This 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.
I thought it is by introducing an RCE vulnerability that you get an RCE vulnerability.
I'm being facetious of course, but this recent rhetorical trend of people confidently vouching for "pet" in "pet vs. cattle" is not a sustainable decision, even if it's admittedly plain practical on the short to medium run, or in given contexts even longer. It's just a dangerous and irresponsible lesson to blindly repeat I think.
Change happens. Evidently, while we can mechanistically rule out several classes of bugs now, RCEs are not one of those. Whatever additional guardrails they had in place, they failed to catch this *. I think it's significantly more honest to place the blame there if anywhere. If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad *, you can be confident they're introducing RCEs left and right to other components too **. With some additional contextual weighting of course.
* Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
** Under the interpretation that this was an RCE, which I question.
> * Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
Most people seem to see "CVE" and "RCE" and assume the worst here. As you saw though, Notepad is just making totally valid URIs clickable! Web browsers allow it too - why is it not an RCE there? Sure, they usually show a warning when the URI is going to something external but most people just click through things like that anyway.
> This Notepad vuln, allows you to click things like ssh://x....
Which just opens up SSH connecting to a server. Is that really RCE?
It'll also only work with URI schemes that are registered on your system. It's not running arbitrary commands - software you install on your PC registers URI schemes and sets what command it should run when opened. It's then up to that software to parse the URI and handle it properly. If it doesn't then the RCE belongs to them because they registered the URI scheme and failed to handle it securely. Having an allowlist of URI schemes in Notepad isn't going to fix it.
As far as I can tell there is no URI scheme registered on Windows for JScript, PowerShell, or VBScript. They have file associations but those are not URI schemes.
> According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?
> The word Remote in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally.
> For example, when the score indicates that the Attack Vector is Local and User Interaction is Required, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.
The low level tool that has served to rescue more systems than I can count does not need to "change" simply because "it happens, bro."
> while we can mechanistically
You can rule it out with process as well. As in "don't change what isn't broken."
> If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad
Then they clearly feel they have no viable competition. This is table stakes. Getting it wrong should lose you most of your customer base overnight. Companies actually used to _work_ this way.
If I told you to stop using computers, and then you won't have computer problems, I don't think you would find that particularly helpful or charitable either, would you?
What you find a trusty "low-level" tool is a demo application for a basic WYSIWYG text editor. They modernized it so that it remains being perceived that way, instead of letting it be increasingly misclassified as a legacy product for the enthusiast, like you just did.
That was my first thought... Notepad is a plain text editor. Why add formatted text options when there's no good reason for it?
Plus, judging by the image, it doesn't look like there's controls to interact with the plain text markdown. It seems more like it's a "you can use markdown _codes_ to trigger text formatting. Jira has exactly this, and it's horrible.
But this is not about how you, but Microsoft, "the corporation that turns updates into chaos,"introduces RCE bugs. And bugs in general: easy to introduce, by action or inaction, when one has absolutely no concern for user satisfaction.
It comes from the world of systems operations. Something long-lived and trusted, so high emotional attachment (pet), vs. something short-lived that thus does not need to be trusted, so comparatively low emotional attachment (cattle).
For example, Bob's one-of-a-kind trusty server from which Bob is nigh inseparable, vs. a Docker container with a version controlled config you routinely tear down and bring up instances of, maybe even in an automated fashion.
Here this would map to trusty aged codebases you don't touch out of fear and caution, vs. codebases you can confidently touch because the spec, the code, the tests, the tooling, and the processes are solid.
A different mapping: to Microsoft, the users's computers are cattle, but to each individual user, the computer is a pet. Which is why the users keep getting mad when their pet feature gets euthanized.
Pets are projects that you toy with and keep adding new features, even when the main objective has been met.
Cattle are projects that do what they are supposed to and are left alone.
I'd much rather have Notepad fall into the cattle category.
Meanwhile TextEdit on Mac always rendered HTML. Which seems useless until you realize it can also edit and save as HTML. So there's casually a wysiwyg web editor built into macOS that idk how many people use.
Spell check is fine - highlight misspelled words, offer corrections when asked. What's incredibly harmful is autocorrect, as it slowly but surely causes vast majority of computer users to become partly illiterate. And nobody gives a damn, because hey, we're efficiently saving time!
It didn't cause me to become illiterate, it caused me to give up using it and find something else since it was "correcting" a lot of things that were correct to begin with, and going back to re-change them became a chore in the only 10 minutes I used it.
TextEdit prefs (not systemwide prefs) have easy checkboxes to disable all that, also the smart quotes. Also gotta make it default to plain text.
The reason I dropped it was cause of a bug where I'd highlight text, copy, and it's actually copy the wrong block of text. Idk the trigger but seems related to larger files.
I 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.
> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
It is certainly perceptibly slow. Carried out a test on my 12 year old PC running Win-10 vs a new HP Win11 laptop of my friend which he bought in a hurry before price increases. Opened a directory of several thousand files with nested folders - much slower at navigation. Much slower at opening right-click menus. Much slower at pretty much everything.
M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS. You gotta get used to staring at that spinning blue circle, counting the many precious moments of your life draining away.
You could at least disable Active Desktop to dethrottle your PC. Meanwhile, my work W11 PC has a second+ delay for explorer right click and there's nothing I can do about it.
You can actually restore the old right-click menu on W11 with some regedit.
Not ideal in any way, and a setting would have been a much better way to toggle this, but it is an option.
I've found that ( at least for me ) that was caused by some entries doing some checks before showing up. Getting a context menu editor and removing some of them can help.
Doesn't matter, it's a shit user experience and Microsoft's fault for putting the onus on the user to fiddle around at that level, rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
> rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
Do you want the users to blame Microsoft, all Microsoft employees including catering and cleaning workers, and Gates personally? This is how you make the users blame all the before mentioned but not the culprit.
Oh, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft in any way. Everything they make has been going downhill faster and faster.
Just suggesting a possible way to work around it.
> As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
Ultimately, what difference does it make? The file explorer in Windows 10 is much faster than the one in Windows 11, and it's very noticeable. Turn on the old context menus, and try right clicking a file. Instant in Windows 10, visible delay in Windows 11.
I measured once. It uses about 50% more resources and offers less feautures (or at least hides existing feautures). You may not have noticed if you had resources to spare.
It does offer some new features for businesses. Nothing useful for the consumer, and nothing to justify the massive performance loss
The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator. It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network.
The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sort of "clever" localization where my inputs change depending on the language of the operating system. My language uses commas so of course it only accepts those. Infuriating. Hope whoever coded this is enjoying their promotion.
Off-topic, but do you know Mozilla Firefox has a builtin calculator and unit conversion in the URL bar? For my personal use I rather use python and GNU units, but I guess for most users that live in the browser instead of the terminal, this could become their default calculator.
browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator = true
I don't know if you need to restore the urlbar first, before that works.
qalc is also a very good tool for this. I found it recently and have been happy with it. It's not just a really advanced calculator, it's a nearly full equivalent of the Google calculator. The only thing it doesn't really do is have awareness of variables like "current US population."
One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator.
It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be.
Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.
Yeah, I think that is a common first task when learning to program. Learning about strings: write a first-grade-math expression calculator. Learning Java: make a GUI calculator. Now convert between prefix, infix and postfix notation. This is all even before you learn about classes or files.
The new calculator isn't just slow to open, it seems to have actual input lag too. God I miss the old calculator.
To me it's not sad, it's infuriating. This corporation is worth a trillion dollars. Why can't they do their jobs? I'm sure the old calculator could be maintained and improved without screwing it up beyond belief. Send us some fat stacks and we'll do it.
With numbers >1000 they are of course displayed with thousands separators as 1,000 (text) now like you would see in financial reports, how attractive. Big numbers have a few commas too. No longer displayed as unseparated numerical constants, like you know, computers have always used.
And if you copy the figure from the calculator display, by right-clicking for the context menu or CTRL-C, you get the whole separated text with commas included to paste into where you need it.
So the receiving textbox you pasted to now needs to have the commas manually edited out before you can go forward, unlike any other Windows calculator.
I guess somebody forgot that people might want it to be at least as useful as it was since the 1990's.
You can still paste plain numeric text in without any commas, it just doesn't copy back out in the same usable format like it always did before.
You can't make this up.
A calculator is supposed to be the perfect example of a no-brainer :\
Edit: If you do the math it must have been more than one person who forgot, you have to think, is it even possible for one person alone to be responsible for quality declines like we have seen on their own? If so who would that be?
Wow that's annoying. Just reproduced the issue on my work computer. It's real. It even localizes the commas into periods too which is amazing because it has the potential to be parsed as a floating point number!
Just for the record, I just timed how long it took for the calculator to open. Eleven seconds. That's how long it took for it to display a window on the screen. A useless blue filled window that did nothing. It took a total of 17 seconds for it to show the calculator controls and be usable. This isn't a loaded machine, it's a freshly booted Windows system that's been at rest literally doing nothing for over five minutes. Notepad opened and was usable in less than one second.
Its AI and not humans that make up that trillion dollars and its AI enshloppification that created the new calculator. You are not AI - no fat stack for you.
The old notepad would still open instantly so that can't be it. The updated machines with the new notepad are just as infuriating.
Reminds me of the shitty gamer laptop manufacturer apps that would take over a minute to display a glorified rectangle on the screen. All this to configure keyboard LEDs. I reverse engineered that garbage and made a Linux version that works instantly, proving their incompetence.
All I know is it's an infuriating experience that I basically have to speedrun through almost every single day before I can actually get work done. My Linux laptop must be over a decade old by now and it just doesn't have this problem. The Windows 98 computer I had as a child didn't have this problem.
Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing they should probably stop. A goddamn calculator application shouldn't require a high performance workstation to even launch. It worked fine before, now it takes ages and can't even handle input properly. That's stupid and there's really no excuse for it.
With Windows 11, all the stuff going on in the background and so much new excess disk I/O just dwarfs that of Windows 10 on the same hardware.
And that was orders of magnitude more than W98.
Your SSDs are getting hammered like never before.
The first time you open the new, sluggish replacements for old standbys they take way more time to load, but then if you don't turn off the PC completely they are already in memory lots of times so they pop up faster in subsequent times, and with simple things like Calculator the actual calculation is not any slower than it was in 1998.
At least as long as your PC hardware is 20X as fast :\
Its not faster bereft of context, its just bloated. If you have enough resource to throw at it, its roughly the same. Theres some specific things that can themselves be slower, the Windows 11 Start Menu has had a lot of words written about its new implementation.
That _is_ slower. The fact that it's possible to throw enough resources at it that both "look" the same speed, doesn't change the fact that one of them is 10x slower.
I dont know what to tell you. I have endless user complaints at i5 16GB RAM, and none at i5 32GB RAM. Not to mention that I run 32 myself and its mostly fine. I can open menus.
I’ve got two machines for work - a desktop with an i9 and a laptop with an i7 and 32GB. The laptop is honestly a disgrace - I can’t believe it is sold as it is and marketed as a premium device. It’s “fine” for some light development but it fundamentally just doesn’t work - it misses inputs, it can’t handle chrome, regularly refuses to wake from sleep, etc. it does have an EPM solution on it which definitely makes it worse, but my 17 year old MacBook which can’t even load modern websites because safari is so out of date runs better than it.
There are a ton of posts and bug reports about the Windows 11 File Explorer being slow. Personally, after a few minutes of use, changing directories can take on the order of 20-30 seconds!
The slowdown appears to be due to XAML Islands, which allow legacy code to use modern MS UI stuff.
This was one of the most outrageous data grab in the past years. They replaced the completely working simple Mail app, which I used until that point, with this garbage, and I was just lucky that I paid attention, and I stopped for a sec what is that warning which tells you that they grab literally all of your emails.
If I have to view an image on Windows, I've long been in the habit of right clicking it and choosing "edit" to open MS Paint because it's so much better and faster than the stock image viewer. It's instant.
I can't think of a metaphor that sounds worse than this in regards to how low the bar has fallen. It's just an image viewer. How hard could they possibly be making it for themselves?
Literally the best parts of Windows have been the parts they forgot existed for 10+ years and never changed.
It's been so weird to watch over the decades as team sizes, budgets, and timelines have exploded even as we've abandoned once-normal things like native GUI applications as too hard in favor of "more efficient" webshit... even as the aforementioned stuff with growing team sizes, budgets, and timelines have happened.
