebron 7mo agohave you tried adding this to your settings json? workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility": "hidden",
- tracker1 7mo agoIt's still annoying to have it by default even if you do make use of it.
- 7bit 7mo agoThere's a setting in barcode that disabled AI entirely and the sidebar with it. Works flawless for me since it landed.
- gigel82 7mo agoWindows 11 LTSC still has the old school notepad.exe (and calc.exe) instead of this UWP abomination. Also: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
- embedding-shape 7mo agoIs LTSC still impossible to get as someone who doesn't want to run cracked software or "license unlockers" on the same machine they do their banking on? I never found a way of buying it that didn't involve having to survive an interrogation by a sales team.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gigel82 7mo agoIt is unfortunately. I have access to a MSDN Subscription (or VS Essentials or whatever it's called nowadays) that comes with some "test" licenses. Let's just say I haven't concluded my testing yet, it's ongoing :)
- cyberax 7mo agoYou can get LTSC. It's a bit of a quest, but it's possible. You need to buy 5 regular Windows licenses and then you'll be able to unlock the LTSC option. It works out to about $300.
- zaruvi 7mo agoHaha, I always guess whether or not there will be an LTSC comment before checking the comments. These days it's always there, even early after posting.
- vee-kay 7mo ago[dead]
- metalliqaz 7mo agoIsn't Markdown how they managed to get a Severity 8.8 RCE into notepad.exe?
- ceejayoz 7mo agoYup. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20841 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20841
- aldousd666 7mo agoThis would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
- pipeline_peak 7mo agoI don’t see why people are complaining. If you use notepad for txt files, nothing changes.
- SamuelAdams 7mo agoThe concern is that more features introduces more risk. See CVE-2026-20841 for a recent example. If the application remained a simple text editor, it is unlikely exploits like this would be possible. https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
- jajuuka 7mo agoThat's a false sense of security. We have a LONG list of vulnerabilities in open source software that were "simple" programs for decades. The house of cards approach to security is just not it.
- sunaookami 7mo agoMore code = more vulnerabilites. It's a simple fact. Complexity kills.
- dangus 7mo agoSell your computer. Now you have perfect security! Fun fact: you can uninstall Notepad if you don’t like it.
- sunaookami 7mo agoCongrats for completely missing the point.
- dangus 7mo agoI got the point. I just disagree with the merit of the point. Microsoft decided that additional complexity for the notepad application is worth the tradeoffs. I tend to agree with them: Notepad is traditionally most heavily used to peruse readme files, which today are primarily written in Markdown. Therefore, having Markdown support as a first-class feature makes good sense. Furthermore, I point out that it is an optional application that can be uninstalled.
- ChrisSD 7mo agoFor everyone that wants a simple, lightweight, alternative to notepad there's edit.exe on recent version of Windows. Assuming you don't mind TUIs.
- beart 7mo agoHey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?
- dijit 7mo agoHackernews, mostly.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agoWindows is about GUI, tho
- smusamashah 7mo agoI need to tell everyone, we can just uninstall this modern notepad which restores plain old notepad.
- piokoch 7mo agoI use MS Windows for sooo long and I've never discovered that. Amazing!
- athorax 7mo agoIt's like they are trying to do the opposite of the Unix philosophy. Do many things very poorly.
- pipeline_peak 7mo agoWhy’s this poor?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 7mo agoMy work machine is Win11 and the new Notepad is hilariously buggy. Repeatedly encountered bugs where the screen fails to paint, takes multiple seconds to load, hard refuses to open files of a certain size, etc. Notepad was never fancy, but it was a reliable tool to strip formatting or take a quick note, and now I cannot even count on that.
- nottorp 7mo agoThey've rewritten it in React?
- helle253 7mo agoNotepad++ already exists, is more reliable, and already has a md support plugin recent vuln asside (big caveat ill admit) idk why you would use notepad at all when N++ exists
- JohnFen 7mo agoI don't find Notepad++ to be a good replacement for (the old) notepad, personally. It's too feature-filled. The big win of notepad was that it was genuinely minimalist.
- Night_Thastus 7mo agoIt may have features, but you don't need to use them - and at least for me it starts up very quickly and none of those extras get in the way.
- JohnFen 7mo agoTrue, I can ignore them, but they're still a distraction and impact performance. For the use cases that I want the old Notepad for, Notepad++ isn't a great alternative for me.
- tracker1 7mo agoI always liked Crimson/Emerald more myself.
- fastasucan 7mo agoIf you dont need any of the ++ why would you use notepad++ over notepad?
