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.

It's becoming Word-lite, like Wordpad used to be. Paint is becoming Photoshop-lite, and now has conflicting functionality with the Photos app.

Isn't Markdown how they managed to get a Severity 8.8 RCE into notepad.exe?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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