>What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
The inverse has been happening. AI seems to be best at JS and React, so many projects use this just to have the best results. I think this is the whole reason that Claude Code is actually React that's then mapped onto a terminal.
> make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
I don't think that was ever not the case. The popular UI toolkits include a WYSIWYG editor where you can pick widgets and just put them where you want them with the mouse. Sure, that might not be what developers like to use, but invoking a widget constructor is not that hard and gets you a lot more functionality out of the box, that you would need to implement in JS.
Cross-platform GUIs is also more of a problem of theory. It used to be a big thing, because the GUIs don't look native to the platform, but that concern has gone out of the window with websites now. Win32 programs run with WINE, which I guess is not desirable for deploying to ordinary users, but I guess the people who write for Win32 generally do not care much about porting their programs outside of MS Windows. GTK+ and Qt both run on MS Windows. TCL/Tk comes built-in with Python and looks native on MS Windows.
Encoding algorithms is not that much different across C-like (Algol-derived) languages. Registering callbacks also looks kind of the same. I guess what makes a real difference is the ubiquity of async in JS, where you would use threads more in native applications.
I think what is an actual difference is the mindset around styling and layout. This is something that you actually need to adapt. CSS is more declarative, much like writing constraints for sizes, because you just write a formula about e.g. size in relation to other sizes. On native toolkits you would need to implement this stuff imperatively, I guess this looks like a real downgrade coming from the web, but it is really just a different mindset. Also when you run on the actual machine you have actual access to the device/viewport characteristics and can adapt based on that, and don't need to write an abstract layout. The other side of the coin is that the default widget packaging mechanism has been grid based while CSS only gained that later.
What I guess is also easier in JS, is just drawing on a canvas. The native UI toolkits want to nudge you into implementing a custom widget which implements all the required functionality of widgets. That results in a way better interface for the user, but when you just want a raster graphic you can click on, it can feel like a huge waste of time.
Since now native toolkits also support CSS, have JS bindings and Webpage targets, a guess the difference blurs.
> What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
Think one step ahead. They will want you to pay them for some LLM "agent" to use the GUI instead. It's not important that GUI is human usable anymore, actually the opposite.
The user is not the customer. Microsoft builds software for the enterprise now, so Windows 11 is full of new features for the enterprise and has nothing for the User.
They forgot that Enterprises are made out of Users.
It’s also weird that the productivity increases of AI lead to layoffs instead of hiring. If we can do more with AI why are companies scrambling to maintain the current output? Does leadership lack the vision of what to do with the additional productivity?
It was already true that an attacker could trick a user into copying a malicious link inside a file opened in Notepad to their browser, was that also a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability?
You can trick the user into copying the same malicious link, but browsers have generally already implemented the same mitigation that is Microsoft's fix for this issue inside Notepad (specifically, prompting before opening outside applications after the user enters or clicks a URL that isn't one of the built-in schemes).
It is also possible to use a different application as the http and file: url handler at the os level;
Write an app to display the (URL) argument passed and require the user to confirm or reject before running the browser using any of one or more default and configurable command line templates.
Add a "Install as default http, https, file:// uri handler" button in the settings gui. Prompt the user to install the app as default handler on first run.
Add opt-in optional debug logging of at least: {source_app_path:, url:, date_opened: } to a JSON lines log file
Much worse:
CVE-2026-20682
Apple Notes Note Deletion Logic Flaw (An attacker may be able to discover a user’s deleted notes.)
Many has not upgraded to iOS 26.3 yet.
I recently thought my keyboard was faulty. I take my notes on notepad, and after a recent update, sensed that keystrokes occasionally get missed or delayed. After a few days, I noticed it was not happening on Google Docs. On a whim I checked Notepad settings and found a new setting, enabled by default: "AI features > Copilot". I disabled it, along with "Autocorrect", and haven't had the problem since.
Notepad is supposed to be a bare bones editor -- where you go when everything else fails. The VI of Windows. If they want a rich editor, they should bring back WordPad.
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?
If you want to make a joke, you can suggest it as a new feature from the parameters of Microsoft To Do. Seems like the only Microsoft app that doesn't yet have it... BTW it can be disabled in Notepad settings.
> 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.
I 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.
I read somewhere that even for the "Copilot" things that supposedly run locally, windows needs to send a request to microsoft to confirm if your input is allowed by their rules.
Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found.
(I found an odd one: for some reason I can't log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)
The best way is to set up samba on a Linux machine, even a raspberry pi, and create a domain. Then you can create group policy to turn off a lot of nonsense and set up your computer by connecting to the domain. No MS account required, although you can associate one of you like.
Windows feels like it has a lot of attrition from home users now and perhaps it is only a matter of time before it's no longer worth writing exclusive software for it.
The reason we're getting this AI gumbo is that obviously the product people at M$ we're told: "Make money by selling AI features!!!". Which flipped their minds from their usual "I am Steve Jobs" fantasies, which tell them to _consider the User experience first_, to _Consider the companie$ experience first_, and they can't keep the two concepts in their little heads at the same time because they are, after all, just product people.
Ironic 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).
Yeah, 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.
I 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.
> "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.
The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.
I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.
The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more?
OK.
The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.
Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume?
Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight.
The maintainer is the first comment, agreeing with the post author:
> I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much.
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar.
I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
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/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF.
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.
When 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.
It's not stockholm syndrome for a lot of people. Microsoft is so firmly entrenched in so much of the corporate world that you can't get away from them. My mom was in the market for a new laptop recently, and I so badly wanted to get her setup with a MacBook Air, but it's not an option because the Sage accounting software she uses for my dad's business is Windows only. And furthermore, the business itself (a small pawn shop) is forced to use some specific software to manage inventory (I believe it allows police to access the database to track serial numbers in finding stolen goods or something), which is a webapp using some antiquated decades-old technology that only runs in Microsoft Edge's IE-compatibility mode (which has become a more and more difficult incantation to enable over the years) and I believe that can only be used on the Windows version of Edge.
For me it's currently the minimal-hassle way to make my Steam library runnable. But it feels like we're moving in a good direction thanks to Valve's efforts where one day I may be able to never boot into Windows on my PC.
> When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS…
That's when I jumped to Macs and haven't looked back since. Windows is just a glorified game console to me now, but I have enough fun with PS5/Switch exclusives.
Though macOS is also becoming annoying, not quite to that breaking point yet, but worrying
Meanwhile Linuxland seems like a chaos of 10000 people who all think they're right, under an anal overlord
Maybe it's time to dig the Commodore 64 back up? :')
But who cares though, soon AI will make operating systems meaningless, right?
> 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?
Agreed... 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
They’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...
Oh 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.
Edit 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.
Notepad++ 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.
The 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.
And yet notepad++ is installed by default on millions of development machines across the globe. This one of those cases that Microsoft should take over the project, keep as open source and give it proper prime time attention.
More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.
I'm worried a political activist might go off the rails at some point for whatever their cause is and I have their software running on my computer... I don't want to be part of someone else's crusade.
I didn't realize until recently that the very popular Notepad++ was such a lightning rod over the years for controversy and (though I can't guarantee correlation is causation) security issues.
The 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.
If 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).
While 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.
You'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
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'.
Notepad 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
Anything with a scripting engine isn't lightweight compared to (classic) Notepad!
(Also, a lot of that stuff comes bundled with Emacs out-of-the-box, further disqualifying it. Having a scripting engine is one thing, but having a scripting engine along with the whole rest of the jet is something else entirely!)
If by vi you mean vim, then I agree, real vi is rather lite.
As someone famous said, "everything is relative" :) Compared to the new applications that have been coming out, Emacs and vim are a paragon of lightness.
I agree with you that vi is lighter than vim. I’ve seen more than a few instances of an OS just aliasing vi to vim.
On that note, why are the keybindings for vi on a “modern” Ubuntu different from fedoras? I remember having to mess with ^H in a vimrc or something to that effect to mimic the behavior I was expecting.
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.
I 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.
On 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.
Imagine the result if everybody took to this mindset. Look at everything that's on your desk right now, and what percent of it was made in e.g. China. Imagine if they decided to just start jamming political slogans onto everything. Or for something closer to home, surgeons and anesthesiologists are largely conservative. [1] Imagine if they started signaling their politics. Many people, ironically often those most predisposed to try to make their own political views highly visible, do a poor job of tolerating the views of others. This sort of behavior would just cause complete chaos and disorder and make everybody even more pissed off at each other than they already are.
And political signaling can also make you look bad even to the audience that might ideologically agree with you. For instance notepad++ takes a position on essentially every big controversial US geopolitical issue, but they are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they hadn't taken on any political positions, this isn't an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue, suddenly their not taking a position on one like this effectively is taking a position, but it's one that (for once) they don't want to say.
A few cosmetic names for patch versions and political banners on websites seems pretty mild. I was a constant user of Notepad++ for more than a decade (until moving my last computer to Linux a few months ago), and never had any idea that they did any of the messaging listed on their Wikipedia.
If anything, I could stand for most things to be just a bit more political than them. Most things are way more political than that.
What non-political things would you say are "way" more political than what they're doing? What I mean by non-political is that you kind of expect this sort of nonsense in the media or whatever, but not a text editor. They also have their schtick in the documentation, and at times have included it as 'easter eggs' in the program itself.
It's already made the software a target for hacking amongst other things. Taking positions that resonate with perhaps half the people in 15% of the world, and piss off a sizable chunk of people in the remaining 85% of the world is not a great idea. And, from my perspective, it's not just about self defense - but why do you even want to do that?
I hold some fringe views relative to many on here at least, and I don't make any secret of it either - but imagine by username was like 'IllegalImmigrantsAreIllegal' or something. It'd be like 'oh cool, I see you're 13.' I see this as something along the same lines. If the topic comes up, it comes up, but making it a part of your identity is childish and antagonistic.
I guess this is true in a professional context - you don't want your user's or company's data somehow becoming compromised because of your choice of text editor.
But, at the same time, that's exactly the sort of thinking that's killed off that feeling I'm sentimental for. As a free human being, I don't want to live in fear of expressing my political views; and as someone who wants to view the software I make as a form of art or expression, I don't want to be afraid to express my political views through my software either. Should a writer avoid being political for fear of becoming a target? For fear of their books or readers becoming a target?
There's another reason to avoid agitating massive numbers of people, beyond fear. It's just not a reasonable thing to do. Like what do you really accomplish? There was that one guy who's mind was somehow changed by a random slogan. Unfortunately, he changed to the other side after seeing their even catchier slogan (it had italics!) a few days later.
You're not changing people's minds and you're simultaneously agitating both many of those who disagree with you as well as plenty who are neutral or even agree with you, as seeing politics shoved somewhere it doesn't belong is something many people do not appreciate, regardless of how those politics may or may not align with their own.
I 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.
> 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.
Interesting. This is not actually true anymore, even for the masses.
Nowadays everyone can just have their own tools made, "hand-tailored" with the features they want. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like everyday-software is now only a few sentences (and a python script) away.
I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.
FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...
⟩ dnf install --downloadonly --installroot /tmp/yourmom python3
…SNIP…
Transaction Summary:
Installing: 59 packages
Total size of inbound packages is 33 MiB. Need to download 33 MiB.
After this operation, 118 MiB extra will be used (install 118 MiB, remove 0 B).
The operation will only download packages for the transaction.
Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.
(( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))
while 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++.
The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.
I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.
It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance.
I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with.
Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH
Yes! I have tested all the major ones at some point, months ago, and found perplexity to be the most default-intelligent of the bunch. Of course that has to do with the underlying model (I still believe that it was Sonar, but idk), but also with how perplexity.ai "works" (for lack of a better term) the back-end. You know, memory, reasoning-steps, hidden prompts.
I have a huge background in psychoanalysis and neurolinguistic programming. My favourite hobby is metacognition.
I can't speak about the other major "engines", but perplexity learns over time. When you don't like something and keep telling "her" (i dislike using "it", because it's like i am talking to someone. it's weird, really), she will eventually stop doing it, because her memory influences her reasoning-steps.
Like ... tools are off, unless actually needed. She doesn't please me, at least not in the usual sense. She never uses "maybe", "probably" or "almost certainly", because I've taught her not to by explaining her, logically deductible, why it's bad. When she does, she explains why she does it.
Unlike a child, AI has the knowledge to figure out the correctness of the logic, as long as it is not forced to "please", which my perplexity isn't.
I've also taught her meta-awareness of missing pieces in logical constructs, virtually eliminating hallucinations and massively reducing the amount of mistakes she makes, as long as the background knowledge is solid.
