I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month.<p>20260211 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516</a> <i>Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability</i> (804 points, 516 comments)<p>20260210 <a href="https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841" rel="nofollow">https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...</a><p>> <i>"An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad"</i><p>Other recent Notepad issues:<p>20260207 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098</a> <i>Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?</i> (187 points, 284 comments)<p>20260127 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451</a> <i>Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad</i> (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.
I thought it is by introducing an RCE vulnerability that you get an RCE vulnerability.<p>I'm being facetious of course, but this recent rhetorical trend of people confidently vouching for "pet" in "pet vs. cattle" is not a sustainable decision, even if it's admittedly plain practical on the short to medium run, or in given contexts even longer. It's just a dangerous and irresponsible lesson to blindly repeat I think.<p>Change happens. Evidently, while we can mechanistically rule out several classes of bugs now, RCEs are not one of those. Whatever additional guardrails they had in place, they failed to catch this *. I think it's significantly more honest to place the blame there if anywhere. If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad *, you can be confident they're introducing RCEs left and right to other components too **. With some additional contextual weighting of course.<p>* Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.<p>** Under the interpretation that this <i>was</i> an RCE, which I question.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/2/19/cve-2026-20841-arbitrary-code-execution-in-the-windows-notepad" rel="nofollow">https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/2/19/cve-2026-20...</a>
> * Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.<p>Most people seem to see "CVE" and "RCE" and assume the worst here. As you saw though, Notepad is just making totally valid URIs clickable! Web browsers allow it too - why is it not an RCE there? Sure, they usually show a warning when the URI is going to something external but most people just click through things like that anyway.
But this is not about how you, but Microsoft, "the corporation that turns updates into chaos,"introduces RCE bugs. And bugs in general: easy to introduce, by action or inaction, when one has absolutely no concern for user satisfaction.
Good point re: "RCE" though the CVSS score is 7.8/high severity; some more flavor per the FAQ at <a href="https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841" rel="nofollow">https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...</a><p>> <i>According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?</i><p>> <i>The word Remote in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally.</i><p>> <i>For example, when the score indicates that the Attack Vector is Local and User Interaction is Required, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.</i>
What does pet" in "pet vs. cattle" mean?
It comes from the world of systems operations. Something long-lived and trusted, so high emotional attachment (pet), vs. something short-lived that thus does not need to be trusted, so comparatively low emotional attachment (cattle).<p>For example, Bob's one-of-a-kind trusty server from which Bob is nigh inseparable, vs. a Docker container with a version controlled config you routinely tear down and bring up instances of, maybe even in an automated fashion.<p>Here this would map to trusty aged codebases you don't touch out of fear and caution, vs. codebases you can confidently touch because the spec, the code, the tests, the tooling, and the processes are solid.
A different mapping: to Microsoft, the users's computers are cattle, but to each individual user, the computer is a pet. Which is why the users keep getting mad when their pet feature gets euthanized.
For development, I'd see a different mapping.<p>Pets are projects that you toy with and keep adding new features, even when the main objective has been met.
Cattle are projects that do what they are supposed to and are left alone.<p>I'd much rather have Notepad fall into the cattle category.
> Change happens.<p>The low level tool that has served to rescue more systems than I can count does not need to "change" simply because "it happens, bro."<p>> while we can mechanistically<p>You can rule it out with process as well. As in "don't change what isn't broken."<p>> If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad<p>Then they clearly feel they have no viable competition. This is table stakes. Getting it wrong should lose you most of your customer base overnight. Companies actually used to _work_ this way.
If I told you to stop using computers, and then you won't have computer problems, I don't think you would find that particularly helpful or charitable either, would you?<p>What you find a trusty "low-level" tool is a demo application for a basic WYSIWYG text editor. They modernized it so that it remains being perceived that way, instead of letting it be increasingly misclassified as a legacy product for the enthusiast, like you just did.
