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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...)
This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
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
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/
https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm
Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
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.
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...
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.
It is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...
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 also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.
Textadept is lightweight, and more...
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".
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
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.
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.
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/
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?
Vim is The Way.
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"?
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?
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.
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).
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...
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.
>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?
> Welcome to 2026
But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.
The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
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?
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
CRLF vs LF?
This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
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.
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.
Windows is about GUI, tho
Hey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?
Hackernews, mostly.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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 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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
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.
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 always liked Crimson/Emerald more myself.
Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
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.
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.
noooooo
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Uh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
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.
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.
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.
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.