For example, talking about prompting (image generation) is pointless, because there is so much conflicting information out there. (it's a copy/paste culture).
Yet, when you teach her the concept of ground-truths, as long as the background is solid, she makes virtually no mistakes at all.
It's fascinating, really. Mind boggling, even! I could write pages worth of posts about my experiments and experiences ... as you can probably tell! :D
Thanks for the detailed response, lol. Seems like it’s more personally tailorable than some of the others. Gonna give it a try with some similar vibe coding ideas
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.
> and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.
What do you mean by that? I don't understand.
I really don't think this requires someone "technical" anymore. ChatGPT might not give a python script, but a powershell script. Or possibly create a batch file.
Generally, since the default assumption is that the user is a moron, it chooses the path of least resistance, meaning that it all boils to the user being able to process written words and following instructions.
Nowadays, it seems to me that the real hurdle is the fact that far too many people can't properly read, write or express themselves anymore, let alone ask questions that might expose ... inadequacies.
I fail to see your point. That's not what this is about.
I wrote "Welcome to 2026", because the user, apparently, did not yet know that it only takes a few sentences for having it create a simple notepad clone.
If I had asked pqtyw to write me a barebones notepad clone, 20 years ago, would pqtyw have done that? For free? Within a single minute?
Well at least 10-15 you could just copy pasted exact same thing in a few minutes yet. But regardless even a basic notepad app is significantly more than a tkinter window with an input field.
The 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..."
It 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?
When 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.
Exactly, 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.
Should 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.
Markdown 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.
FWIW, 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.
I 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.
Notepad 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.
Makes me wonder - with Notepad rapidly evolving into WordPad v2, and no default "just render bytes as text" solution in modern Windows to replace it, maybe there's still a way to hack one together on the go, just from pieces laying around in every default installation? I mean, rundll32.exe is a thing.
All I really need is a basic text box with a scroll bar, and a way to feed it with bytes from a file.
To make it a well-defined challenge: the task is to find a way to create a basic notepad - a multi-line textbox that supports scrolling, and can be fed bytes from a file to render as text directly. Additionally, this must be achievable through simple means - simple enough to memorize - and must work on standard Windows 11 installation, with no extra dependencies to procure. Solution can be e.g. something I can type from memory into "Run" (Win+R) box, but could also be a short list of GUI steps (e.g. open some program, click on "Help", drag file to help box).
Dave Plummer vibe coded one on his YouTube channel a couple months ago. Normally I wouldn’t share someone vibe coding something, but since he wrote the Task Manager, Zip Folders, and other such core Windows features back in the day, it hits different.
Huh. I was going to say, last time I saw this was 20+ years ago, and I forgot it exists - but I must be remembering something else. It seems `edit` is a new thing, if I'm to believe https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
I can confirm it exists on my Windows 11 machine, and I didn't install it specifically, though it's definitely not a base install (upgraded from Windows 10, and plenty of dev tooling installed over the years). Still, it fits the bill (+/- GUI, but I didn't consider TUI at all). Thanks!
The documentation doesn't make this entirely clear, but I think these are two separate things: the original `edit` command which is built into Windows 11 (and has been built into prior Windows releases), and a replacement written in Rust that can optionally be installed.
The old EDIT never shipped with any 64-bit Windows IIRC, since it was a 16-bit MS-DOS application. I believe 32-bit Windows 10 has it..?
As someone who (mercifully) only occasionally has to touch Windows machines, I keep forgetting this, and then when I try to do stuff I’m flabbergasted that the operating system does not include a terminal text editor. (In a fit of pure desperation I even typed EDLIN into the Command Prompt — no go ;)
That was the case with Win11 about a year ago; if they finally started shipping EDIT64 then hey, that’s one positive recent change in Windows I suppose.
Well, there was a workaround (that I only learned today) for creating new files:
copy con file_to_edit.txt
Type text, end with CTRL+Z. Don't make any typos.
That's what web search told me, but then looking at the remarks in docs for `copy`[0], I have to wonder if this works now, and if it would've worked back then:
copy prefix.txt+con+suffix.txt output.txt
If it does, then combined with some clever use of `find`, `findstr` or `for` (whichever was available back then), you could probably get something that's half-way between EDIT.COM and a line editor.
(`more` would come in handy here, but AIUI, there's no way to run it non-interactively in cmd.exe? Don't have a Windows machine handy to check it right now.)
Thanks, this explains the mystery, and now the timelines add up.
So it turns out, EDIT.COM was one of the first - if not the first - computer programs I ever saw and used, back when the first PC showed up in the house. For some reason, someone in the family guessed that 9yo me will be interested in DOS and QBasic. A few years later, I used it from Windows for some time, when I was learning X86 assembly (I wanted to learn how to make a video game, so I went to the local library looking for some "intro to programming" book, and mistakes were made).
Afterwards, it was Borland C++ 3.1 (another TUI classic) and vim/Emacs, and I forgot about EDIT.com entirely. This new Microsoft Edit is something new, and something else, but similar enough that it brought those memories back.
So 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.
I 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).
Once 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.
It doesn't work everywhere though as there are still apps that don't offer a plain text paste, and as you have noted the shortcut can be different in different applications.
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:
^+v::
Clipboard:=Clipboard
Send ^v
That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.
Unless 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.
I 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.
My 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.
So 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.
That 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)
At 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.
I used to write documentation in Markdown manually. About a year ago I started using a VSCode extension to tell me if there are minor errors in the documents, but nothing else.
Is 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.
Haha, 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.
Weird, 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.
I 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.
I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Internally, the Notepad project existed to provide a minimal, shippable product that we could use as a testbed. We used it to validate everything from compiler changes to kernel32 loader behavior on beta versions of Windows. If Notepad didn’t run, your feature didn’t work.
Notepad was historically just a thin wrapper for the "EDIT" window class, along with file loading and saving.
And WordPad was built on top of the "RICHEDIT" window class, and exposed lots of the OLE features provided by the rich text control. "Insert Object" is a powerful and potentially dangerous feature with a lineage going back to the Windows 3.1 days. As long as your DLL is registered correctly, any document in an OLE-capable program can cause objects from that DLL to become instantiated and deserialized.
Getting rid of documents able to instantiate arbitrary OLE controls is a good reason to try to remove WordPad. It's not just some simple styled text editor.
I didn't remember that they'd shipped that. I remember reading about it but I ever tried it. My hot take, after 10 minutes, is that it's frustrating and not at all a replacement for Notepad. (Fortunately you can uninstall the shitty "Windows Notepad" and the real notepad.exe takes over.)
This new "Edit" is completely tone-deaf in that it doesn't keep the keybindings from Notepad (i.e. no CTRL-H for find/replace, no F5 for the current date/time). You can't turn off the status bar or the line numbers. It doesn't follow the OS theme (instead pretending to be a text-mode application). It tries to be "helpful" with indentation.
At least they bothered to get Find Next with F3 right.
It would have been immensely better if they'd just ported the old MS-DOS EDIT / QBASIC over to Windows.
Wordpad 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.
If you think about it, Wordpad was always just the free "lite" edition of Word for people who didn't buy Office to use. Like Outlook Express was to Outlook.
But in the world we seem to be heading toward, where you can only log into Windows with a Microsoft account, and where your Microsoft 365 subscription state controls which "edition" or "desktop experience" of Windows you get as said logged-in user (regardless of which machine you're logged into)... there'd be no need for Wordpad.
In that world, Word the software package would always be pre-installed. (Why? Because even if you aren't paying for M365, someone who is could always log into your PC as a roaming user; and that person would want Word to work immediately without having to wait for it to download+install.)
And in a world where Word the software package is always preinstalled, then Microsoft could just let anyone launch Word (whether they have an M365 subscription or not); and then, at launch, rather than just putting a paywall in the face of anyone without an M365 subscription, Word could instead use the logged-in user's M365 licensing state to determine whether the spun-up Word process should run the full-fat Word UI, or some kind of degraded unpaid-mode Word UI.
And "Word running with some kind of degraded unpaid-mode UI" could be every bit the "Word lite" offering that Wordpad is. Which makes Wordpad itself redundant.
(The only weird part to me, is that they deprecated/removed Wordpad before pulling the trigger on all of this.)
they didn’t remove wordpad before pulling the trigger on this… you can use the online version of Word for free, effectively achieving what you are saying.
VSCode needs Electron which is too big IMO. It's also a specialised code editor instead of a general text editor, with features like builtin terminal and traditional menus instead of ribbons.
I mean, Microsoft is already using WebView and web technologies in Windows at this point. I agree electron is inefficient, but it's not particularly egregious when compared to what they're already doing
I was mostly meaning the Wordpad name, not the original incantation of the tool... the only legacy I might support if it was Wordpad as a markdown editor, would be to import RTF/Doc files only supporting what can cleanly adapt to markdown syntax support...
Then I'd probably have a decent print to pdf function as part of it.
Just 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.
After 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.
> 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.
If 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.
When 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.
For 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.
I 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.
notepad 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.
> 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.
Everything is copilot, so much so that I don't even know what copilot is.
From the security side, everything is Microsoft Defender. When talking to people I have to say things like "defender but the AV thing that's on by default, not the paid cloud thingy, and by that I don't mean the cloud protection one but the thing that protects endpoints using cloud stuff". They can't come up with good names and they confuse the crap out of their users. I hate to say it's just MBAs, since I don't really know but that'd be my guess. Someone at an Ivy league school somewhere is perpetuating this perhaps?
Why 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.
Why 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?
I'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.
Notepad 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.
Where 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?
Years 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.
Are 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.
The 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++?
I 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.
I 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.
On 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.
Yes. 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.
But 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?
Line 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.
What 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.
Oh 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.
It'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.
I actually welcome this. Markdown is this incredible, future proof, portable and elegant format… up until you have to collaborate on something with a normie
Is 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?
A 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.
I 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.
hah, 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.
Can 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.
> 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.
I 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.
True, 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.
Never 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.
Notepad 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
Eh. 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.
At 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.
Even 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.
What happened to "just enable X if you need it"? Why are we always okay with every new thing being enabled by default?
Is it because the average person isn't as tech savvy as most (if not all) HN readers to know any better, and those companies want the headcount of usage to look high to please stakeholders?
Where have you been for the past umpteenth years of computing where even in the Linux kernel stuff is enabled by default, let alone userland applications.
It's not just an icon in the notification area though!
There's a keyboard shortcut for it. I never figured out quite what it was, but every now and again Copilot would open itself while I was using Visual Studio or Emacs on my Windows 11 desktop PC. I assume I'm either hitting the shortcut, or a ghost key on my keyboard is stepping in and hitting it for me. (I could never reproduce this by pressing Windows+C.)
Copilot does stuff in the background. What stuff? I don't know. But, occasionally, on my desktop PC, I'd get a message box popping up saying that Copilot was unable to open this or that file. (Though, yes, perhaps it is just opening that file for no reason. Hard to say.)
(Both of these went away when I removed all the Copilot apps from the list of startup stuff.)
Copilot can be persuaded to get itself into a state where it expects you to log in. I had this happen on my old Windows 10 laptop somehow, when I logged in as my (local only) work user, something that existed to let me sign in to my old employer's Teams setup, their VPN, and use Remote Desktop to my work PC. And each time I logged in to my laptop, Copilot would pop up a login dialog. Though I can't deny that this was a handy reminder to remind me to quit it.
A keyboard shortcut? Damn, that's horrific. Terrible terrible stuff.
So instead of troubleshooting you went straight to "oh my god this is the end of days!" These seem like obvious user error or at worst bugs.
Not to mention you've pivoted from Copilot in Notepad to Copilot in general. Which are not the same thing. Copilot is a brand name and various instances of it are not connected at all.
You should have started with your 3rd paragraph, because that clarifies my misunderstanding of your comment. I stand by my comment as well, though. We can both be right here.
Unfortunately, you started with the first 2 paragraphs, so clearly you're more interested in moaning at me. But this is the internet, so that's fine. I already expected it. In fact, I'm disappointed. You're going to have to try harder.
The 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.
The truth is, unless Notepad got some kind of makeover, it was a useless vestige. It obviously wasn’t a good text editor for plain monospaced text. Having basically zero features didn’t serve anyone - why not use Notepad++ or vim in that case?
