Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options Microsoft is updating Notepad again. The latest indignity for the veteran Windows text wrangler? Text formatting. I do not understand why Microsoft cannot leave well enough alone and just let Notepad be a very lightweight and streamlined note taking app Windows used to have an editor with formatting functionality, an …
Since the cancer definitely dies with the host, I think you may just have contradicted yourself.
You were, I imagine, thinking of a parasite rather than a cancer. Now it may be that an obsesssion with adding features is a parasitic mentality that has parasitised Microsoft, but that's a whole other discussion.
The fact that one obscure, tangential reference to 'surviving' cancer cells exists doesn't negate the point that under practically all circumstances, a cancer dies with the host and thus does not have "survival" encoded into the genetic makeup.
PS thanks for the ref though. I learned something today.
Awesome idea, and if once you copy pasted anything beyond text into the document, the formatting it mangled wasn't undone when you hit undo. OOOh and if you are given a document that used some form of theme, making any change should be a byzantine order of hierarchies that defy any logic.
Love Notepad++ ... use it to keep text in that is too much effort to save but might want to keep.
Notepad I also used as a scratchpad hence the new new notepad with tabs and stuff is way too much advanced and remembers tabs, this is not what I want from my temp scratch pad.
Notepad that does pure MD is also a welcome addition. Im sure MS will cock it up.
About a million years ago due for Notepad's <64K on non-NT systems I think I switched to Textpad.
Later I switched to Notepad++ on XP. Notepad was too basic. Just plain text, bit optional syntax and ability to have MS or UNIX line ends.
That even worked on WINE on Linux, but later I changed to KATE on Linux.
MS has lost the plot. I have an almost never used Win10 laptop, Win7 tower and VMs with XP, Win7 & Win10 on Linux Mint. Only the XP VM gets any (occasional) usage.
It's been a downward slide for MS since 2003. Their update system is stupid and occasionally broken. For 26 years my Linux updates just work. Only reboot for Kernel updates, and when ever it suits. No 15 minute wait on shutdown or boot due to an update (Win10 does), but near instant shutdowns and boots of Linux Mint.
No no no. They're trying to get rid of control.exe and replace it with the abomination that is "Settings"
Sometimes you have to fight quite hard to get to the relevant control panel section to do the bits that you need to do and Settings completely omits. Print drivers, I'm looking at you.
which given with the enforced windows 11 "notepad" AI that reads all your text et cetera simply points me further down the path of linux. Endeavour OS should be good for gaming I hear.
Slightly sad to move off from windows long-term, however forcing AI stuff on people, reading your screen all the time and more, plus making notepad pointless, is just too muchl.
1. Hate for decades, try to kill off for decades, fail for decades.
2. Change of tactic:
a) Embrace: yay, we're keeping it folks, we hear you!
b) Extend: yay, we're making it even better - with the formatting that you all miss from Worpad, plus the latest buzzword blockchain I mean AI!.
c) Extinguish: yay, to give you an even better experience we're adding virtual colored pencils to the plain-text view, so you can still see that lovely markdown and highlight it while sharing your page on Teams. What? And we've made both OneNote and SharePoint 100% compatible* with the new version! What's that? Did we omit to mention that /editing/ in the plain-text view has disappeared? Look, if you're that hardcore, we've given you Edit on the command line, so everybody's got what we they wanted. Yay!
* Except where they aren't and never will be
The Windows dev team at Microsoft must be working together to figure out exactly which parts of Windows still work and that people actually like. And then they work non-stop to destroy those things completely. Just grind it into dust under their heel because... because "fuck the users" I guess?
"figure out exactly which parts of Windows still work "
Might be a big ask as I am not sure that even the BSOD still works.
The could've should've and MS in general reminded me of a mug emblazoned with the distinctions between the likes of you're and your that were crudely stated but being a Chinese knock off had a typo thier for their and mixed up one of the definitions but to their credit not one f*cking was omitted; The latter trait one suspects is shared with corporate MS.
(The mug in the linked image isn't so affected.)
I don’t think it would be too hard for them to have a simple menu option where the new stuff could be switched off and notepad operates in legacy mode.
Of course it means a notepad.ini or a registry key but it could only need those for the new mode. If those are absent it could just default start in legacy mode.
Also have the new functionality in a lazy-loaded dynamically linked .dll with no dependency.
The trouble with that is, half of Notepad's value is in its ubiquity. No matter whose Windoze box you're working on today or how tightly locked down it may be, you can rely on Notepad.
