Weird, it already does at my work computer since months which aren't exactly first to get the latest updates.
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 formatting options that they're now giving Notepad.
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 to WinUI.
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 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.
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.
The new outlook 'features' are built in Javascript and not integrated at all with the rest of outlook. This is because they laid off all the older more expensive staff who knew C++ and replaced them with new cheaper diverse staff that only know Javascript.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
They’re turning Notepad into what Wordpad was (or was supposed to be). Now everyone looking for the light weightiest *.txt editor must find a new tool...
Oh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.
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!)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
Markdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: binary WYSIWYG. I.e. if I type in some plain text and then open the file with anything else (including after moving to another machine/platform, or even viewing raw data stream in transit or on drive), I can trust to see that text, as is, and nothing else. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence.
FWIW, Notepad has had support for BoM detection and wide-characters (UTF-16/UCS-16) for some while. That said, IMO, most simple editors at this point should default to UTF-8 encoding and only LF for line endings.
I think the Real Bug™ here comes from product-management: Nobody should be taking this kind of stochastic guess process and then just... 100% trusting the outcome with no feedback to the user and no way for the user to correct bad guesses.
For example, a prompt when opening the file like: "It's unclear what kind of data this is, here are a few options with a preview, pick which one you'd like me to use."
Annoying, but them's the breaks when you're making software and aren't willing to put in hard requirements about what it is expected to (not) operate on.
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.
Exactly, this is why I want notepad to be as simple as possible. I rely on it. The W11 notepad is frustrating and useless if all I want to do is open a file. I wish they would fix notepad by pushing whatever version was shipped in w10 as the default.
notepad 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.