I think the most popular use of notepad is to read text files quickly and these days that often includes Markdown files. It makes perfect sense for Notepad to evolve into something that’s actually useful for lightly formatted text formats.
but i dont think most people here are complaining because of security risk... otherwise they wouldnt be recommending things like notepad++, other obscure editors, or editors with way larger code bases.
That'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.
I 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.
The ergonomics of the new version are slightly different. The default behavior of opening tabs with previously-open files is jarring to me. I just remove it (Powershell command line in another comment) and the original "Notepad.exe" takes over.
I've spent a long time building up my muscle memory. I don't want my tools changing out from under me. If they wanted to ship an "enhanced" notepad they should have called its something else.
> Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.
If you use many different machines throughout your workday, this means you have to carry a copy of your bespoke solution with you on a memory stick or something, and hope that the machine you want to use it on allows the use of memory sticks or unapproved software.
It's far better to use an application that you can count on already existing on the machines.
TBF, a lot of people used to keep portable apps like this... then IT started locking down even being able to mount a USB storage device. I used to do this for my email and mail profile with a portable Thunderbird.
I even worked on an app in a relatively secure environment where the work around for an early SPA and IE6-8 company wide, was for the systems analysts using our app to use a portable firefox browser on the user desktop. IE6-8 in particular were really bad when you had an SPA as you had events tied to dom elements across the COM bridge that wouldn't release unless all dom and script references were freed up. jQuery actually did this, if you managed everything through it, but our app was an early version of extjs... so after 3-4 hours it would just run out of memory and die.
We used to have a perfectly good application that came with the OS. Then Microsoft ruined it. Yes I can make my own Notepad, but I shouldn't have to. If Microsoft really wanted a built-in text editor that had features Notepad didn't, they should've made a second application rather than ruining the minimalist one.
I use Notepad from time to time for quick notes and I have noticed exactly zero friction added to this "workflow". Not sure what you are talking about.
You 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.
When 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.
I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month.
20260211 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-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 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 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)
This 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.
I thought it is by introducing an RCE vulnerability that you get an RCE vulnerability.
I'm being facetious of course, but this recent rhetorical trend of people confidently vouching for "pet" in "pet vs. cattle" is not a sustainable decision, even if it's admittedly plain practical on the short to medium run, or in given contexts even longer. It's just a dangerous and irresponsible lesson to blindly repeat I think.
Change happens. Evidently, while we can mechanistically rule out several classes of bugs now, RCEs are not one of those. Whatever additional guardrails they had in place, they failed to catch this *. I think it's significantly more honest to place the blame there if anywhere. If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad *, you can be confident they're introducing RCEs left and right to other components too **. With some additional contextual weighting of course.
* Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
** Under the interpretation that this was an RCE, which I question.
[0] https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/2/19/cve-2026-20...
> * Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
Most people seem to see "CVE" and "RCE" and assume the worst here. As you saw though, Notepad is just making totally valid URIs clickable! Web browsers allow it too - why is it not an RCE there? Sure, they usually show a warning when the URI is going to something external but most people just click through things like that anyway.
Thats not the case here.
Web browsers warn you about opening arbitrary protocols. And you have to select the program that will open it.
This Notepad vuln, allows you to click things like ssh://x....
> This Notepad vuln, allows you to click things like ssh://x....
Which just opens up SSH connecting to a server. Is that really RCE?
It'll also only work with URI schemes that are registered on your system. It's not running arbitrary commands - software you install on your PC registers URI schemes and sets what command it should run when opened. It's then up to that software to parse the URI and handle it properly. If it doesn't then the RCE belongs to them because they registered the URI scheme and failed to handle it securely. Having an allowlist of URI schemes in Notepad isn't going to fix it.
It doesn't only work with protocols registered by "your system" - Notepad doesn't register protocols. And Notepad is the user agent, here.
It works with your _locally_ registered protocols, not just the _remote_ protocols.
Which is why it works with JScript. And Powershell. And Visual Basic.
This is a bug that replicates why IE 4 was called insecure. Its not something that should ever surface again, today.
It is... The exact example of what an RCE is. _Local_ code executed by a _remote_ command.
As far as I can tell there is no URI scheme registered on Windows for JScript, PowerShell, or VBScript. They have file associations but those are not URI schemes.
Good point re: "RCE" though the CVSS score is 7.8/high severity; some more flavor per the FAQ at https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
> According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?
> The word Remote in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally.
> For example, when the score indicates that the Attack Vector is Local and User Interaction is Required, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.
> Change happens.
The low level tool that has served to rescue more systems than I can count does not need to "change" simply because "it happens, bro."
> while we can mechanistically
You can rule it out with process as well. As in "don't change what isn't broken."
> If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad
Then they clearly feel they have no viable competition. This is table stakes. Getting it wrong should lose you most of your customer base overnight. Companies actually used to _work_ this way.
If I told you to stop using computers, and then you won't have computer problems, I don't think you would find that particularly helpful or charitable either, would you?
What you find a trusty "low-level" tool is a demo application for a basic WYSIWYG text editor. They modernized it so that it remains being perceived that way, instead of letting it be increasingly misclassified as a legacy product for the enthusiast, like you just did.
I thought "basic WYSIWYG text editor" was more WordPad's lane, no? May it rest...
That was my first thought... Notepad is a plain text editor. Why add formatted text options when there's no good reason for it?
Plus, judging by the image, it doesn't look like there's controls to interact with the plain text markdown. It seems more like it's a "you can use markdown _codes_ to trigger text formatting. Jira has exactly this, and it's horrible.
> letting it be increasingly misclassified
"No, it's the customers who are wrong."
From their (supposed) perspective, yes. That's the idea I wanted to convey indeed.
But this is not about how you, but Microsoft, "the corporation that turns updates into chaos,"introduces RCE bugs. And bugs in general: easy to introduce, by action or inaction, when one has absolutely no concern for user satisfaction.
What does pet" in "pet vs. cattle" mean?
It comes from the world of systems operations. Something long-lived and trusted, so high emotional attachment (pet), vs. something short-lived that thus does not need to be trusted, so comparatively low emotional attachment (cattle).
For example, Bob's one-of-a-kind trusty server from which Bob is nigh inseparable, vs. a Docker container with a version controlled config you routinely tear down and bring up instances of, maybe even in an automated fashion.
Here this would map to trusty aged codebases you don't touch out of fear and caution, vs. codebases you can confidently touch because the spec, the code, the tests, the tooling, and the processes are solid.
A different mapping: to Microsoft, the users's computers are cattle, but to each individual user, the computer is a pet. Which is why the users keep getting mad when their pet feature gets euthanized.
For development, I'd see a different mapping.
Pets are projects that you toy with and keep adding new features, even when the main objective has been met. Cattle are projects that do what they are supposed to and are left alone.
I'd much rather have Notepad fall into the cattle category.
Meanwhile TextEdit on Mac always rendered HTML. Which seems useless until you realize it can also edit and save as HTML. So there's casually a wysiwyg web editor built into macOS that idk how many people use.
idk maybe TextEdit DOES have some rce not discovered yet?
maybe we should separate "real origianl text-only editor" from "fancy text editor"?
windows already got wordpad... why even lay a finger on textpad?
Windows had wordpad but it was discontinued two years ago : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPad
wat?????
wtf why?????????
So you subscribe to the Microsoft CoPilot 365 App or whatever it's called now.
hmm... ok maybe that's reasonable
charge extra premium for a "secure vanilla-text™ pure unadulterated wysiwyg editor" experience should be a thing for the "security-minded" enterprises
If it also allowed me to type what I want instead of changing every single word due to "spell check" it would actually be a useful tool!
Spell check is fine - highlight misspelled words, offer corrections when asked. What's incredibly harmful is autocorrect, as it slowly but surely causes vast majority of computer users to become partly illiterate. And nobody gives a damn, because hey, we're efficiently saving time!
It didn't cause me to become illiterate, it caused me to give up using it and find something else since it was "correcting" a lot of things that were correct to begin with, and going back to re-change them became a chore in the only 10 minutes I used it.
TextEdit prefs (not systemwide prefs) have easy checkboxes to disable all that, also the smart quotes. Also gotta make it default to plain text.
The reason I dropped it was cause of a bug where I'd highlight text, copy, and it's actually copy the wrong block of text. Idk the trigger but seems related to larger files.
Ok wysiwyg web editor is maybe overselling it. You can make a text-only page in it. Still neat.
I 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.
> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
It is certainly perceptibly slow. Carried out a test on my 12 year old PC running Win-10 vs a new HP Win11 laptop of my friend which he bought in a hurry before price increases. Opened a directory of several thousand files with nested folders - much slower at navigation. Much slower at opening right-click menus. Much slower at pretty much everything.
M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS. You gotta get used to staring at that spinning blue circle, counting the many precious moments of your life draining away.
> M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS.
So we're back to the woes of Active Desktop on Windows 98. Everything old is new again.
You could at least disable Active Desktop to dethrottle your PC. Meanwhile, my work W11 PC has a second+ delay for explorer right click and there's nothing I can do about it.
You can actually restore the old right-click menu on W11 with some regedit. Not ideal in any way, and a setting would have been a much better way to toggle this, but it is an option.
The problem is that the old righ-click menu is ALSO much slower on Windows 11. Shows a fucking spinner for half a second before the menu appears.
I've found that ( at least for me ) that was caused by some entries doing some checks before showing up. Getting a context menu editor and removing some of them can help.
Doesn't matter, it's a shit user experience and Microsoft's fault for putting the onus on the user to fiddle around at that level, rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
> rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.
Do you want the users to blame Microsoft, all Microsoft employees including catering and cleaning workers, and Gates personally? This is how you make the users blame all the before mentioned but not the culprit.
Oh, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft in any way. Everything they make has been going downhill faster and faster. Just suggesting a possible way to work around it.
You can't edit the registry without admin rights which you don't have on a work laptop.
Yeah that's a fair point.
> As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
Ultimately, what difference does it make? The file explorer in Windows 10 is much faster than the one in Windows 11, and it's very noticeable. Turn on the old context menus, and try right clicking a file. Instant in Windows 10, visible delay in Windows 11.
I measured once. It uses about 50% more resources and offers less feautures (or at least hides existing feautures). You may not have noticed if you had resources to spare.
It does offer some new features for businesses. Nothing useful for the consumer, and nothing to justify the massive performance loss
The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator. It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network.
The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sort of "clever" localization where my inputs change depending on the language of the operating system. My language uses commas so of course it only accepts those. Infuriating. Hope whoever coded this is enjoying their promotion.
Off-topic, but do you know Mozilla Firefox has a builtin calculator and unit conversion in the URL bar? For my personal use I rather use python and GNU units, but I guess for most users that live in the browser instead of the terminal, this could become their default calculator.
I don't know if you need to restore the urlbar first, before that works.qalc is also a very good tool for this. I found it recently and have been happy with it. It's not just a really advanced calculator, it's a nearly full equivalent of the Google calculator. The only thing it doesn't really do is have awareness of variables like "current US population."
I didn't know. That's pretty amazing. Thank you.
One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator.
It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be.
Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.
Yeah, I think that is a common first task when learning to program. Learning about strings: write a first-grade-math expression calculator. Learning Java: make a GUI calculator. Now convert between prefix, infix and postfix notation. This is all even before you learn about classes or files.
The new calculator isn't just slow to open, it seems to have actual input lag too. God I miss the old calculator.
To me it's not sad, it's infuriating. This corporation is worth a trillion dollars. Why can't they do their jobs? I'm sure the old calculator could be maintained and improved without screwing it up beyond belief. Send us some fat stacks and we'll do it.
>God I miss the old calculator.
Prayer won't help you now ;)
With numbers >1000 they are of course displayed with thousands separators as 1,000 (text) now like you would see in financial reports, how attractive. Big numbers have a few commas too. No longer displayed as unseparated numerical constants, like you know, computers have always used.
And if you copy the figure from the calculator display, by right-clicking for the context menu or CTRL-C, you get the whole separated text with commas included to paste into where you need it.
So the receiving textbox you pasted to now needs to have the commas manually edited out before you can go forward, unlike any other Windows calculator.
I guess somebody forgot that people might want it to be at least as useful as it was since the 1990's.
You can still paste plain numeric text in without any commas, it just doesn't copy back out in the same usable format like it always did before.
You can't make this up.
A calculator is supposed to be the perfect example of a no-brainer :\
Edit: If you do the math it must have been more than one person who forgot, you have to think, is it even possible for one person alone to be responsible for quality declines like we have seen on their own? If so who would that be?