- Dylan16807 7mo agoI think just about anyone can appreciate having multiple undos. And keeping your unsaved notes safe against crash/reboot. I do think notepad recently got those, but for a long time it was a compelling reason to use notepad++. And you can avoid copilot.
- avazhi 7mo agoTIL Windows still has Notepad. Somebody should probably tell Microsoft we’ve all moved on to better things like Notepad++ (even when their update supply chain gets compromised).
- recursive 7mo agoYou can use notepad on servers with no administrative permissions, and when you're blocked by policy from downloading executables. It seems crazy to suggest that an OS should not have any built-in capability to edit plain text files.
- ecshafer 7mo agoWhen the hack happened I actually thought "People still use Notepad++?" with so many editors available now, its weird to still use it. Notepad is the best TODO app and scratch pad on windows.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- burnt-resistor 7mo agoRIP Aaron Swartz for inspiration via atx.
- mFixman 7mo ago> We’re also adding a fill tolerance slider, giving you control over how precisely the Fill tool applies color. To get started, select the Fill tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the tolerance to your desired level. Experiment with different tolerance settings to achieve clean fills or creative effects. This tool would have been so useful 25 years ago when I had to manually recolour every pixel in the contour of the cool photo I was editing for my new desktop background because the fill tool didn't recognise the background properly.
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoMarkdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: binary WYSIWYG. I.e. if I type in some plain text and then open the file with anything else (including after moving to another machine/platform, or even viewing raw data stream in transit or on drive), I can trust to see that text, as is, and nothing else. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence. (Modulo CR/LF, of course.)
- java-man 7mo agoRemember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoAh, the times when computing used to be full of wonder and discovery.
- Terr_ 7mo agoI think the Real Bug™ here comes from product-management: Nobody should be taking this kind of stochastic guess process and then just... 100% trusting the outcome with no feedback to the user and no way for the user to correct bad guesses. For example, a prompt when opening the file like: "It's unclear what kind of data this is, here are a few options with a preview, pick which one you'd like me to use." Annoying, but them's the breaks when you're making software and aren't willing to put in hard requirements about what it is expected to (not) operate on.
- tracker1 7mo agoFWIW, Notepad has had support for BoM detection and wide-characters (UTF-16/UCS-16) for some while. That said, IMO, most simple editors at this point should default to UTF-8 encoding and only LF for line endings.
- al_borland 7mo agoNotepad being a plain text editor, it always supported markdown. Versions of notepad from the 80s would be able to open and edit markdown, as it’s just plain text. Apps like classic notepad are useful to have around, when apps that try to parse things like markdown get it wrong and the underlying file needs to be fixed.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoJanaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support; Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago: Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516
- carcabob 7mo agoThis has been supported for a while now, so I wonder why this is being treated as news. But I guess it’s news to some people, so that’s fair. I tried to take advantage of it, but the implementation felt really clunky (formatting seemed to be via menus only), so I’ve stuck with .txt files.
- AbraKdabra 7mo agoYeah no.
- MoonWalk 7mo agoSo the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows? Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.
- tracker1 7mo agoAt this point I really think GitHub should formally publish their flavor as well as a default implementation. It's likely the single most widely used variant online at this point. I know there are others and there are fine points. I would like to see a couple minor additions to support image placement (that aligns with Medium's editor) and finally a strike-through text notation. But that's about it.
- segphault 7mo agoGithub does publish their spec: https://github.github.com/gfm/ https://github.github.com/gfm/ The CommonMark spec is largely based on it.
- return_to_monke 7mo agoThe point of markdown is that it is human-readable not only in "rendered" html form, but plain text too. I think this explains the lack of viewers; they are simply not needed.
- eviks 7mo agoThat doesn't explain it since that point is theoretical, in reality markdown is poorly readable even for the basics (table with a few bold red words in a cell easily breaks alignment / readability) (also seeing all those marks isn't aesthetically good, hence the need for a viewer)
- VerifiedReports 7mo agoNo, it doesn't. First, I don't know what you mean by "HTML form." It's not HTML at all. Second: If the formatting codes are going to be ignored by all the viewing applications, why are they in the document in the first place? Every time this comes up, someone floats this weird "but all you need is a text viewer" argument... indicating that Markdown is pointless.
- tracker1 7mo agoI still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off. Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.
- deafpolygon 7mo agoWordpad presented a “free” tool that they couldn’t monetize anymore. They want you to use Office. Copilot is shoved into Notepad so they can monetize your data stream.
- ronsor 7mo agoThey could've shoved Copilot in Wordpad
- deafpolygon 7mo agoAnd it would still compete with Word. They want you to switch to Office 365 (I mean, Copilot 365).