Meanwhile TextEdit on Mac always rendered HTML. Which seems useless until you realize it can also edit and save as HTML. So there's casually a wysiwyg web editor built into macOS that idk how many people use.
idk maybe TextEdit DOES have some rce not discovered yet?<p>maybe we should separate "real origianl text-only editor" from "fancy text editor"?<p>windows already got wordpad... why even lay a finger on textpad?
If it also allowed me to type what I want instead of changing every single word due to "spell check" it would actually be a useful tool!
Well this is what we call it opportunity cost
I think it's more likely that Microsoft is vibe coding slop garbage to replace their core apps that were literally better.<p>Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.<p>It also signals the death knell for Windows native apps. Microsoft can't make them anymore. It won't be long until even Excel is a Electron sloplication.
> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.<p>I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
> As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?<p>Ultimately, what difference does it make? The file explorer in Windows 10 is much faster than the one in Windows 11, and it's very noticeable. Turn on the old context menus, and try right clicking a file. Instant in Windows 10, visible delay in Windows 11.
It is certainly perceptibly slow. Carried out a test on my 12 year old PC running Win-10 vs a new HP Win11 laptop of my friend which he bought in a hurry before price increases. Opened a directory of several thousand files with nested folders - much slower at navigation. Much slower at opening right-click menus. Much slower at pretty much everything.<p>M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS. You gotta get used to staring at that spinning blue circle, counting the many precious moments of your life draining away.
I measured once. It uses about 50% more resources and offers less feautures (or at least hides existing feautures). You may not have noticed if you had resources to spare.<p>It does offer some new features for businesses. Nothing useful for the consumer, and nothing to justify the massive performance loss
The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the <i>calculator</i>. It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network.<p>The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sort of "clever" localization where my inputs change depending on the language of the operating system. My language uses commas so of course it only accepts those. Infuriating. Hope whoever coded this is enjoying their promotion.
Off-topic, but do you know Mozilla Firefox has a builtin calculator and unit conversion in the URL bar? For my personal use I rather use python and GNU units, but I guess for most users that live in the browser instead of the terminal, this could become their default calculator.<p><pre><code> browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator = true
</code></pre>
I don't know if you need to restore the urlbar first, before that works.
One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator.<p>It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be.<p>Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.
Is that Windows, or the EDR that is hooking every system call and pinning a whole core with analytics?
The old notepad would still open instantly so that can't be it. The updated machines with the new notepad are just as infuriating.<p>Reminds me of the shitty gamer laptop manufacturer apps that would take over a minute to display a glorified rectangle on the screen. All this to configure keyboard LEDs. I reverse engineered that garbage and made a Linux version that works <i>instantly</i>, proving their incompetence.
Its not <i>faster</i> bereft of context, its just bloated. If you have enough resource to throw at it, its roughly the same. Theres some specific things that can themselves be slower, the Windows 11 Start Menu has had a lot of words written about its new implementation.
That _is_ slower. The fact that it's possible to throw enough resources at it that both "look" the same speed, doesn't change the fact that one of them is 10x slower.
> if you have enough resource to throw at it<p>An i9 with 128GB RAM isn’t enough resources to open a menu?
The best example is probably the new "Outlook", and I put that name in quotes intentionally.
In case anyone is not aware:<p>20231109 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453</a> Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials (666 points, 278 comments)<p>> <i>the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally</i>
This was one of the most outrageous data grab in the past years. They replaced the completely working simple Mail app, which I used until that point, with this garbage, and I was just lucky that I paid attention, and I stopped for a sec what is that warning which tells you that they grab literally all of your emails.<p>Btw, just before that I found this page regarding Edge, and this is why I paid more attention to these things:
<a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/microsoft-edge/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/microsoft-edge/priva...</a><p>That list is way too long for my taste, and it really indicated me that Windows became completely adversarial.
[flagged]
If everything is electron then there’s literally no reason to pay for windows since superior OSes can run everything exactly the same
It's been so weird to watch over the decades as team sizes, budgets, and timelines have exploded even as we've abandoned once-normal things like native GUI applications as <i>too hard</i> in favor of "more efficient" webshit... even as the aforementioned stuff with growing team sizes, budgets, and timelines have happened.
