alt Hacker NewsWindows 11 Notepad to support Markdown
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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...)
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 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.
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..."
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?
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.
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...
At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...
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
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.)
We can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.
Somewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.
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.
Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?
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.
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.
Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
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?
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.
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.
It's like they are trying to do the opposite of the Unix philosophy. Do many things very poorly.
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.
> 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.
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.
This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi
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?
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.
It's becoming Word-lite, like Wordpad used to be. Paint is becoming Photoshop-lite, and now has conflicting functionality with the Photos app.
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.
Isn't Markdown how they managed to get a Severity 8.8 RCE into notepad.exe?
Janaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support;
Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago:
Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
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)
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.
This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
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
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?
noooooo
I don’t see why people are complaining. If you use notepad for txt files, nothing changes.
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...
Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.
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!
Yeah no.
Stopped using notepad when they added co-pilot. Stop shoving AI down our throats.
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)