- SllX 7mo agoYou jest but they did name change it to Microsoft 365. Confused the hell out of me recently when I was looking for Office 365 on their website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_365 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_365
- deafpolygon 7mo ago> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. Oh boy.
- whynotmaybe 7mo agoAre they trying to market copilot PC's to another segment?
- paxys 7mo agoI was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-writing-with-ai-in-notepad-4088b954-c97b-46dc-813f-959be01746d5 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...)
- ondra 7mo agoThis might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
- benbristow 7mo agoWell they're text generation engines, of course they do, it's all just text.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoWhat’s the point of your comment? We know that markdown is text, we understand that text is text. LLMs have very obviously been intentionally trained to work with markdown, specifically. Its prominence in LLM output far outweighs the real-world existence of raw Markdown online. That’s the point that was being made. What’s next. Are you going to say stochastic parrot?
- benbristow 7mo agostochastic parrot
- thezipcreator 7mo agopochastic starrot
- moonshinefe 7mo agoAgreed. Notepad's got Markdown, it's what LLMs crave.
- nnevatie 7mo agoOh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
- andsoitis 7mo agoWhen I do agentic development with Claude Code, I use notepad to read/edit the .MD files, so this will make my life a little easier.
- Someone1234 7mo agoWhy not use VSCode? It has native Claude Code integration and is literally designed for Markdown from the ground-up.
- andsoitis 7mo agoI probably will! Just new to Windows (back after 15 years) so still getting set up. I might prefer full Visual Studio; will see.
- pvdebbe 7mo agoNotepad going the way of Wordpad, EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad. What's next, in a few years we're rocking EDLIN when we need to operate on a text file safely?
- Apocryphon 7mo agohttps://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm
- noinsight 7mo ago> EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad. edit.exe[1,2] actually. And it runs on Linux too! Linux had a real lack of good text editors. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
- gmueckl 7mo agoSo I was about ready to rant about bloat in modern software, but I checked first: the new edit.exe for Windows is 260kB. The old editor for DOS 6.22 was actually provided by qbasic.exe, which had the editor and a full BASIC interpreter packed in 250kB. Edit.com was just a tiny wrapper. This isn't bad at all given how most other software evolved in thr the intervening 30 years.
- cyberax 7mo agoOldie bit goodie: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
- bananaflag 7mo agoI remember first finding out about Edlin in 2003 while reading DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin. Experienced a lot of anemoia that day. That short section about Edlin was the most touching part of the entire book (probably because it took place before the DOS 5-6 / Win 3.x era which already felt old).
- ActionHank 7mo agoThis is why I uninstalled Notepad. They are convinced it needs to be a worse vscode when all I want is something to edit plain text files.
- cogman10 7mo agoWhat I want in windows is Notepad++ or Kate (and even Kate is a bit much). That's the full extent of the features that I'd want in something like notepad. Adding RTF and a wysiwyg markdown editor is the last thing that I want from something like notepad. When I open notepad, I still want to see the characters that are present. Heck, I'd like to be able to see the difference between a space and a tab. I'd want to be able to see which type of line ending are being used (and switch to the correct one, \n) Hiding characters is antithetical to the reason I'd use notepad in the first place. I want to be able to search text and see text. Not compose a document or talk to an LLM.
- noinsight 7mo ago> Kate So install Kate? There's a Windows build.
- cogman10 7mo agoOh I've ditched windows or I would go grab Kate (I use it on my linux box). I'm just commenting on how even if you were to enrich the features of notepad, the direction to take it is towards a kate editor and not towards an wordpad editor.
- snvzz 7mo agoAnd it can be easily installed with chocolatey, like: choco install kate
- nenadg 7mo agonoooooo
- kgwxd 7mo agoJust include Visual Studio Code, leave Notepad alone. Edit: On second thought, go ahead. I'm already off the OS, exactly because of things like this. The less relevant the OS becomes, the better my life will be.
- bart6114 7mo agoHasn’t .md always been supported?
- Superbowl5889 7mo agoArticle is published in January.
- eks391 7mo agoNotepad would render .md as plain text. Now it renders .md as rich text. The complaint is that people like notepad explicitly because it doesn't support rich text. I personally write pretty much everything in notepad for this very reason unless I am making a document I need to share with someone. The reasoning from MS for the update is because they added copilot to notepad, another feature that upset many people. Copilot returns answers as markdown, which is completely readable, but didn't itch the happy conclusion MS wanted. So now notepad supports enough rich text to not only read .md, but render it too
- zuluonezero 7mo agoYes. Supports .md but when you try to save back to .txt it does something to line endings that you cannot see in notepad but if you grep your .txt files from wsl like, I do all the time, you get page long strings instead of matching lines. It's weird and I haven't dug into the cause as it was easier to save as a new note but pretty sukky for an IT company to miss something like that.