Much worse:
CVE-2026-20682
Apple Notes Note Deletion Logic Flaw (An attacker may be able to discover a user’s deleted notes.)
Many has not upgraded to iOS 26.3 yet.
It was already true that an attacker could trick a user into copying a malicious link inside a file opened in Notepad to their browser, was that also a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability?
You can trick the user into copying the same malicious link, but browsers have generally already implemented the same mitigation that is Microsoft's fix for this issue inside Notepad (specifically, prompting before opening outside applications after the user enters or clicks a URL that isn't one of the built-in schemes).
It is also possible to use a different application as the http and file: url handler at the os level;<p>Write an app to display the (URL) argument passed and require the user to confirm or reject before running the browser using any of one or more default and configurable command line templates.<p>Add a "Install as default http, https, file:// uri handler" button in the settings gui. Prompt the user to install the app as default handler on first run.<p>Add opt-in optional debug logging of at least: {source_app_path:, url:, date_opened: } to a JSON lines log file
It looks like the exploit would cause notepad to retrieve and execute arbitrary code when a malicious link is clicked.
I believe notepad was originally just a demo of the multi line edit control. Feature creep.
> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.<p>Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it <i>doesn't</i> run locally, which begs the question, why does it require a Copilot+ PC at all?<p>Not even going to bother asking "does anybody want this to begin with" because at this point there is no real need to bother asking that.
I feel the deepest existential pain in my heart that despite companies being 'all in' on AI, they can't integrate anything meaningful that would make sense to the end use, but would require even a braincells worth of mental effort of ML expertise or actual requirements people have.<p>My two favourite 'AI' tools in image editing have been ones that can replace tedious work.<p>One such example are segmentation models that can be used for smart cutouts, removing backgrounds etc.<p>Now we have both 'segmentation' and 'AI' in paint - but the segmentation uses the exact same shitty flood fill with tolerance that's probably existed in the first paint program at Xerox PARC, while the 'AI' feature is another by-the-numbers crappy stable diffusion model that's strictly worse than anything you could get with your first Google search.
I read somewhere that even for the "Copilot" things that supposedly run locally, windows needs to send a request to microsoft to confirm if your input is allowed by their rules.
Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found.<p>(I found an odd one: for some reason I <i>can't</i> log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)
The goal is obviously to onboard consumers to an app store ecosystem so MS can charge monopoly rents to app developers for access to Windows users.<p>Everything MS is doing in Windows is to this end.
Obviously not. They introduced their app store (13 years ago!, fuck time goes by), probably trying to do this.<p>They got to like step 3 of their 10 step master plan and gave up and have been lingering there.<p>Microsoft has been a walking husk of a company for the past decade and a half that somehow inexplicably stumbled into a trillion dollar valuation.
Ironic how Notepad used to be too simple, making it useless as a text editor in many cases. In particular, it didn't support UNIX line endings and files larger than a few MB.<p>The there was a brief moment where it became decent. Still a barebones text editor, but it could actually edit text, what I think most people expected Notepad to be.<p>And now, it is going the other way, with "AI" features no one wanted, and also "Markdown support" which is ironic since Markdown is designed to look good in a regular text editor. Now we have something that isn't really a text editor, but not really a wysiwyg editor either, it has some advanced features like AI, but is lacking features most other semi-advanced text editors have (ex: syntax highlighting).<p>At least, it was good for a couple of years.
Yeah, Notepad was originally nothing more than a Win32 multiline textbox and two functions, one of which read the file and set the textbox value to the contents and the other took the textbox value and wrote it to the file. Every other menu option simply changed some existing property of the textbox.
The “notepad team” has fully embraced resume driven development.<p>Isn’t it boring when a piece of software is just complete? In fact that’s an unacceptable state for it!
