Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wan

Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-notepad/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-examples?view=msvc-170 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-... The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/ https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF. Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use-streams https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use... Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :) You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science. Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.