- poolnoodle 7mo agoCRLF vs LF?
- 1718627440 7mo agoBut this would result in showing double newlines, when you view a CRLF file with an LF viewer, that also interprets CR. This does sound more like the file would have only CRs, which is what classic Mac did pre-Darwin. But that doesn't make any sense. Maybe Notepad is actually saving LF, but marks the file as CRLF and some WSL translation layer then triggers and removes LF, because they are not CRLF?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ljm 7mo agoLine endings between windows and Mac/Linux have been a problem basically forever. Windows uses carriage return and the others use newline or something like that.
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoThanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoFrom an elevated Powershell prompt: Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -like 'Microsoft.WindowsNotepad*' } | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
- escapeteam 7mo agoWhy is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it. Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y
- falcor84 7mo agoI for one hate it when product managers update systems to make them simpler and remove features/settings that I depend on.
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoExactly, this is why I want notepad to be as simple as possible. I rely on it. The W11 notepad is frustrating and useless if all I want to do is open a file. I wish they would fix notepad by pushing whatever version was shipped in w10 as the default.
- hirako2000 7mo agoWe are hard wired to perceive addition as value.
- alansaber 7mo ago> deploy loads of new features > bin them into few, better features > remove all the features > repeat
- bor_real 7mo agoSo they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this: - Notepad: Plain Text - Wordpad: Rich Text - Word: Documents Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor? They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?
- numpad0 7mo agopsa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoJust uninstalling the new "Windows Notepad" application is sufficient. No registry changes necessary. I've put a command line in another comment.
- Superbowl5889 7mo agoPersonally I'm not happy that they are touching and revamping most basic tool of the os. A Notepad, which is a innocent little thing in itself. Notepad should be last thing they should be fiddling with. I am sad that we have to install 3rd parties for basics now.
- teki_one 7mo agoThis seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
- waldrews 7mo agoThe new workflow will be "AI, I need to view this text file and add some words to it. Create an app that displays it in a scrollable window, respecting the encoding. Now move the cursor to the line below the three dashes... no, the other three dashes..."
- zombot 7mo agoThis is how futuristic MS is, because they already work that way when creating slopware like this.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agostep 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem
- datenyan 7mo agoGlad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoI assume there's like a single manager who's job it was was to maintain notepad and force use of AI, so obviously, vibe code needless features because if it's not broke, how can you fix it with AI.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago[flagged]
- datenyan 7mo ago> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor” Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features. Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.
- eclipxe 7mo agoI like having something all in one.
- 2muchcoffeeman 7mo agoFunny comment because this would have been WordPad.
- password4321 7mo agoI believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month. 20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (804 points, 516 comments) 20260210 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20... > "An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad" Other recent Notepad issues: 20260207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098 Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs? (187 points, 284 comments) 20260127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)
- j2kun 7mo agoThis is my favorite part of this story. Do you want remote code execution? Because [fixing things that aren't broken] is how you get remote code execution.
- 0xy 7mo agoI think it's more likely that Microsoft is vibe coding slop garbage to replace their core apps that were literally better. Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close. It also signals the death knell for Windows native apps. Microsoft can't make them anymore. It won't be long until even Excel is a Electron sloplication.
- steve1977 7mo agoThe best example is probably the new "Outlook", and I put that name in quotes intentionally.
- password4321 7mo agoIn case anyone is not aware: 20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials (666 points, 278 comments) > the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally
- overgard 7mo agoOn one hand, I don't feel strongly about this because I literally never use these builtin Windows tools. I can't help but think it'd just make more sense to include VSCode builtin though. It's already very good and has a nice startup time, and then you don't need to screw-up fundamental system utilities that are more break-in-case-of-emergency then something that should be feature rich.
- hirako2000 7mo agoPerhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
- rkagerer 7mo agoIs it safe to assume LTSC versions of Windows will not have this crap shoved down their throats, as they don't get feature updates only security patches?
- erickhill 7mo agoSomewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.
- madeofpalk 7mo agohttps://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-markdown https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar... https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/06/markdown-support-in-windows-notepad https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/06/markdown-suppor...
- red_admiral 7mo agoOnce upon a time, you could strip formatting from the clipboard in notepad with ^V ^A ^C, for example if you were trying to paste from edge into word. There's still a market for a non-rich text editor, without autosave, cloud, account login or AI.