What you're proposing amounts to splitting Notepad into multiple applications, which will work differently from each other. Bye bye, value.
This is what happens when you have a large organisation, focussed on "continuous improvement".
After a while, you get to the point where the OS, app or whatever, has been improved to the point of near perfection. But you need to keep coming out with new, "improved" versions to keep the revenue coming in. So you do things like...introducing a new UI, or enshittifying an otherwise useful product.
It's never been about the users. It's about the companies. That is the only way they keep being relevant. That's why we have Teams, and Outlook, and Excel...
And now with Copilot, it can access all of that for a more copiloty experience across the ecosystem. And Cortana wept.
Micros~1: We're adding 'dark mode' and multi-level undo to Notepad.
OK, that's nice? I guess?
Micros~1: We're adding tabs to Notepad.
Mmmmkayyy... Could be handy. Should anyone need it...
Micros~1: We're adding spell checking to Notepad.
Errr... Why?
Micros~1: We're adding AI to Notepad.
NO! ARE YOU FSCKING INSANE? BAD MICROS~1!
Micros~1: We're adding formatting options to Notepad.
AW, FSCK OFF! Just resurrect Wordpad and leave the poor little tool alone!
By the way, I decided to use their new edit.exe to make a first draft for this comment (and check it to see if it can be a useful tool in these crAIzy times) and when I tried to copy/paste it seems that it doesn't play well (read: at all) with the clipboard. At least in Win10.
I tried [Highlight] > [Ctrl-C] > [Ctrl-v]
Didn't work.
I tried [Highlight] > [Alt-E] > [Select Copy] > [Ctrl-V]
Didn't work.
I tried [Highlight] > [Alt-E] > [Select Copy] > [Right-Click] > [Paste]
Didn't work.
I tried [Highlight] > [Right-Click] > [Copy] > [Right-Click] > [Paste]
Didn't work.
I can be a stubborn barsteward, but even I know when to give up. So I just saved the file, opened it in Notepad++ and just Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V into the comment editor.
Though I'm not giving up. I still think EDIT.EXE could be a nice addition to my toolbox.
Maybe I was just using it wrong.
I'm not against all changes, so long as it improves it as a basic text editor. For example, the ability to manage line endings or file encoding is fine. These are partially supported already. At a push, I wouldn't mind marking spelling errors - optionally!
I don't want it to be an advanced text editor. There is already plenty of choice for that, including from Micros~1.
Always installed and simple means it can always be relied upon.
I use an editor named Typora. It is a markdown editor, and liaises with pandoc to import and export Word files. The MS-enhanced-notepad seems to be doing something similar.
I find it useful for cleaning up a Word document without losing italics, headings, etc.
But Typora uses one specific markdown. It may crumble if presented with markdown from direct use of pandoc or elsewhere.
I don't think they want to bugger up Markdown. They chose it precisely because it saved them the trouble.
Makes it easier for them to design their own Microsoft Markdown (TM), which will allow proprietary binary extensions to be included, data island / email image style, and then get it ratified as an "open" standard. The default for Notepad 2028, natch. I/O filters available at extra cost.
Remember who owns, and by extension [sic], controls GitHub and GitHub Flavored Markdown, and may or may not have a vested interest in making that the one variant to rule them all…
(Other flavours of Markdown are available - it would genuinely be nice if there were just one proper standard (and hopefully non-evil) version, but, well, we all know how that goes.)
As has been said, should have just kept wordpad AND (a proper basic version) notepad.
Notepad is handy due to ability to strip formatting (too many windows apps (esp MS ones) when you paste something in, retain any existing formatting which is often inappropriate) so an oft used intermediate on copy and paste actions. *
Wordpad was fine for basic formatted documents, & vaguely useful as it supported a simple RTF format (which was occasionally useful as used to be a few C# visual components that supported RTF to allow text with a bit of basic layout such as mix of bold, italic & normal text in "one textbox" (may still be that functionality present, a long time since I did a Windows GUI app))
* Windows is work use, not home use.
RTF is still useful for sending out unbloated lightly formatted text that can be opened by all of the word processors out there (or that copy of the wordpad exe that accidentally slips onto newer Windows installs).
Just give the file a .doc extension, the program's can figure out the rest for themselves and the recipient's needn't bother themselves with why your attachments are so much less bulky than theirs.
once got a script to run in a terminal window on a mac. wouldn't run as it had been edited on a pc. notepsd++ has an option to convert line endings to mac, unix or pc. open the file on a flash drive, convert line endings to mac move flash to mac run script. took longer to figure out why the script wouldn't run in the first place. wouldn't think the official file from ITS for turning a non managed mac to a managed mac would be messed up that way.