Wow that's annoying. Just reproduced the issue on my work computer. It's real. It even localizes the commas into periods too which is amazing because it has the potential to be parsed as a floating point number!
Just for the record, I just timed how long it took for the calculator to open. Eleven seconds. That's how long it took for it to display a window on the screen. A useless blue filled window that did nothing. It took a total of 17 seconds for it to show the calculator controls and be usable. This isn't a loaded machine, it's a freshly booted Windows system that's been at rest literally doing nothing for over five minutes. Notepad opened and was usable in less than one second.
Its AI and not humans that make up that trillion dollars and its AI enshloppification that created the new calculator. You are not AI - no fat stack for you.
They're not gonna put LLM nonsense in the freaking calculator, right?
> It looks like you're trying to calculate averages. Would you like help with that?
> Did you know Microsoft™ Office™ Excel™ has a formula for that? Rent Microsoft™ Office™ Excel™ today! Only $200/month in a perpetual payment plan!
What a time to be alive.
Is that Windows, or the EDR that is hooking every system call and pinning a whole core with analytics?
The old notepad would still open instantly so that can't be it. The updated machines with the new notepad are just as infuriating.
Reminds me of the shitty gamer laptop manufacturer apps that would take over a minute to display a glorified rectangle on the screen. All this to configure keyboard LEDs. I reverse engineered that garbage and made a Linux version that works instantly, proving their incompetence.
If your work computer is taking 10 seconds to open the calculator something is very odd since my windows 11 work computer opens it just fine.
All I know is it's an infuriating experience that I basically have to speedrun through almost every single day before I can actually get work done. My Linux laptop must be over a decade old by now and it just doesn't have this problem. The Windows 98 computer I had as a child didn't have this problem.
Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing they should probably stop. A goddamn calculator application shouldn't require a high performance workstation to even launch. It worked fine before, now it takes ages and can't even handle input properly. That's stupid and there's really no excuse for it.
With Windows 11, all the stuff going on in the background and so much new excess disk I/O just dwarfs that of Windows 10 on the same hardware.
And that was orders of magnitude more than W98.
Your SSDs are getting hammered like never before.
The first time you open the new, sluggish replacements for old standbys they take way more time to load, but then if you don't turn off the PC completely they are already in memory lots of times so they pop up faster in subsequent times, and with simple things like Calculator the actual calculation is not any slower than it was in 1998.
At least as long as your PC hardware is 20X as fast :\
If the storage was the bottleneck I would expect opening notepad for the first time to be just as slow. Instead it is about 17 times faster.
Its not faster bereft of context, its just bloated. If you have enough resource to throw at it, its roughly the same. Theres some specific things that can themselves be slower, the Windows 11 Start Menu has had a lot of words written about its new implementation.
That _is_ slower. The fact that it's possible to throw enough resources at it that both "look" the same speed, doesn't change the fact that one of them is 10x slower.
> if you have enough resource to throw at it
An i9 with 128GB RAM isn’t enough resources to open a menu?
I dont know what to tell you. I have endless user complaints at i5 16GB RAM, and none at i5 32GB RAM. Not to mention that I run 32 myself and its mostly fine. I can open menus.
I’ve got two machines for work - a desktop with an i9 and a laptop with an i7 and 32GB. The laptop is honestly a disgrace - I can’t believe it is sold as it is and marketed as a premium device. It’s “fine” for some light development but it fundamentally just doesn’t work - it misses inputs, it can’t handle chrome, regularly refuses to wake from sleep, etc. it does have an EPM solution on it which definitely makes it worse, but my 17 year old MacBook which can’t even load modern websites because safari is so out of date runs better than it.
There are a ton of posts and bug reports about the Windows 11 File Explorer being slow. Personally, after a few minutes of use, changing directories can take on the order of 20-30 seconds!
The slowdown appears to be due to XAML Islands, which allow legacy code to use modern MS UI stuff.
https://www.techindeep.com/why-is-windows-explorer-slow-7289...
The best example is probably the new "Outlook", and I put that name in quotes intentionally.
In case anyone is not aware:
20231109 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
This was one of the most outrageous data grab in the past years. They replaced the completely working simple Mail app, which I used until that point, with this garbage, and I was just lucky that I paid attention, and I stopped for a sec what is that warning which tells you that they grab literally all of your emails.
Btw, just before that I found this page regarding Edge, and this is why I paid more attention to these things: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/microsoft-edge/priva...
That list is way too long for my taste, and it really indicated me that Windows became completely adversarial.
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“Diverse”? Wanna expand on that one, buddy? You think you’re being subtle?
If I have to view an image on Windows, I've long been in the habit of right clicking it and choosing "edit" to open MS Paint because it's so much better and faster than the stock image viewer. It's instant. I can't think of a metaphor that sounds worse than this in regards to how low the bar has fallen. It's just an image viewer. How hard could they possibly be making it for themselves?
Literally the best parts of Windows have been the parts they forgot existed for 10+ years and never changed.
It's been so weird to watch over the decades as team sizes, budgets, and timelines have exploded even as we've abandoned once-normal things like native GUI applications as too hard in favor of "more efficient" webshit... even as the aforementioned stuff with growing team sizes, budgets, and timelines have happened.
What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
Somehow in this timeline AI can only be used to make things worse and sloppier
>What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
The inverse has been happening. AI seems to be best at JS and React, so many projects use this just to have the best results. I think this is the whole reason that Claude Code is actually React that's then mapped onto a terminal.
The engineers running the AI have to still be good.
AI code that isn't properly guided and controlled by an engineer is just as sloppy as the human behind it.
AI is an accelerate for programming, but some developers create horrible code before AI, snd AI won't change that. It just lets them do it faster.
I agree, but given the breadth of slop we are seeing now, I think it's safe to say the average AI-accelerated developer are bad coders.
That being said, no one ever looked at good code and said "that's AI gold," so opinions may be skewed.
> make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
I don't think that was ever not the case. The popular UI toolkits include a WYSIWYG editor where you can pick widgets and just put them where you want them with the mouse. Sure, that might not be what developers like to use, but invoking a widget constructor is not that hard and gets you a lot more functionality out of the box, that you would need to implement in JS.
Cross-platform GUIs is also more of a problem of theory. It used to be a big thing, because the GUIs don't look native to the platform, but that concern has gone out of the window with websites now. Win32 programs run with WINE, which I guess is not desirable for deploying to ordinary users, but I guess the people who write for Win32 generally do not care much about porting their programs outside of MS Windows. GTK+ and Qt both run on MS Windows. TCL/Tk comes built-in with Python and looks native on MS Windows.
Encoding algorithms is not that much different across C-like (Algol-derived) languages. Registering callbacks also looks kind of the same. I guess what makes a real difference is the ubiquity of async in JS, where you would use threads more in native applications.
I think what is an actual difference is the mindset around styling and layout. This is something that you actually need to adapt. CSS is more declarative, much like writing constraints for sizes, because you just write a formula about e.g. size in relation to other sizes. On native toolkits you would need to implement this stuff imperatively, I guess this looks like a real downgrade coming from the web, but it is really just a different mindset. Also when you run on the actual machine you have actual access to the device/viewport characteristics and can adapt based on that, and don't need to write an abstract layout. The other side of the coin is that the default widget packaging mechanism has been grid based while CSS only gained that later.
What I guess is also easier in JS, is just drawing on a canvas. The native UI toolkits want to nudge you into implementing a custom widget which implements all the required functionality of widgets. That results in a way better interface for the user, but when you just want a raster graphic you can click on, it can feel like a huge waste of time.
Since now native toolkits also support CSS, have JS bindings and Webpage targets, a guess the difference blurs.
> What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps
Think one step ahead. They will want you to pay them for some LLM "agent" to use the GUI instead. It's not important that GUI is human usable anymore, actually the opposite.
Software used to be built for users, now it just has to look good as a screenshot.
The user is not the customer. Microsoft builds software for the enterprise now, so Windows 11 is full of new features for the enterprise and has nothing for the User.
They forgot that Enterprises are made out of Users.
All the enterprise users I know are extremely unhappy with the direction of development.
[dead]
It’s also weird that the productivity increases of AI lead to layoffs instead of hiring. If we can do more with AI why are companies scrambling to maintain the current output? Does leadership lack the vision of what to do with the additional productivity?
If everything is electron then there’s literally no reason to pay for windows since superior OSes can run everything exactly the same
Well this is what we call it opportunity cost
Making automatic updates mandatory is another name for 'Give M$ remote code execution'.
It was already true that an attacker could trick a user into copying a malicious link inside a file opened in Notepad to their browser, was that also a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability?
You can trick the user into copying the same malicious link, but browsers have generally already implemented the same mitigation that is Microsoft's fix for this issue inside Notepad (specifically, prompting before opening outside applications after the user enters or clicks a URL that isn't one of the built-in schemes).
It is also possible to use a different application as the http and file: url handler at the os level;
Write an app to display the (URL) argument passed and require the user to confirm or reject before running the browser using any of one or more default and configurable command line templates.
Add a "Install as default http, https, file:// uri handler" button in the settings gui. Prompt the user to install the app as default handler on first run.
Add opt-in optional debug logging of at least: {source_app_path:, url:, date_opened: } to a JSON lines log file
It looks like the exploit would cause notepad to retrieve and execute arbitrary code when a malicious link is clicked.
The worst part of enshittification is all these search tools erring on the side of too many results than not enough.
Much worse: CVE-2026-20682 Apple Notes Note Deletion Logic Flaw (An attacker may be able to discover a user’s deleted notes.) Many has not upgraded to iOS 26.3 yet.
I believe notepad was originally just a demo of the multi line edit control. Feature creep.
I 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-wri...)
I recently thought my keyboard was faulty. I take my notes on notepad, and after a recent update, sensed that keystrokes occasionally get missed or delayed. After a few days, I noticed it was not happening on Google Docs. On a whim I checked Notepad settings and found a new setting, enabled by default: "AI features > Copilot". I disabled it, along with "Autocorrect", and haven't had the problem since.
Notepad is supposed to be a bare bones editor -- where you go when everything else fails. The VI of Windows. If they want a rich editor, they should bring back WordPad.
This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
Agreed.
Notepad's got Markdown, it's what LLMs crave.
I love it too, because it's easy to write and copy, compared to formatted text
Me, too. Oh my god, I might be an LLM.
Well they're text generation engines, of course they do, it's all just text.
What’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?
stochastic parrot
pochastic starrot
If you want to make a joke, you can suggest it as a new feature from the parameters of Microsoft To Do. Seems like the only Microsoft app that doesn't yet have it... BTW it can be disabled in Notepad settings.
Good that they have realized the power of raw texts thanks to LLMs.
Thank god notepad is finally useable now
Still no line numbers....
> 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.
I 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.
Proper color fill will not make shareholders happy while AI-powered image color replacement will.
I have like 3 Microsoft shares, and it would have made me happy :(
I read somewhere that even for the "Copilot" things that supposedly run locally, windows needs to send a request to microsoft to confirm if your input is allowed by their rules.
Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found.
(I found an odd one: for some reason I can't log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)
The best way is to set up samba on a Linux machine, even a raspberry pi, and create a domain. Then you can create group policy to turn off a lot of nonsense and set up your computer by connecting to the domain. No MS account required, although you can associate one of you like.
Windows feels like it has a lot of attrition from home users now and perhaps it is only a matter of time before it's no longer worth writing exclusive software for it.
The 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.
Obviously 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.
Come on man, the usual reason: $$$
Its is Micro$oft after all :P
The reason we're getting this AI gumbo is that obviously the product people at M$ we're told: "Make money by selling AI features!!!". Which flipped their minds from their usual "I am Steve Jobs" fantasies, which tell them to _consider the User experience first_, to _Consider the companie$ experience first_, and they can't keep the two concepts in their little heads at the same time because they are, after all, just product people.
Ironic 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.
Yeah, 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.
Don't forget the .LOG feature.
The “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!
I 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.
step 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
Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
I 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.
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> "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.
I like having something all in one.
Funny comment because this would have been WordPad.
I liked having a simple plain text editor
I can't believe I'm saying this on hackernews of all places... Markdown *is* plain text.
That's the point. It now gets rendered in Notepad. Before these changes Notepad was just able to edit plain text and not rendered markdown etc.
Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows.
What are these horrible takes?
The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.
>Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files.
then put the markdown support there to supplant rtfs?