- gmueckl 7mo agoUnless it changed recently, the faster way is to just press ctrl+shift+V for "paste special" in Word, which should open up the paste dialog with "Unformated Text" preselected (IIRC), so immediately pressing Enter should close the dialog and paste the stripped text.
- leni536 7mo agoCareful when doing it in Teams. ctrl+shift+V is "paste without formatting", ctrl+shift+C is "call everyone".
- MengerSponge 7mo agoHey everyone! Check me out! I don't preserve formatting!
- BubbleRings 7mo ago(I heard this in Homer Simpson’s voice.)
- estimator7292 7mo agoI sincerely hope that whoever decided that a) this action needs a shortcut and b) to overload the most common hotkey spends the rest of eternity toiling away at features nobody wants, slowly ruining their company, and never, ever gets that sick promotion they're desperately chasing. I hope their wife leaves them and takes the dog.
- hurfdurf 7mo agoApparently pasting unformatted text in browsers can be done with Ctrl+Shift+V. Pasting it in Office is Ctrl+Alt+V. Always the odd one out. Taken from here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=107124 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10...
- smusamashah 7mo agoWe can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.
- vyskocilm 7mo agoAt this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle. https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applications/notepad https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...
- andreynering 7mo agoThis would be really interesting, actually. Maybe someone should submit a feature request for it.
- semiquaver 7mo agoMarkdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?
- coffeecoders 7mo agoI built a tiny Notepad clone in ~5 minutes using an LLM: open/save, plain text, no surprises. Lately I've been doing the same for other small utilities. Roughly half the little tools I use are ones I generated and kept because they’re predictable and easy to audit. The point isn't replacing built-ins; it's reducing dependence on shifting defaults. I want to care less about what the software/os vendor changes this time.
- protocolture 7mo agoHonestly they lost me at tabs. I like my notepad ephemeral.
- LadyCailin 7mo agoEh. Tabs are nice. And the auto restore functionality is REALLY nice, and that would just be more difficult to design (though not impossible) without tabs. But new features in notepad should have an extremely high bar for being added, in general.
- ZoomZoomZoom 7mo agoYears ago replacing Notepad with an alternative was a given and everybody had their favourite. Before UTF everywhere you needed at least proper character encoding handling, other features followed. Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive. Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later. Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then. Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.
- bitbytebane 7mo ago[dead]
- porphyra 7mo agoIf notepad were to support Markdown by giving it a nice syntax highlighting and niceties like clickable links and automatic list numbering, while preserving the monospaced font, then that would be great. But with rich text formatting it has all the pitfalls of WYSIWYG editors like accidentally changing the style of something, having "formatting typos" where you tried highlighting only part of a word before making it bold, using the wrong header type, etc.
- QuiEgo 7mo agoTypora is where it’s at!
- BubbleRings 7mo agoWhen Typora has an iPhone client as good as their other clients, I’ll give up using a mix of Typora and Obsidian and just do all Typora. Neither of them seem to do everything I need. I hope MS does Notepad right, that could be useful.
- QuiEgo 7mo agoYeah. I would happily pay $100 for a typora that supports iOS and encrypted folders. Bear is my fallback on iOS, but I much prefer some of the themes available for Typora, and simple files in folders over tagging.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoWhy must they ruin notepad instead of creating a notepad++.
- notepad0x90 7mo agonotepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated. But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat. My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example. they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad. It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit. Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoThe core product teams are on like generation 5 of the ship of theseus and every generation has been cheaper and more technically inept than the last.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago> You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. It's funny because they are actively destroying existing branding these days. Like how they renamed Office after their failed AI assistant, rather than the other way around.
- jug 7mo agoWeird, it already does at my work computer since a month which aren't exactly first to get the latest updates and definitely don't get prerelease software. I wonder how all that works. (Update: Ah, title is a little misleading. This update doesn't introduce Markdown, it adds support for nested Markdown lists etc.) Personally, I think they should've kept Notepad as-is and reincarnated WordPad instead, rewriting it and giving it Markdown instead of RTF. It already had the basic formatting interface and all. It would've been a pretty smooth transition. The problem is that Markdown supports quite a bit, even tables, which lends to feature creep. It was already more sluggish without any of this due to moving Notepad to WinUI.
- baw-bag 7mo agoIt's not like I am thrilled, but it has at least some value over the last what, 5-10 years of windows changes. I can see me mistaking markup. I can't see me mistaking copilot.
- jimt1234 7mo agoLeave Notepad alone! ( In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc )
- 63745285 7mo agoVideo
- sbinnee 7mo agoI just found out that google docs has “markdown mode” as a beta feature. You can use headings, bold, italic syntax etc. [1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en
- knowitnone3 7mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 7mo agoA little bit slow, Mr. Microsoft ...
