You cannot claim you're "against feature bloat" while then in the same breath say that it is acceptable that a basic text editor have an entire additional render pipeline.

If you want Markdown use VSCode, it is a first class citizen. Don't take an intentionally stripped down text editor and bolt on VSCode-like features.

Just... no... not notepad.. Notepad should be the single-simplest of text editors, always has been, always should be... it should be "safe" much like "task manager" it should be as simple and bulletproof as any application in Windows are... these are essential tools that should never, ever, ever break.

MS has WordPad... fck around with that to make it support markdown or whatever else beyond rtf you want it to support. For that matter, it's probably that much more appropriate to do so.

Do I typically use Notepad, no.. not really... I actually use the new rust based edit terminal app more than Notepad. That said, I expect notepad to do one thing... edit text files, and to not break doing so. The ONLY* addition that might be acceptable would be a HEX Editor mode, so you can edit any file.

There are maybe 5-7 applications in Windows I expect to never break... task manager, notepad, registry editor, file explorer, command prompt are at the top of that list... these are the golden tools that should never fail, even if everything else does.

The main problem with "Markdown support" in Notepad is that "Markdown support" is an ill-defined phrase. The closest thing to a well-defined definition is to support CommonMark but that is far, far from universal. Microsoft being Microsoft they'd probably still half-ass the job then just declare their new half-ass support a newly embraced-and-extended standard and leave it that way for the next 20 years, so asking Notepad to support Markdown is in practice asking for yet another effing Markdown dialect to come into existence and join the shambling hoard of other dialects.

Markdown is more properly understood as a family of related-but-mutually-incompatible standards, like CSV, and like "supporting CSV" is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. And supporting Markdown is already clearly non-trivial compared to the baseline of Notepad we've come to expect over the past few decades.

Except notepad was the safe option for editing files and making sure what you see is what gets saved. Not any more?

Maybe I don't understand what markdown support will imply, but doesn't this hide text?

Like, if I have a h2 or url, its going to show as special text rather than the h2 tag?