RTF is not binary encoded though? It's plain text with commands, not unlike TeX.
I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.
Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1]
Step 6: GOTO 1.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit
It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it.
Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682
The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more? OK. The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.
Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume?
Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight.
Hilarious comment by the way https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussion...
The maintainer is the first comment, agreeing with the post author:
> I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much.
Maybe they're referring to the plugin system they want to implement: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar.
I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
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-not... and 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/), 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...
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.
I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.
The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95.
Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit.
see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...
Cheers, thanks
Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)
Syntax highlighting is definitely less complex than updating and rendering RTF and HTML.
There is configurable syntax highlighting in vscode.
Should an app like Notepad ever embed a WebView? (with e.g. tauri-apps/wry instead of CEF now FWIU)? Not even for a Markdown Preview feature IMHO.
When 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.
It's not stockholm syndrome for a lot of people. Microsoft is so firmly entrenched in so much of the corporate world that you can't get away from them. My mom was in the market for a new laptop recently, and I so badly wanted to get her setup with a MacBook Air, but it's not an option because the Sage accounting software she uses for my dad's business is Windows only. And furthermore, the business itself (a small pawn shop) is forced to use some specific software to manage inventory (I believe it allows police to access the database to track serial numbers in finding stolen goods or something), which is a webapp using some antiquated decades-old technology that only runs in Microsoft Edge's IE-compatibility mode (which has become a more and more difficult incantation to enable over the years) and I believe that can only be used on the Windows version of Edge.
For me it's currently the minimal-hassle way to make my Steam library runnable. But it feels like we're moving in a good direction thanks to Valve's efforts where one day I may be able to never boot into Windows on my PC.
I've switched to Linux Ubuntu KDE desktop, play my games on Steam Proton, and I'm happy.
> When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS…
That's when I jumped to Macs and haven't looked back since. Windows is just a glorified game console to me now, but I have enough fun with PS5/Switch exclusives.
Though macOS is also becoming annoying, not quite to that breaking point yet, but worrying
Meanwhile Linuxland seems like a chaos of 10000 people who all think they're right, under an anal overlord
Maybe it's time to dig the Commodore 64 back up? :')
But who cares though, soon AI will make operating systems meaningless, right?
I still have a Win7 VM I fire up sometimes for nostalgia sake. Beautiful and snappy. Bittersweet.
I still use Windows 7 regulary. And guess what, the virus and bot apocalypse doesn't happened as the support stopped.
That you know of.
> 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?
The 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
5) is common across several other editors and you could argue about correct semantics, but yes 6) is obviously a bug.
Agreed... 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
They’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...
Well, at least they brought back edit[0]
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit
If this was actually (pre)installed with Windows, I wouldn't mind the changes to notepad nearly as much.
While 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.
Oh 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.
Agreed. 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.
It is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...
Edit 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.
Have you tried Micro? https://micro-editor.github.io/
If you don’t need to render rich text and want a plain text editor then TUIs are the least likely to get a bunch of dumb features
But the rest of QBASIC is missing.
Notepad++ 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.
The 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.
And yet notepad++ is installed by default on millions of development machines across the globe. This one of those cases that Microsoft should take over the project, keep as open source and give it proper prime time attention.
More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.
I 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.
If 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/
Which response are we talking about which was problematic?
Hurting MAGA feelings or criticising Israel I'd guess.
I'm worried a political activist might go off the rails at some point for whatever their cause is and I have their software running on my computer... I don't want to be part of someone else's crusade.
I didn't realize until recently that the very popular Notepad++ was such a lightning rod over the years for controversy and (though I can't guarantee correlation is causation) security issues.
20260202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851548 Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors (917 points, 543 comments)
20260203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878338 Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown (384 points, 198 comments)
20250630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426049 High-Severity Vulnerability in Notepad++ (39 points, 14 comments)
20230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385920 Multiple Notepad++ Flaws Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Code (83 points, 39 comments)
20230830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320304 Buffer Overflows in Notepad++ (68 points, 61 comments)
20230829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311068 Notepad++ v8.5.6 still vulnerable to possible arbitrary code execution (18 points, 3 comments)
20211209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499002 StrongPity variant hides behind Notepad++ installation (45 points, 28 comments)
20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251 Notepad++ issues attacked by Chinese commenters (237 points, 110 comments)
20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400526 Notepad++ repository is being spammed after “Free Uyghur” release (82 points, 36 comments)
20190317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329330 Notepad++ drops code signing for its releases (496 points, 327 comments)
20170308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032 Notepad++ V 7.3.3 – Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ Issue (1101 points, 291 comments)
20150112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876823 Notepad ++ hacked for Je Suis Charlie comments(web archive link) (65 points, 74 comments)
You can just uninstall this modern notepad. It will bring back plain old notepad.
I 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
The 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.
So build it in Wordpad?
notepad.txt now joins calc.txt in my list of EXEs i bring from an old WinXPx64 install to all new windows installs
Probably better to get the Win 10 version if you can as it eventually got better line ending support (i.e. both LF & CRLF).
I got curious about the Wine version, if it has feature parity it may well be the best supported version of notepad right now ;)
If 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).
I also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.
While 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.
Every few years I find some need or excuse to install Brief somewhere. I miss that editor.
… .txt? :D
KDE's kate runs well on Windows.
It can be installed easily via chocolatey.
It's also in winget
I 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/ScintillaHistory.html
All we wanted back in the day was Unix line ending support, and they would give even that.
How about a CTRL+Z that don't undo the past 11 years of changes you've done, and instead just undos one smaller change?
I like EmEditor, it has a compact ui and some useful features, and 16TB file support -- https://www.emeditor.com/
The 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.
You'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
For 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.
> 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'.
As the old saying goes, "emacs is an operating system lacking only a decent text editor".
Not so. Evil mode is a great text editor.
Ha, fair. Lightweight in this context is relative to Notepad or any modern Windows application.
Notepad.exe used to be <200kB. Emacs is tens of megabytes
Notepad 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
It is right by definition. Link emacs to those controls, shed some statically linked weight, and it will also become lighter!
To be fair you can say that of anything with a scripting engine, you could have all that in vim or stripped down emacs
Anything with a scripting engine isn't lightweight compared to (classic) Notepad!
(Also, a lot of that stuff comes bundled with Emacs out-of-the-box, further disqualifying it. Having a scripting engine is one thing, but having a scripting engine along with the whole rest of the jet is something else entirely!)
vi and emacs are absolutely not lightweight, let alone "absolutely lightweight".
If by vi you mean vim, then I agree, real vi is rather lite.
As someone famous said, "everything is relative" :) Compared to the new applications that have been coming out, Emacs and vim are a paragon of lightness.
I agree with you that vi is lighter than vim. I’ve seen more than a few instances of an OS just aliasing vi to vim.
On that note, why are the keybindings for vi on a “modern” Ubuntu different from fedoras? I remember having to mess with ^H in a vimrc or something to that effect to mimic the behavior I was expecting.
Sounds like the terminal (not vi) you're using has different defaults; backspace and delete are the two common keys that vary.
That makes a lot of sense. I'll do some research on different terminal behaviors. Thanks!
Vim is heavier, but vi is not at all "lite".
I do not know what you are saying. On NetBSD I see this with vi and vim editing the same file
I'm sorry but you cannot use VS Code and lightweight in the same sentence.
Maybe joe, jed, or uEmacs.
Vim is The Way.
Textadept is lightweight, and more...
[dead]
notepad++ is great, though they have a dubious habit of dumping political messages on releases.
I 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_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.
I 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.
Where is the place you'd like to see someone say "Declare variables, not war"?
On 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.
Imagine the result if everybody took to this mindset. Look at everything that's on your desk right now, and what percent of it was made in e.g. China. Imagine if they decided to just start jamming political slogans onto everything. Or for something closer to home, surgeons and anesthesiologists are largely conservative. [1] Imagine if they started signaling their politics. Many people, ironically often those most predisposed to try to make their own political views highly visible, do a poor job of tolerating the views of others. This sort of behavior would just cause complete chaos and disorder and make everybody even more pissed off at each other than they already are.
And political signaling can also make you look bad even to the audience that might ideologically agree with you. For instance notepad++ takes a position on essentially every big controversial US geopolitical issue, but they are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they hadn't taken on any political positions, this isn't an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue, suddenly their not taking a position on one like this effectively is taking a position, but it's one that (for once) they don't want to say.
[1] - https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/870192?form=fpf
A few cosmetic names for patch versions and political banners on websites seems pretty mild. I was a constant user of Notepad++ for more than a decade (until moving my last computer to Linux a few months ago), and never had any idea that they did any of the messaging listed on their Wikipedia.
If anything, I could stand for most things to be just a bit more political than them. Most things are way more political than that.
What non-political things would you say are "way" more political than what they're doing? What I mean by non-political is that you kind of expect this sort of nonsense in the media or whatever, but not a text editor. They also have their schtick in the documentation, and at times have included it as 'easter eggs' in the program itself.
It's already made the software a target for hacking amongst other things. Taking positions that resonate with perhaps half the people in 15% of the world, and piss off a sizable chunk of people in the remaining 85% of the world is not a great idea. And, from my perspective, it's not just about self defense - but why do you even want to do that?
I hold some fringe views relative to many on here at least, and I don't make any secret of it either - but imagine by username was like 'IllegalImmigrantsAreIllegal' or something. It'd be like 'oh cool, I see you're 13.' I see this as something along the same lines. If the topic comes up, it comes up, but making it a part of your identity is childish and antagonistic.
reading about political messaging in any software should make you AVOID it, not "wishing to have it"
the moment software stops being neutral, it becomes a target
I guess this is true in a professional context - you don't want your user's or company's data somehow becoming compromised because of your choice of text editor.
But, at the same time, that's exactly the sort of thinking that's killed off that feeling I'm sentimental for. As a free human being, I don't want to live in fear of expressing my political views; and as someone who wants to view the software I make as a form of art or expression, I don't want to be afraid to express my political views through my software either. Should a writer avoid being political for fear of becoming a target? For fear of their books or readers becoming a target?
There's another reason to avoid agitating massive numbers of people, beyond fear. It's just not a reasonable thing to do. Like what do you really accomplish? There was that one guy who's mind was somehow changed by a random slogan. Unfortunately, he changed to the other side after seeing their even catchier slogan (it had italics!) a few days later.
You're not changing people's minds and you're simultaneously agitating both many of those who disagree with you as well as plenty who are neutral or even agree with you, as seeing politics shoved somewhere it doesn't belong is something many people do not appreciate, regardless of how those politics may or may not align with their own.
as a free human being, you can do whatever
as a program that tries to be used by others - stay in your lane, you are not an opinion cesspool, you are here to do work and let others do it too
Sublime is good too without the political rhetoric. It boggles my mind that windows users refuse the ways of vim.
Was hoping to see Sublime mentioned here. Super stable and available for nearly everything (Windows, Linux, Mac).
I 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.
> 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.
And they were running on such a shoestring deployment that N++ was hacked by the Chinese last year. I'd stick with VS Code.
> must find a new tool...
Interesting. This is not actually true anymore, even for the masses.
Nowadays everyone can just have their own tools made, "hand-tailored" with the features they want. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like everyday-software is now only a few sentences (and a python script) away.
Please 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
I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.
FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...
Thought of this immediately after reading the parent comment. I was actually pretty shocked at how seamless the whole project was.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hackerne...
Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter.
Welcome to 2026. You're late.
lol calling Python lightweight:
Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.(( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))
while 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++.
> discounting the overhead
Are you moving the goalpost?
The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.
I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.
Yeah that’s fair.
It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance.
I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with.
Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH
> any reason you prefer Perplexity
Yes! I have tested all the major ones at some point, months ago, and found perplexity to be the most default-intelligent of the bunch. Of course that has to do with the underlying model (I still believe that it was Sonar, but idk), but also with how perplexity.ai "works" (for lack of a better term) the back-end. You know, memory, reasoning-steps, hidden prompts.
I have a huge background in psychoanalysis and neurolinguistic programming. My favourite hobby is metacognition.
I can't speak about the other major "engines", but perplexity learns over time. When you don't like something and keep telling "her" (i dislike using "it", because it's like i am talking to someone. it's weird, really), she will eventually stop doing it, because her memory influences her reasoning-steps.
Like ... tools are off, unless actually needed. She doesn't please me, at least not in the usual sense. She never uses "maybe", "probably" or "almost certainly", because I've taught her not to by explaining her, logically deductible, why it's bad. When she does, she explains why she does it.