- munificent 7mo agoNever in a million years would I have guess that fucking Markdown of all languages would become the dominant syntax for telling computers what to do, but thanks to LLMs and prompts... here we are.
- mactavish88 7mo agoCan't they just leave it alone?
- g-mork 7mo agoDon't forget Wine ships a faithful notepad.exe reimplementation. It should run just fine on Windows edit: just checked the version that ships with Steam on Linux, yep, works great in a VM
- _RPM 7mo agoi used notepad for the first time in a decade, and it's awesome. mine supports markdown, and tabs.
- sedatk 7mo agoIt doesn't support basic code/monospace blocks using backticks: > Unsupported Syntax Detected > This file contains syntax that isn't fully supported in formatted view. Some content may not render as intended, and switching views could modify parts of your original Markdown. Do you want to continue?
- QuiDortDine 7mo agoSo custom implementation, then? How very Microsoft.
- zombot 7mo agoWhen has MS ever implemented someone else's standard or even convention (MD is not really a standard)? They only ever implemented their own incompatible parody. They're even incompatible with themselves, because backticks do work in MS Teams. This software is probably vibecoded slop.
- donatj 7mo agoStop adding features to notepad. It was feature complete in 1995
- radial_symmetry 7mo agohah, our original idea for Nimbalyst was just for it to be a better desktop markdown editor. Once we were able to get red/green diffs working in rendered markdown which made it much easier to work with AI it evolved into a full agentic work/coding environment.
- atleastoptimal 7mo agoThey should rewrite windows from scratch using AI
- angst 7mo ago> To use Write, Rewrite, and Summarize in Notepad, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. > To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. My god they love to identify you.
- dajt 7mo ago"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?
- psyklic 7mo agoA notepad "welcome experience"? How is notepad turning into bloatware?
- sbinnee 7mo agoI don't consider any of window apps light. I'd rather open a vim on WSL because anyway I always have WSL open on windows. But I welcome markdown support in fact. I can quickly jot down something that is pleasingly presentable to people, say during presentation or meeting. For bloatware perspective, I would be more worried of LLM support which I had no idea it had. I learned it from a comment.
- cube00 7mo agoOn the face it's reasonable until you remember how frequently we get "welcomed" to Windows and then to Edge. Before you know it every month this thing will appear over the top of what you actually want to do.
- trinsic2 7mo agoThis is funny. A post about Notepad in an OS that is dying because of the AI Idioocracy.
- hshdhdhj4444 7mo agoThis pretty much makes notepad pointless. The whole point of notepad was a plain text editor. Wordpad was the lightweight document creation software.
- eviks 7mo agoThat's what wordpad is for! Notepad was supposed to be an app that starts faster than you can blink for any file size and show it's plain nature
- GuB-42 7mo agoIronic how Notepad used to be too simple, making it useless as a text editor in many cases. In particular, it didn't support UNIX line endings and files larger than a few MB. The there was a brief moment where it became decent. Still a barebones text editor, but it could actually edit text, what I think most people expected Notepad to be. And now, it is going the other way, with "AI" features no one wanted, and also "Markdown support" which is ironic since Markdown is designed to look good in a regular text editor. Now we have something that isn't really a text editor, but not really a wysiwyg editor either, it has some advanced features like AI, but is lacking features most other semi-advanced text editors have (ex: syntax highlighting). At least, it was good for a couple of years.
- orthoxerox 7mo agoYeah, Notepad was originally nothing more than a Win32 multiline textbox and two functions, one of which read the file and set the textbox value to the contents and the other took the textbox value and wrote it to the file. Every other menu option simply changed some existing property of the textbox.
- barrkel 7mo agoDon't forget the .LOG feature.
- coffeebeqn 7mo agoThe “notepad team” has fully embraced resume driven development. Isn’t it boring when a piece of software is just complete? In fact that’s an unacceptable state for it!
- gtk40 7mo agoI haven't used Windows in years. I remember needing to use WordPad to even open a Unix line ending file, even though it was counter-intuitive.
- ngriffiths 7mo agoA lot of comments about how this is another case of useless bloat. I don't know, markdown is just incredibly useful and widespread and yet it is pretty annoying to find a good editor: - There wasn't anything that comes with Windows that natively supports it (before now) - All your favorite text editors don't support it natively, and plugins vary - You can pay for a nice markdown editor but for some reason your more powerful usual text editor is still free? - You can open VSCode, which is hilarious overkill if you just want to take some notes. Obsidian is excellent but same problem. - Maybe something I'm missing? Basically I think it is a great thing if I just get a lightweight markdown friendly editor built in, because I'll probably use it all the time. ...except if it immediately leads to a CVE, I guess.
