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.
> 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.
> * 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
I don’t know what sort of insane nerd echo chamber you have to be in to think that MBA-ification means “adding rich text editing features to a text editor”.
You’ve heard legitimate complaints about “MBAs” but very clearly lack the knowledge to identify those problems on your own.
> "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 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.
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.
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?
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..."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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'.
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!)
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> * 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.
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?
Well this is what we call it opportunity cost
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
I believe notepad was originally just a demo of the multi line edit control. Feature creep.
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.
This pretty much makes notepad pointless.
The whole point of notepad was a plain text editor.
Wordpad was the lightweight document creation software.
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...)
Good that they have realized the power of raw texts thanks to LLMs.
This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
Agreed.
Notepad's got Markdown, it's what LLMs crave.
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
Me, too. Oh my god, I might be an LLM.
Thank god notepad is finally useable now
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
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.
Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
I don’t know what sort of insane nerd echo chamber you have to be in to think that MBA-ification means “adding rich text editing features to a text editor”.
You’ve heard legitimate complaints about “MBAs” but very clearly lack the knowledge to identify those problems on your own.
> "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.
I liked having a simple plain text editor
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.
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.
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.
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?
So custom implementation, then? How very Microsoft.
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..."
A notepad "welcome experience"? How is notepad turning into bloatware?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)...
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
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.
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
Textadept is lightweight, and more...
KDE's kate runs well on Windows.
It can be installed easily via chocolatey.
It's also in winget
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 ;)
Every few years I find some need or excuse to install Brief somewhere. I miss that editor.
I also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.
… .txt? :D
Vim is The Way.
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.
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!)
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
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!
I'm sorry but you cannot use VS Code and lightweight in the same sentence.
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.
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 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)
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?
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.
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?
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
>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!
>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.
This is funny. A post about Notepad in an OS that is dying because of the AI Idioocracy.
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.
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
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...
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 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.
Notepad in Windows 11 (while not autosave) will preserve unsaved documents.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/rabfulton/ViewMD
Markdown viewer for Linux
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.
"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?
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
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?
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.
The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...
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.
Hey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?
Hackernews, mostly.
Windows is about GUI, tho
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?
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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
They should rewrite windows from scratch using AI
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.
Stop adding features to notepad. It was feature complete in 1995
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?
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 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.
Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Can't they just leave it alone?
This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
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
Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?
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.
Why must they ruin notepad instead of creating a notepad++.
10 IoT LTSC ftw!
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.
This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
A little bit slow, Mr. Microsoft ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Leave Notepad alone!
( In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc )
i used notepad for the first time in a decade, and it's awesome. mine supports markdown, and tabs.
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? 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.
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.
Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
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.
Video
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
noooooo
Uh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
FUCK MICROSOFT.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Today Markdown. Tomorrow WordArt (but with AI probably).
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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.