Notepad's big failing was that it assumed DOS formatting and would display everything allononelineifithadLinuxorMac line endings (solution: open in Wordpad if Notepad++ not available)
Wordpad's RTF was handy for annotating log files to highlight the errors or for creating quick'n'dirty documents that could be loaded without waiting 5mins for Word to load
"Wordpad was fine for basic formatted documents, & vaguely useful as it supported a simple RTF format"
I thought the whole reason for retiring Wordpad was deprecation of RTF. The sensible thing would have been to retain it - or even reintroduce it - as a Markdown <spit> editor if that's what they want.
Not enough to contend with the stupid EOL CR/LF in notepad, now we're having to deal with bold and italics. And that dumb " nonsense where it looks the same but isn't.
I suppose they'll say use that new edit replacement if you want a super basic text editor. Then they'll bugger that up too.
Bah Microsoft. Notepad++ for me!
They ruin Notepad by making it odd, they remove Wordpad which was great for very simple documents, Word is now weird and not windows menu compliant.
Is it any wonder I gave MS the boot at home?
Notepad is for reading logs, and simple text files, or for pasting code into before running FF aginst the two files.
I only really use it because I have set Notepad++ up with all whitespace characters visible, so is a bit slower to read.
> The update is another nail in the coffin for users with a workflow that included pasting text into Notepad to strip formatting. Now, an extra click could well be required
... but then Copilot will jump in and decide you need lots of automatic formatting anyway, followed by Recall that can take copies of your little note every few seconds even if you didn't need to save it.
Sorry for taking so long to reply. The version of notepad2 which I have was downloaded on 2016 from Flo's Freeware at
www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
I have had no issues with any malware. If you honestly believe there might be, the page has the source code which you can download and review.
As for being old, who cares? It's a plain text editor which I use as a notepad replacement. It does the job just dandy.
The old Notepad was basically just a menu wrapped around the Windows edit control in multiline mode and one of the examples from Charles Petzold replicated that (IIRC the example was actually about adding menus, as that is the bulk of the code you needed to add around the edit control).
If anyone can lay their hands on their copy, we can get back to the basic simplicity we love.
PS
I agree with others (see above) that Notepad++ is well worth having as well, especially for the computing literati who inhabit The Register comments, but it still isn't as quick to start up from scratch as good old Notepad - and NP++ is a bit OTT for the casual user.
Inspired by this article and motivated in part by your comment, I fired up Visual Studio this morning. 45 minutes later, starting from scratch I had a bare-bones text editor with load/save functionality; a couple of hours after that it had a toolbar, supported user-specified fonts, dark mode (or optional custom ink/paper colours), full-screen mode for distraction-free typing, showing of non-printable characters, word-wrap, bookmarking, search, merging of files, character/line counts, automatic bulleted-list mode, and loading/saving of preferences.
No, I haven’t implemented CoPilot, tabs, or anything else :)
What I’ve written is no Notepad++ by any means, but it demonstrated to me that the basic core of what Notepad is/should-be is very, very simple.
Replying to my own post... as is my wont, once I started hacking away in VS I got way, way too far into it.
My little Notepad.exe replacement for Windows 10/11, which started life as yes, a simple wrapper around the Win32 TextBox control, now has:
If anyone wants the source, and promises not to laugh, reply here and I'll try to throw up (that terminology is apt!) a Github page for it.
We saw the same nonsense with car models.
In the 1980s, the Honda Civic was the generic term for a small and cheap car. They also sold the Accord, which was a bigger car relative to the Civic, but still small by North American standards.
In the 1990s, both Civic and Accord grew, and by the early 2000s, the Civic was now larger than the Accord had been in 1980. And so, Honda introduced a new car, the Fit (or Jazz, as it's known in many markets), which was closer to the size of the 1980s Civic. And then the Fit started to grow, and three versions later, it's also almost as large as the Civic was in 2000.
What the brain trust at Honda and Microsoft both don't understand, or don't care to understand, is that these minimal entry level products are popular for a reason. If they are upscaled to the next level, it doesn't move the market with it, it makes the market look for a new product to replace the gap left by the product leaving the space.
I don't know of any text editor for Windows that has fewer features than Notepad. There are dozens, and probably hundreds, if not thousands of lightweight freeware editors that all have at least one feature more than Notepad. Notepad's only real purpose was that it (a) was guaranteed to be on any Windows machine, so if you needed to edit a config file on a lab PC, you could be sure it was there, and (b) it was lightweight and fast.