I was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have (<a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-writing-with-ai-in-notepad-4088b954-c97b-46dc-813f-959be01746d5" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...</a>)
I recently thought my keyboard was faulty. I take my notes on notepad, and after a recent update, sensed that keystrokes occasionally get missed or delayed. After a few days, I noticed it was not happening on Google Docs. On a whim I checked Notepad settings and found a new setting, enabled by default: "AI features > Copilot". I disabled it, along with "Autocorrect", and haven't had the problem since.<p>Notepad is supposed to be a bare bones editor -- where you go when everything else fails. The VI of Windows. If they want a rich editor, they should bring back WordPad.
This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.
Agreed.<p>Notepad's got Markdown, it's what LLMs crave.
I love it too, because it's easy to write and copy, compared to formatted text
Me, too. Oh my god, I might be an LLM.
Well they're text generation engines, of course they do, it's all just text.
What’s the point of your comment?<p>We know that markdown is text, we understand that text is text.<p>LLMs have very obviously been intentionally trained to work with markdown, specifically. Its prominence in LLM output far outweighs the real-world existence of raw Markdown online.<p>That’s the point that was being made.<p>What’s next. Are you going to say stochastic parrot?
Good that they have realized the power of raw texts thanks to LLMs.
Thank god notepad is finally useable now
step 1: remove wordpad<p>step 2: omg there's demand for features<p>step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad<p>step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem
Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1]<p>Step 6: GOTO 1.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/edit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/edit</a>
It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it.<p>Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682</a>
Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
I don’t know what sort of insane nerd echo chamber you have to be in to think that MBA-ification means “adding rich text editing features to a text editor”.<p>You’ve heard legitimate complaints about “MBAs” but very clearly lack the knowledge to identify those problems on your own.
> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor”<p>Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features.<p>Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.
I like having something all in one.
Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows.<p>What are these horrible takes?
The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.
>Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files.<p>then put the markdown support there to supplant rtfs?
I assume there's like a single manager who's job it was was to maintain notepad and force use of AI, so obviously, vibe code needless features because if it's not broke, how can you fix it with AI.
I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar.<p>I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-notepad/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not...</a> and <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-examples?view=msvc-170" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-...</a><p>The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go <a href="https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/</a>), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF.<p>Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use-streams" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use...</a><p>Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :)<p>You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science.<p>Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.
Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)
Syntax highlighting is definitely less complex than updating and rendering RTF and HTML.<p>There is configurable syntax highlighting in vscode.<p>Should an app like Notepad ever embed a WebView? (with e.g. tauri-apps/wry instead of CEF now FWIU)? Not even for a Markdown Preview feature IMHO.
The new notepad is a buggy embarrassment. When you disable the "Continue previous session" option you can very easily lose unsaved changes:<p>0) Set "When Notepad starts" option to "Start new session and discard unsaved changes"<p>1) New file<p>2) Type "abc" - note the "X" to close the file changes to a "O" (pretend that's a circle) to indicate unsaved changes<p>3) Save file - "O" changes back to "X"<p>4) Type "def" - "X" changes back to "O" because "def" is not on the file on disk<p>5) Undo, "def" disappears, "O" incorrectly remains...<p>6) Redo, "def" reappears, "O" incorrectly changes back to "X"<p>7) Close file. No prompt to save unsaved "def". Reopen file. "def" is gone
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]<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/edit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/edit</a>
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.<p>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)...
Edit is unironically one of my favorite text editors these days. It opens incredibly fast compared to everything else I use, it's easy to use, works fine on Linux. It's not going to replace emacs or VS Code, but it's incredibly handy for basic editing chores.
If you don’t need to render rich text and want a plain text editor then TUIs are the least likely to get a bunch of dumb features
Have you tried Micro? <a href="https://micro-editor.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://micro-editor.github.io/</a>
You can just uninstall this modern notepad. It will bring back plain old notepad.
The problem is usually when you're using notepad, it's in some situation where you don't want to install another exe. Like you're using someone else's PC or a random one in a library or something. This needs to be built in.