Unlike a child, AI has the knowledge to figure out the correctness of the logic, as long as it is not forced to "please", which my perplexity isn't.
I've also taught her meta-awareness of missing pieces in logical constructs, virtually eliminating hallucinations and massively reducing the amount of mistakes she makes, as long as the background knowledge is solid.
For example, talking about prompting (image generation) is pointless, because there is so much conflicting information out there. (it's a copy/paste culture).
Yet, when you teach her the concept of ground-truths, as long as the background is solid, she makes virtually no mistakes at all.
It's fascinating, really. Mind boggling, even! I could write pages worth of posts about my experiments and experiences ... as you can probably tell! :D
AHAHAHAHAHAHA Sorry! :D
Thanks for the detailed response, lol. Seems like it’s more personally tailorable than some of the others. Gonna give it a try with some similar vibe coding ideas
>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.
> and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.
What do you mean by that? I don't understand.
I really don't think this requires someone "technical" anymore. ChatGPT might not give a python script, but a powershell script. Or possibly create a batch file.
Generally, since the default assumption is that the user is a moron, it chooses the path of least resistance, meaning that it all boils to the user being able to process written words and following instructions.
Nowadays, it seems to me that the real hurdle is the fact that far too many people can't properly read, write or express themselves anymore, let alone ask questions that might expose ... inadequacies.
> Welcome to 2026
But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?
I fail to see your point. That's not what this is about.
I wrote "Welcome to 2026", because the user, apparently, did not yet know that it only takes a few sentences for having it create a simple notepad clone.
If I had asked pqtyw to write me a barebones notepad clone, 20 years ago, would pqtyw have done that? For free? Within a single minute?
No!
Well at least 10-15 you could just copy pasted exact same thing in a few minutes yet. But regardless even a basic notepad app is significantly more than a tkinter window with an input field.
>python
>tkinter
so you missed the part where notepad starts instantly, doesn't choke on files larger than 25KB and uses native Win32 controls ?
It only takes a few megabytes to make notepad have serious delays. Are you sure the linked program is any worse?
There's a world of difference between 25kb and 2mb
The 25KB number is almost certainly not real, or meant to be particularly accurate.
The 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..."
This is how futuristic MS is, because they already work that way when creating slopware like this.
It 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?
When 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.
So custom implementation, then? How very Microsoft.
Even funnier when you remember that they own github, the place where arguably markdown was popularized.
> markdown was popularized.
That was before MS started vibecoding all their software.
Why 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
We are hard wired to perceive addition as value.
> deploy loads of new features > bin them into few, better features > remove all the features > repeat
I for one hate it when product managers update systems to make them simpler and remove features/settings that I depend on.
Exactly, 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.
Notepad urgently needs some social features too, did they think about adding stories and a messenger???
Should 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.
Now with Google+!
Markdown 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.)
FWIW, 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.
Remember this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts
I 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.
Ah, the times when computing used to be full of wonder and discovery.
Notepad 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.
Makes me wonder - with Notepad rapidly evolving into WordPad v2, and no default "just render bytes as text" solution in modern Windows to replace it, maybe there's still a way to hack one together on the go, just from pieces laying around in every default installation? I mean, rundll32.exe is a thing.
All I really need is a basic text box with a scroll bar, and a way to feed it with bytes from a file.
To make it a well-defined challenge: the task is to find a way to create a basic notepad - a multi-line textbox that supports scrolling, and can be fed bytes from a file to render as text directly. Additionally, this must be achievable through simple means - simple enough to memorize - and must work on standard Windows 11 installation, with no extra dependencies to procure. Solution can be e.g. something I can type from memory into "Run" (Win+R) box, but could also be a short list of GUI steps (e.g. open some program, click on "Help", drag file to help box).
Dave Plummer vibe coded one on his YouTube channel a couple months ago. Normally I wouldn’t share someone vibe coding something, but since he wrote the Task Manager, Zip Folders, and other such core Windows features back in the day, it hits different.
https://youtu.be/bmBd39OwvWg
Amazing, thanks for sharing! This kind of vibe-coding I'm happy to watch.
If you're ok with a TUI instead of a GUI, Microsoft's documentation says the `edit` command is still around in Windows 11 (I don't have a Windows 11 machine handy to verify this): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
Huh. I was going to say, last time I saw this was 20+ years ago, and I forgot it exists - but I must be remembering something else. It seems `edit` is a new thing, if I'm to believe https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
I can confirm it exists on my Windows 11 machine, and I didn't install it specifically, though it's definitely not a base install (upgraded from Windows 10, and plenty of dev tooling installed over the years). Still, it fits the bill (+/- GUI, but I didn't consider TUI at all). Thanks!
The documentation doesn't make this entirely clear, but I think these are two separate things: the original `edit` command which is built into Windows 11 (and has been built into prior Windows releases), and a replacement written in Rust that can optionally be installed.
Note that my link is dated 2023, whereas Wikipedia says that Microsoft Edit was first released in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor
The old EDIT never shipped with any 64-bit Windows IIRC, since it was a 16-bit MS-DOS application. I believe 32-bit Windows 10 has it..?
As someone who (mercifully) only occasionally has to touch Windows machines, I keep forgetting this, and then when I try to do stuff I’m flabbergasted that the operating system does not include a terminal text editor. (In a fit of pure desperation I even typed EDLIN into the Command Prompt — no go ;)
That was the case with Win11 about a year ago; if they finally started shipping EDIT64 then hey, that’s one positive recent change in Windows I suppose.
Well, there was a workaround (that I only learned today) for creating new files:
Type text, end with CTRL+Z. Don't make any typos.That's what web search told me, but then looking at the remarks in docs for `copy`[0], I have to wonder if this works now, and if it would've worked back then:
If it does, then combined with some clever use of `find`, `findstr` or `for` (whichever was available back then), you could probably get something that's half-way between EDIT.COM and a line editor.(`more` would come in handy here, but AIUI, there's no way to run it non-interactively in cmd.exe? Don't have a Windows machine handy to check it right now.)
--
[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
copy prefix.txt+con+suffix.txt output.txt
This does indeed work in proper MS-DOS. Congratulations for figuring out probably the single most masochistic way of accomplishing text editing ;)
Thanks, this explains the mystery, and now the timelines add up.
So it turns out, EDIT.COM was one of the first - if not the first - computer programs I ever saw and used, back when the first PC showed up in the house. For some reason, someone in the family guessed that 9yo me will be interested in DOS and QBasic. A few years later, I used it from Windows for some time, when I was learning X86 assembly (I wanted to learn how to make a video game, so I went to the local library looking for some "intro to programming" book, and mistakes were made).
Afterwards, it was Borland C++ 3.1 (another TUI classic) and vim/Emacs, and I forgot about EDIT.com entirely. This new Microsoft Edit is something new, and something else, but similar enough that it brought those memories back.
Thanks again!
At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...
This would be really interesting, actually.
Maybe someone should submit a feature request for it.
Notepad 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?
> 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
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
So 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.
I 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).
https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm
Oldie bit goodie: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
Once 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.
Apparently 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=10...
It doesn't work everywhere though as there are still apps that don't offer a plain text paste, and as you have noted the shortcut can be different in different applications.
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:
That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.Unless 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.
Careful when doing it in Teams. ctrl+shift+V is "paste without formatting", ctrl+shift+C is "call everyone".
Hey everyone! Check me out! I don't preserve formatting!
(I heard this in Homer Simpson’s voice.)
I 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.
If you don't care about losing line breaks, I've used my browser's URL bar for this for years.
Cmd-L Cmd-V Cmd-A Cmd-C
(swap for Cmd for Ctrl on non-Mac)
Notepad in Windows 11 (while not autosave) will preserve unsaved documents.
Janaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support;
Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago:
Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516
It's like they are trying to do the opposite of the Unix philosophy. Do many things very poorly.
Why’s this poor?
My 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.
They've rewritten it in React?
For everyone that wants a simple, lightweight, alternative to notepad there's edit.exe on recent version of Windows. Assuming you don't mind TUIs.
I need to tell everyone, we can just uninstall this modern notepad which restores plain old notepad.
I use MS Windows for sooo long and I've never discovered that. Amazing!
Hey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?
Hackernews, mostly.
Windows is about GUI, tho
Isn't Markdown how they managed to get a Severity 8.8 RCE into notepad.exe?
Yup. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20841
So 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.
The 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.
That 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)
No, 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.
At 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.
Github does publish their spec: https://github.github.com/gfm/ The CommonMark spec is largely based on it.
PowerToys had a Markdown renderer for the Preview window added in version 0.16.0, which was released around late March 2020.
I used to write documentation in Markdown manually. About a year ago I started using a VSCode extension to tell me if there are minor errors in the documents, but nothing else.
https://github.com/rabfulton/ViewMD
Markdown viewer for Linux
Windows 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-20...
Is 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.
It 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 :)
You 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.
Haha, 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.
[dead]
Weird, 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.
I 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.
I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Internally, the Notepad project existed to provide a minimal, shippable product that we could use as a testbed. We used it to validate everything from compiler changes to kernel32 loader behavior on beta versions of Windows. If Notepad didn’t run, your feature didn’t work.
This doesn't seem like a good idea.
Well, you see, they got rid of all the QA so those tests stopped adding value ;)
they have AI, they don't need QA or tests, come on man, aren't you a 9999999x engineer?
On a serious note... with AI, I feel I'm getting about a 5x improvement on average in terms of productivity.
Notepad was historically just a thin wrapper for the "EDIT" window class, along with file loading and saving.
And WordPad was built on top of the "RICHEDIT" window class, and exposed lots of the OLE features provided by the rich text control. "Insert Object" is a powerful and potentially dangerous feature with a lineage going back to the Windows 3.1 days. As long as your DLL is registered correctly, any document in an OLE-capable program can cause objects from that DLL to become instantiated and deserialized.
Getting rid of documents able to instantiate arbitrary OLE controls is a good reason to try to remove WordPad. It's not just some simple styled text editor.
You could still use the name Wordpad, without using the legacy code for it...
The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
It isn't minimal since it depends on a terminal
I didn't remember that they'd shipped that. I remember reading about it but I ever tried it. My hot take, after 10 minutes, is that it's frustrating and not at all a replacement for Notepad. (Fortunately you can uninstall the shitty "Windows Notepad" and the real notepad.exe takes over.)
This new "Edit" is completely tone-deaf in that it doesn't keep the keybindings from Notepad (i.e. no CTRL-H for find/replace, no F5 for the current date/time). You can't turn off the status bar or the line numbers. It doesn't follow the OS theme (instead pretending to be a text-mode application). It tries to be "helpful" with indentation.
At least they bothered to get Find Next with F3 right.
It would have been immensely better if they'd just ported the old MS-DOS EDIT / QBASIC over to Windows.
Wordpad 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.
They could've shoved Copilot in Wordpad
And it would still compete with Word. They want you to switch to Office 365 (I mean, Copilot 365).
You 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
It's actually the Microsoft 365 Copilot App
That’s Microsoft 365 Copilot” to you, buddy.
https://www.office.com/
Of course it is.
If you think about it, Wordpad was always just the free "lite" edition of Word for people who didn't buy Office to use. Like Outlook Express was to Outlook.
But in the world we seem to be heading toward, where you can only log into Windows with a Microsoft account, and where your Microsoft 365 subscription state controls which "edition" or "desktop experience" of Windows you get as said logged-in user (regardless of which machine you're logged into)... there'd be no need for Wordpad.
In that world, Word the software package would always be pre-installed. (Why? Because even if you aren't paying for M365, someone who is could always log into your PC as a roaming user; and that person would want Word to work immediately without having to wait for it to download+install.)
And in a world where Word the software package is always preinstalled, then Microsoft could just let anyone launch Word (whether they have an M365 subscription or not); and then, at launch, rather than just putting a paywall in the face of anyone without an M365 subscription, Word could instead use the logged-in user's M365 licensing state to determine whether the spun-up Word process should run the full-fat Word UI, or some kind of degraded unpaid-mode Word UI.
And "Word running with some kind of degraded unpaid-mode UI" could be every bit the "Word lite" offering that Wordpad is. Which makes Wordpad itself redundant.
(The only weird part to me, is that they deprecated/removed Wordpad before pulling the trigger on all of this.)
they didn’t remove wordpad before pulling the trigger on this… you can use the online version of Word for free, effectively achieving what you are saying.