People didn't use it to develop thousand line C++ files or XML configurations in it, but they would use it to quickly load one of those files to make a quick one line change rather than wait for Visual Studio or a heavyweight XML editor to load.
Microsoft ditched WordPad as being useless because it bigger and slower than Notepad, but not as full featured as Word. If Notepad is going to have markups and font support, as well as integrating AI, we're going to be in the weird situation where an editor called Notepad++, which has language-sensitive editing features and text highlight will actually be the lightweight editor compared to the stock "light" editor that comes with the operating system.
What next? Will vi get AI and people start using Emacs because it's faster?
> "In the 1980s, the Honda Civic was the generic term for a small and cheap car. [..] In the 1990s, both Civic and Accord grew, and by the early 2000s, the Civic was now larger than the Accord had been in 1980. And so, Honda introduced [the Fit] which was closer to the size of the 1980s Civic."
It's not just Honda. This observation has been made regarding car models/brands in general, i.e. that they tend to grow larger with each new generation.
IIRC it's because people are often conservative and loyal to what they're already happy with and- assuming they have no problems with their current car- will be happy to replace it with the "same" "model". But also that those same people tend to want, and be happy with, slightly larger cars as time goes on and they get older. So they drag the brand/model in that direction.
And if anyone does need a *genuinely* small and cheap car, they're (possibly) more likely to be younger first-time-buyers- in the position our older customers above were in a few decades prior- with less badge-attachment and more likely to buy the "Fit" instead of the now-larger "Civic". (And if Honda they see the "Fit" has ended up in the same boat as the "Civic" and they're losing out on sales, they can always release another small model).
In that case, those models are sold alongside the "original" Fiat 500 (*) and are more spin-offs than successors. Or rather, an obvious attempt by Fiat, a company always best-known for small cars- and never as successful or influential with larger models- to leverage the success of the 500 to sell larger vehicles.
Even if that makes a mockery of any indirect connection their name suggests to the original (and genuinely tiny by modern standards) Fiat 500. (**)
(*) Yes, I know that the "Fiat 500" launched in the 2000s wasn't even the "original" Fiat 500, but you know what I mean.
(**) Yes, I know that one's not even the original either and there was a still earlier Fiat 500. But the better-known 50s version is the one the 2000s version was styled after. And even the "regular" new 500 is significantly larger than its inspiration.
There's also the issue with safety legislation getting stricter.
You look at the original Fiat 500 and add in air bags (and not just in the steering wheel!) , crumple zones, better structural protection for occupants, etc. It ain't gonna fit!
Oh for fcuks sake
It used to be simple, according to your needs ...
Notepad - Write - Word - DTP suite.
What's a Batch/Powershell script going to do when it comes across text formatting.
This looks to me, them realising killing off Write was a mistake and trying to fold it back into Notepad
Just don't - Notepad is a rarity in computing. It has one single job and it just works.
I presume, Copilot will, through “a natural language interfaces” will enable a user avoid this extra “mouse movement and menu click”.
I get the impression, MS are generally, deliberately making the Windows UI/UX worse to encourage the use of CoPilot and thus additional subscription revenues..
When I pop down to the local market for a quart of milk and a loaf of bread, I take my 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle. When I take a cross-country trip, I take my less-fuel-efficient-and-far-more-comfortable-and-powerful touring car.
Microsoft has now roped some giant firework rockets to the roof of my Super Beatle...
Matchbox Lesney Superfast No. 11 Flying Bug
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=matchbox%20beetle%20flying&iar=images
"Longtime Notepad devotee and Directions on Microsoft Editor in Chief Mary Jo Foley, told El Reg: "I do not understand why Microsoft cannot leave well enough alone and just let Notepad be a very lightweight and streamlined note taking app."
Because corporate rewards observable changes, not meaningful changes.
So if something works, and continues to work, it's not a line item on a CV.
If you add something, that's a line item.
If Notepad was open source, anyone disagreeing with that would just fork (or use a fork), and that way the community can evolve software that fits what they want, instead of what emerges from microsoft.
It's also striking that notepad is listed as streamlined and lightweight. Vi is lightweight and streamlined, you can do the basics very fast, or you can have all the power you'd ever like and still it wouldn't consume more than your average firefox tab.
I know this is going to be unpopular, but I'm quite looking forward to this.