- johnhamlin 7mo agoI actually welcome this. Markdown is this incredible, future proof, portable and elegant format… up until you have to collaborate on something with a normie
- BenFranklin100 7mo agoOneNote should officially get this as well.
- nurumaik 7mo agojust nuke notepad in favor of zen-mode vscode. It has everything you want from text editor and it does it quite well
- windowstolinux 7mo agoAfter 30 years on windows I recently switched my gaming desktop over to linux mint. So far proton has handled every game I've thrown at it with only a minor FPS hit. Do note that I only play older games so if you are a bleeding edge gamer it will probably be harder for you. But the peace of mind I get from not being tied to the spyware infected microsoft ecosystem has been well worth it, and the only cost was backing up data from windows for the switch, and the inevitable linux fiddling that's required.
- amyjess 7mo agoAre there any text editors for Windows that are feature-for-feature and bug-for-bug compatible with the Windows 95 build of Notepad? I'm looking for a plain and simple text editor with no programmers' features—no line numbers, syntax highlighting, etc.—no tabs or MDI whatsoever. No, I'm not looking for something with "you can turn these off", just a complete reimplementation of Win95 Notepad made via black-box testing.
- cm2187 7mo agoThe original notepad was completely broken in the first place anyway. Can't handle large files, ctr+Z would cancel a large random number of previous actions, the search feature is case sensitive and barely useful, etc. What do you miss vs a Notepad++?
- amyjess 7mo agoI absolutely need a pure SDI workflow. I like browsing through files on disk by the double-clicking them, reading through them a bit, and then using Alt+F4. I tried that with Notepad++ once and I ended up with hundreds of files open in tabs because Notepad++ remembers everything you've ever opened even if you Alt+F4 the app. I also like sometimes having multiple files open at once and drag the windows around my monitors as I need to and you can't do that in Notepad++. Also Notepad++'s UI is bloated. There's just too much going on. And please don't suggest I muck around in settings, I'm not interested in spending hours mucking around in a gigantic bloated settings dialog, I want something that Just Works™ with no configuration just like Win95 Notepad. Edit: My specific use case here is for viewing files, not editing them. I use a different editor when I'm actually writing stuff but for browsing I just want old Notepad.
- einr 7mo agoHonestly, if you need this, just extract NOTEPAD.EXE from a Windows 95 (or NT 4) installation.
- nxpnsv 7mo agoAh, finally windows is gaining its edge over Linux. Will 2026 e the year of the windows desktop?
- dsijak 7mo agoThey should have done this with Wordpad. Notepad should stay most basic editor.
- gloosx 7mo agoNotepad urgently needs some social features too, did they think about adding stories and a messenger???
- nunobrito 7mo agoShould include native sqlite support and then we can "like" the lines from other people. Also missing some facebook/google account integration to ease that step, and don't forget to only permit opening text files if the device is connected to the internet.
- user3939382 7mo agoNow with Google+!
- tototrains 7mo agoDon't care never going to use it
- aggieNick02 7mo agoThe new notepad is a buggy embarrassment. When you disable the "Continue previous session" option you can very easily lose unsaved changes: 0) Set "When Notepad starts" option to "Start new session and discard unsaved changes" 1) New file 2) Type "abc" - note the "X" to close the file changes to a "O" (pretend that's a circle) to indicate unsaved changes 3) Save file - "O" changes back to "X" 4) Type "def" - "X" changes back to "O" because "def" is not on the file on disk 5) Undo, "def" disappears, "O" incorrectly remains... 6) Redo, "def" reappears, "O" incorrectly changes back to "X" 7) Close file. No prompt to save unsaved "def". Reopen file. "def" is gone
- 1718627440 7mo ago5) is common across several other editors and you could argue about correct semantics, but yes 6) is obviously a bug.
- aggieNick02 7mo agoAgreed... 5) is minor and just the result of saying "We're not going to bother trying to track if a file goes from having unsaved changes to not as a result of undo/redo - once a file gets marked as having unsaved changes, the only way to 'clear' that is to save the file again." That option is much better than getting the undo/redo vs unsaved changes tracking wrong and allowing unsaved changes to be easily lost, like notepad does. :-P
- jchw 7mo ago> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it doesn't run locally, which begs the question, why does it require a Copilot+ PC at all? Not even going to bother asking "does anybody want this to begin with" because at this point there is no real need to bother asking that.
- barrkel 7mo agoThe goal is obviously to onboard consumers to an app store ecosystem so MS can charge monopoly rents to app developers for access to Windows users. Everything MS is doing in Windows is to this end.