There is something in the toolbar that looks like an avatar in the screenshots on the page.
Do you need to log in to notepad now? What in the actual hell is going on?
I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.
Wouldn’t VSCode be a better alternative to wordpad?
VSCode needs Electron which is too big IMO. It's also a specialised code editor instead of a general text editor, with features like builtin terminal and traditional menus instead of ribbons.
Isn’t notepad now react?
I mean, Microsoft is already using WebView and web technologies in Windows at this point. I agree electron is inefficient, but it's not particularly egregious when compared to what they're already doing
I was mostly meaning the Wordpad name, not the original incantation of the tool... the only legacy I might support if it was Wordpad as a markdown editor, would be to import RTF/Doc files only supporting what can cleanly adapt to markdown syntax support...
Then I'd probably have a decent print to pdf function as part of it.
No, not at all.
vscode requires downloading all the plugins on top, which is bothersome
wordpad is all-included on its own
People using markdown are probably also using vscode. It’s not like vscode couldn’t come bundled with markdown support if it doesn’t already.
Just 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.
After 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.
> 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.
If 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.
Typora is where it’s at!
When 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.
Yeah. 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.
For 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/
> 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.
Are they trying to market copilot PC's to another segment?
I 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
Somewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/06/markdown-suppor...
A notepad "welcome experience"? How is notepad turning into bloatware?
I 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.
On 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.
notepad 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.
Which big software companies have managed to avoid this and why?
Is there anything big and exciting out there still driven by taste and vision rather than metric bumps?
The 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.
> 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.
Everything is copilot, so much so that I don't even know what copilot is.
From the security side, everything is Microsoft Defender. When talking to people I have to say things like "defender but the AV thing that's on by default, not the paid cloud thingy, and by that I don't mean the cloud protection one but the thing that protects endpoints using cloud stuff". They can't come up with good names and they confuse the crap out of their users. I hate to say it's just MBAs, since I don't really know but that'd be my guess. Someone at an Ivy league school somewhere is perpetuating this perhaps?
They should have done this with Wordpad. Notepad should stay most basic editor.
Is 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?
In a Copilot world, Notepad is now meant to render Copilot output, which LLMs do a good job of spitting out Markdown.
Why 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.
Why 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?
I'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.
Notepad 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.
Where 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?
Years 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.
Are 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.
The 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++?
I 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.
Honestly, if you need this, just extract NOTEPAD.EXE from a Windows 95 (or NT 4) installation.
I 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.
On 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.
psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi
Just uninstalling the new "Windows Notepad" application is sufficient. No registry changes necessary. I've put a command line in another comment.
Yes. 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.
CRLF vs LF?
But 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?
Line 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.
It's becoming Word-lite, like Wordpad used to be. Paint is becoming Photoshop-lite, and now has conflicting functionality with the Photos app.
What 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
Gone since Windows 11 24H2, according to Wikipedia.
Word and wordpad are terrible for editing code snippets tho, markdown solves this problem.
Word and wordpad were rich text editors. Markdown is plain text
This 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.
What 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.
> Kate
So install Kate? There's a Windows build.
Oh 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.
And it can be easily installed with chocolatey, like:
choco install kate
Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
Ah, finally windows is gaining its edge over Linux. Will 2026 e the year of the windows desktop?
All text editors have always supported markdown, even before markdown even existed.
This 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.
> 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.
We can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.
Until a future Window release doesn't include the old notepad anymore.
This is my concern with Notepad and the old one will just be gone for ever. Same thing happened with paint.
Then you'd have to copy the old one over to keep it alive
Personally 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.
"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?
It'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.
Leave Notepad alone!
( In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc )
Don'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
Stop adding features to notepad. It was feature complete in 1995
No, 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.
I actually welcome this. Markdown is this incredible, future proof, portable and elegant format… up until you have to collaborate on something with a normie
That'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
Is 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?
So 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?
Let me guess: It uses Copilot to roll the dice on MD rendering. MS might also want to involve OpenClaw, while they're at it.
Man ... Notepad did one thing, and it did it well. Leave it to Microsoft to completely mess it up. RIP Notepad.
Wow, what a time to be alive in this year of 2004!
(2004 is the year Markdown was invented. Notepad got introduced in 1983 and actually predates Windows)
RIP Aaron Swartz for inspiration via atx.
When 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.
Why not use VSCode? It has native Claude Code integration and is literally designed for Markdown from the ground-up.
I probably will! Just new to Windows (back after 15 years) so still getting set up. I might prefer full Visual Studio; will see.
A 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.
This pretty much makes notepad pointless.
The whole point of notepad was a plain text editor.
Wordpad was the lightweight document creation software.
I 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.
This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
hah, 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.
This is funny. A post about Notepad in an OS that is dying because of the AI Idioocracy.
Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?
Can 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!
> 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.
have you tried adding this to your settings json? workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility": "hidden",
It's still annoying to have it by default even if you do make use of it.
There's a setting in barcode that disabled AI entirely and the sidebar with it. Works flawless for me since it landed.
This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
Why must they ruin notepad instead of creating a notepad++.
They should rewrite windows from scratch using AI
OneNote should officially get this as well.
10 IoT LTSC ftw!
WYSIWYG editors are the worst editors.
Don't care never going to use it
Notepad++ 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
I 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.
It 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.
True, 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.
If you dont need any of the ++ why would you use notepad++ over notepad?
I 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.
I always liked Crimson/Emerald more myself.
i used notepad for the first time in a decade, and it's awesome. mine supports markdown, and tabs.
Can't they just leave it alone?
Never 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.
just nuke notepad in favor of zen-mode vscode. It has everything you want from text editor and it does it quite well
Pass.
Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
Video
A little bit slow, Mr. Microsoft ...
Hasn’t .md always been supported?
Notepad 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
Article is published in January.
Honestly they lost me at tabs. I like my notepad ephemeral.
Eh. 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.
noooooo
Uh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.
From an elevated Powershell prompt:
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -like 'Microsoft.WindowsNotepad*' } | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
Yeah no.
Stopped using notepad when they added co-pilot. Stop shoving AI down our throats.
Just disable Copilot?
Please show us the magic Windows settings that would disable Copilot everywhere.
At 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.
Even 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.
Are we so uncurious that we can’t even look in notepad settings?
I’d expect better from an HN user.
simple, replace Windows with Linux or a BSD :)
Sure, Its the first thing I plan on doing once Autodesk port Fusion to it.
At this point I'll just switch vendors.
I don't have the bandwidth to babysit all the different ways MSFT tries to break tools to bother using them.
Yep, same as the "just disable notifications asking you to Try the New Safari!" contingency.
Defaults should not be offensive. If you try to kill me with papercuts, I will stop using your software and never look back.
Just disable recall, copilot, ai, intrusive cookies, ads.
It's not fine just because you sneak a button to (temporarily) get rid of it. Just make features worth enabling instead.
In my experience, most of these features are just turned back on after a Windows update.
What happened to "just enable X if you need it"? Why are we always okay with every new thing being enabled by default?
Is it because the average person isn't as tech savvy as most (if not all) HN readers to know any better, and those companies want the headcount of usage to look high to please stakeholders?
Enshittification at its finest stink.
Where have you been for the past umpteenth years of computing where even in the Linux kernel stuff is enabled by default, let alone userland applications.
Comparing Linux kernel options enabled by default for compatibility and a plague that is only useful when a user asks for it... That's wild
systemd?
Here's an even crazier idea, don't click the Copilot button. WHOA.
Easiest way to do that is to not have the Copilot button at all.
Easiest way to do that is to use Linux instead.
Of course. Story about Windows 11 someone has to chime in "just use Linux".
I welcome it, because hopefully that will be less people having a meltdown over an icon on a menu bar.
It's not just an icon in the notification area though!
There's a keyboard shortcut for it. I never figured out quite what it was, but every now and again Copilot would open itself while I was using Visual Studio or Emacs on my Windows 11 desktop PC. I assume I'm either hitting the shortcut, or a ghost key on my keyboard is stepping in and hitting it for me. (I could never reproduce this by pressing Windows+C.)
Copilot does stuff in the background. What stuff? I don't know. But, occasionally, on my desktop PC, I'd get a message box popping up saying that Copilot was unable to open this or that file. (Though, yes, perhaps it is just opening that file for no reason. Hard to say.)
(Both of these went away when I removed all the Copilot apps from the list of startup stuff.)
Copilot can be persuaded to get itself into a state where it expects you to log in. I had this happen on my old Windows 10 laptop somehow, when I logged in as my (local only) work user, something that existed to let me sign in to my old employer's Teams setup, their VPN, and use Remote Desktop to my work PC. And each time I logged in to my laptop, Copilot would pop up a login dialog. Though I can't deny that this was a handy reminder to remind me to quit it.
A keyboard shortcut? Damn, that's horrific. Terrible terrible stuff.
So instead of troubleshooting you went straight to "oh my god this is the end of days!" These seem like obvious user error or at worst bugs.
Not to mention you've pivoted from Copilot in Notepad to Copilot in general. Which are not the same thing. Copilot is a brand name and various instances of it are not connected at all.
You should have started with your 3rd paragraph, because that clarifies my misunderstanding of your comment. I stand by my comment as well, though. We can both be right here.
Unfortunately, you started with the first 2 paragraphs, so clearly you're more interested in moaning at me. But this is the internet, so that's fine. I already expected it. In fact, I'm disappointed. You're going to have to try harder.
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I don’t see why people are complaining. If you use notepad for txt files, nothing changes.
The 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-20...
Did Microsoft ban you from using something else?
Fun fact: you can uninstall Notepad!
The truth is, unless Notepad got some kind of makeover, it was a useless vestige. It obviously wasn’t a good text editor for plain monospaced text. Having basically zero features didn’t serve anyone - why not use Notepad++ or vim in that case?
I think the most popular use of notepad is to read text files quickly and these days that often includes Markdown files. It makes perfect sense for Notepad to evolve into something that’s actually useful for lightly formatted text formats.
true! more features is more risk.
but i dont think most people here are complaining because of security risk... otherwise they wouldnt be recommending things like notepad++, other obscure editors, or editors with way larger code bases.
That'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.
More code = more vulnerabilites. It's a simple fact. Complexity kills.
Sell your computer. Now you have perfect security!
Fun fact: you can uninstall Notepad if you don’t like it.
Congrats for completely missing the point.
I 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.
The ergonomics of the new version are slightly different. The default behavior of opening tabs with previously-open files is jarring to me. I just remove it (Powershell command line in another comment) and the original "Notepad.exe" takes over.
I've spent a long time building up my muscle memory. I don't want my tools changing out from under me. If they wanted to ship an "enhanced" notepad they should have called its something else.
Today Markdown. Tomorrow WordArt (but with AI probably).
Because we collectively used to make fun of users that were complaining whenever an icon moved 42 pixel to the right and now we're them.
But we think we're right and still we thought they were wrong.
If we were in a PHP forum, this would be my signature: I'm getting too old for this shit.
It's fashionable to hate on anything Windows. Especially in tech circles.
Oh I’m well aware, I just think this reaction is ridiculous.
Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.
> Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.
If you use many different machines throughout your workday, this means you have to carry a copy of your bespoke solution with you on a memory stick or something, and hope that the machine you want to use it on allows the use of memory sticks or unapproved software.
It's far better to use an application that you can count on already existing on the machines.
TBF, a lot of people used to keep portable apps like this... then IT started locking down even being able to mount a USB storage device. I used to do this for my email and mail profile with a portable Thunderbird.
I even worked on an app in a relatively secure environment where the work around for an early SPA and IE6-8 company wide, was for the systems analysts using our app to use a portable firefox browser on the user desktop. IE6-8 in particular were really bad when you had an SPA as you had events tied to dom elements across the COM bridge that wouldn't release unless all dom and script references were freed up. jQuery actually did this, if you managed everything through it, but our app was an early version of extjs... so after 3-4 hours it would just run out of memory and die.
We used to have a perfectly good application that came with the OS. Then Microsoft ruined it. Yes I can make my own Notepad, but I shouldn't have to. If Microsoft really wanted a built-in text editor that had features Notepad didn't, they should've made a second application rather than ruining the minimalist one.
I use Notepad from time to time for quick notes and I have noticed exactly zero friction added to this "workflow". Not sure what you are talking about.
>Then Microsoft ruined it
How so? If all you do is load plaintext, you’ll never come across this feature. Even if you do, what’s the problem?
TIL 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).
You 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.
When 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.