I've found the recent changes to notepad have actually made it useful (It's gone from the 'last resort' to 'oh it's just a quick edit, I'll use notepad'). Mind you part of that might be other editors seeming to become more bloated. (For example, Jetbrains released 'Fleet' as a lightweight text editor to solve this issue... it takes 4+ seconds to load on my 12 core 128MB machine).
Also, as I actually find Markdown quite useful a lightweight text editor that supports it with preview is desirable. (Otherwise you need plugins for heavy weight stuff like Visual Studio Code or Rider).
It's not adding formatting to plain text, it's adding a rendering engine for a commonly used simply markup. Assuming it still loads quickly I'm all for it.
You said that as a joke, so you obviously haven't heard... they *do* want to add AI to Notepad.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/23/microsoft_ai_notepad/.
This, unfortunately, is very much *not* a joke.
All will be well.
The first text editors all used some sort of tagged text for rudimentary formatting - all hail WordPerfect's "Show Codes" mode! - and the editors on the personal computers running DOS and MacOS followed in the footsteps of previous editors from Wang and IBM. No doubt El Reg mates can supply many more exemplary predecessors.
MacOS featured TextEdit as its plaintext editor -- but in Classic MacOS, TextEdit retained the ability to render basic formatting and inline graphics, even if editing such documents was considered too complicated for a Desk Accessory utility. You could manually insert the requisite codes into a text document, and even add the graphics resources with ResEdit, and come up with a fancy formatted document that could be mistaken for a MacWord masterpiece... The text stream resembled nothing more than a plaintext ASCII file with embedded ANSI codes, plus references to graphics image resources, if any. The commercial word processor Nisus Writer supported this document format in a full-featured editor.
Of course, the application created all of this by weaving together the various application kits supported by the GUI environment. Molding it like fine pottery into an example app, living documentation of the intent of the app kit designers. A lovely tapestry of clay.
TextEdit on 21st Century macOS supports RTF or plain text modes. You can select either option as the default for new documents.
Never mind that NotePad on Windows probably loads every writing system humanity has ever dreamed of, plus language models for a reasonable subset of those still in use, even before it draws the first pixel.
Meditating upon such realities will only upset you. Have a pint, in the unit of measure you find most pleasing, and forget about such detail.
Wordpad didn't just add some formatting, it was the only Microsoft editor that could actually generate RTF that complies with the RTF spec, and as such had application in some niches of the ecosystem where RTF is (was?) still being used. But today's Microsoft is not the Microsoft of old that cherishes backwards-compatibility and 'developers, developers, developers'.
Notepad++ is ok, I guess. But I don't use it often enough to remember the shortcuts and plugins for the ++ features, like validating and pretty-printing JSON and XML (also still in use).
Keeping wordpad and notepad as they were was a totally valid option, especially as MS' notepad++ competitor is VS code. I guess someone picked it up as a project to survive the next round of redundancies, being able to say "I'm a maintainer of a core application in the OS"?
"According to Microsoft, "The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language."
I take it this will be Github-style Markdown (along with Wiki, the closest we have to a standard)?
As noted, the beauty of Notepad is that it's simple and always there.
Yesterday in my digital inclusion class I needed the (adult) learners to do a few activities to practise some basic keyboard skills I'd been teaching in the session.
We started with how to use the Windows Key. From that we typed note...(etc). Notepad opened. Already they'd learnt and used a few extra new skills.
In Notepad they practised a few keyboard skills like using the space bar, caps and caps lock, moving the cursor, highlight, undo. A perfect teaching tool, in fact..
With Notepad in front of them they could try out and actually see the result of what I'd been demonstrating. And they can go home or to the library and practice more before next week's session.
Because Notepad is always there . It's easy to find, it's quick and easy to use.
And it's not just my beginners who sometimes need that. Sometimes it's useful for many of us. A nice clear note to put on the front door - I'd use Notepad to type "Please knock, bell not working" ( or some such thing) in big letters. Easier to read and notice than a handwritten scrawl. But if I had to fire up Word or Writer to do that----I wouldn't, it'd be quicker and simpler to do the handwritten scrawl.
So I do not want my nice simple utility* turned into a bells and whistles "app"
*Back in The Good Old Days we had lots of simple little programmes that did one thing well. The were called "utilities". Things like flat file databases, and so on. Stuff that wasn't complicated, didn't offer lots of options to wade through, didn't take up much in the way of resources, but did a useful job that needed doing. Not everything needs to have a learning curve.
We still have many of them, even if some are called "apps" now. But finding utilities that haven't been made over complicated is getting much more difficult.
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