- torginus 7mo agoObviously not. They introduced their app store (13 years ago!, fuck time goes by), probably trying to do this. They got to like step 3 of their 10 step master plan and gave up and have been lingering there. Microsoft has been a walking husk of a company for the past decade and a half that somehow inexplicably stumbled into a trillion dollar valuation.
- torginus 7mo agoI feel the deepest existential pain in my heart that despite companies being 'all in' on AI, they can't integrate anything meaningful that would make sense to the end use, but would require even a braincells worth of mental effort of ML expertise or actual requirements people have. My two favourite 'AI' tools in image editing have been ones that can replace tedious work. One such example are segmentation models that can be used for smart cutouts, removing backgrounds etc. Now we have both 'segmentation' and 'AI' in paint - but the segmentation uses the exact same shitty flood fill with tolerance that's probably existed in the first paint program at Xerox PARC, while the 'AI' feature is another by-the-numbers crappy stable diffusion model that's strictly worse than anything you could get with your first Google search.
- fodkodrasz 7mo agoWhere does current Notepad store its settings? How could I distribute settings to new users, eg. by applying a reg file? It looks like to me that it stores its settings at "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe\Settings\settings.dat", which is some binary format. Why is registry being abandoned? If it is, why isn't ini or json or a plain text format used? Who are working at Microsoft now, abandoning both the windows ways to approach tasks, and also the other generic sane default approaches?
- thekevan 7mo agoNotepad is turning into the text app I desperately want, except for the association with Copilot. And then with new changes, it had the recent security vulnerabilities issues. The only thing it doesn't have that I want is a sidebar that shows folders or files like so many text editors already do. I never use Notepad anymore. I have been using Pulsar, which is okay, but not exactly what I want. I want a text editor that can do markdown if I want, spell check, minimal tool bar with some formatting shortcuts, etc. I'd love it if a "dumbed down Typora" had a love child with Notepad.
- bytejanitor 7mo agoWYSIWYG editors are the worst editors.
- zombot 7mo agoLet me guess: It uses Copilot to roll the dice on MD rendering. MS might also want to involve OpenClaw, while they're at it.
- johncoltrane 7mo agoAll text editors have always supported markdown, even before markdown even existed.
- TowerTall 7mo agoI like that it default to view or more precisely a WYSIWYG experience. I wish vs code did the same. I am just no sure that notepad is the right tool for this. It serves as such a important tool to stripping formatting and working with plain text. We are not far away from loosing 30 years of that trust. One little bug away. They should have used wordpad for this.
- nik0xffff 7mo ago[dead]
- leeter 7mo agoWhen MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move. When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS... When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts... When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it... When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history... When their updates refused to install cleanly and bricked people's computer to the point of hardware damage... Seriously thinking I might have Stockholm syndrome at this point. To me the best windows would be Windows 11's kernel and libraries with Windows 7's UI and apps. Because it's been all down hill (generally) since there.
- intrasight 7mo agoI still have a Win7 VM I fire up sometimes for nostalgia sake. Beautiful and snappy. Bittersweet.
- 1718627440 7mo ago> To me the best windows would be Windows 11's kernel and libraries with Windows 7's UI and apps. Does anyone now how to achieve that? What happens when you replace the kernel in a Windows 7 installation with the one from Windows 11? How is the manual update procedure for kernels on MS Windows?
- NortySpock 7mo agoI've switched to Linux Ubuntu KDE desktop, play my games on Steam Proton, and I'm happy.
- ubermonkey 7mo agoPass.
- catapart 7mo agoFor anyone still using Windows' notepad app, I strongly recommend Notepad2[0]. It's a drop-in replacement for Notepad that does add a few extra features, but does not have even the minimal suite of features that something like Notepad++ has. Where Notepad++ is great for code editing and extensible functionality via plugins, Notepad2 is more suited for people who just want Notepad, without the Windows/Microsoft. It has line numbers and (limited) syntax highlighting and a dark mode - bits and bobs like that - but it does not have tabs and ftp-on-save and the more complex stuff that requires a larger binary size. It's free, it works like Notepad, and it acts like a bare bones text editor. In many, many cases, it's exactly what I want, and it's always exactly what I want in cases where my original intention would have been to use Windows' Notepad. [0] https://notepad2.com/ https://notepad2.com/
- HackerThemAll 7mo agoNo, thank you, it's become slow as hell in Windows 11, just like the Explorer and the Windows itself. Windows is a piece of garbage.
- NoSalt 7mo agoMan ... Notepad did one thing, and it did it well. Leave it to Microsoft to completely mess it up. RIP Notepad.