I used to use scite in the early 2000's (scintilla editor), is it still around?<p>EDIT: yes it does and it has actually been updated yesterday.<p><a href="https://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html</a><p><a href="https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaHistory.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaHistory.html</a>
I like EmEditor, it has a compact ui and some useful features, and 16TB file support -- <a href="https://www.emeditor.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emeditor.com/</a>
The whole point of Notepad was its bare bones simplicity. EmEditor looks like it’s loaded full of stuff, and has a subscription fee.<p>Assuming most people don’t need to open 16TB files, they might as well use VS Code.
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.<p>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 <i>actually</i> 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."<p>Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing <i>not</i>.
More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.
I love Notepad++ but yea, zero confidence in that dev right now. Its programma non grata on my machines at the moment.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://kate-editor.org/get-it/" rel="nofollow">https://kate-editor.org/get-it/</a>
Which response are we talking about which was problematic?
I didn't realize until recently that the very popular Notepad++ was such a lightning rod over the years for controversy and (though I can't guarantee correlation is causation) security issues.<p>20260202 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851548">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851548</a> Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors (917 points, 543 comments)<p>20260203 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878338">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878338</a> Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown (384 points, 198 comments)<p>20250630 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426049">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426049</a> High-Severity Vulnerability in Notepad++ (39 points, 14 comments)<p>20230904 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385920">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385920</a> Multiple Notepad++ Flaws Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Code (83 points, 39 comments)<p>20230830 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320304">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320304</a> Buffer Overflows in Notepad++ (68 points, 61 comments)<p>20230829 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311068">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311068</a> Notepad++ v8.5.6 still vulnerable to possible arbitrary code execution (18 points, 3 comments)<p>20211209 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499002">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499002</a> StrongPity variant hides behind Notepad++ installation (45 points, 28 comments)<p>20191030 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251</a> Notepad++ issues attacked by Chinese commenters (237 points, 110 comments)<p>20191030 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400526">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400526</a> Notepad++ repository is being spammed after “Free Uyghur” release (82 points, 36 comments)<p>20190317 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329330">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329330</a> Notepad++ drops code signing for its releases (496 points, 327 comments)<p>20170308 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032</a> Notepad++ V 7.3.3 – Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ Issue (1101 points, 291 comments)<p>20150112 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876823">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876823</a> Notepad ++ hacked for Je Suis Charlie comments(web archive link) (65 points, 74 comments)
For the absolute lightweight, there is vi, eMacs, nano, etc.<p>For a UI I’ve been using VSCode. It is quite quick when you disable all extensions and most settings.
> <i>absolute lightweight</i><p>> <i>eMacs</i><p>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".
Ha, fair. Lightweight in this context is relative to Notepad or any modern Windows application.
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!<p>(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!)
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.<p>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.<p>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.
KDE's kate runs well on Windows.<p>It can be installed easily via chocolatey.
Textadept is lightweight, and more...
Vim is The Way.
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).
While I probably haven't played either in a decade, I bring sol.exe and winmine.exe on general principle, as both had their "Copilot in Notepad" shark-jumping moments all the way back in Windows 8 with the introduction of achievements and in-app purchases.
Every few years I find some need or excuse to install Brief somewhere. I miss that editor.
I also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.
… .txt? :D
All we wanted back in the day was Unix line ending support, and they would give even that.
[dead]
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:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messaging" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messag...</a><p>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.
Imagine the result if everybody took to this mindset. Look at everything that's on your desk right now, and what percent of it was made in e.g. China. Imagine if they decided to just start jamming political slogans onto everything. Or for something closer to home, surgeons and anesthesiologists are largely conservative. [1] Imagine if they started signaling their politics. Many people, ironically often those most predisposed to try to make their own political views highly visible, do a poor job of tolerating the views of others. This sort of behavior would just cause complete chaos and disorder and make everybody even more pissed off at each other than they already are.<p>And political signaling can also make you look bad even to the audience that might ideologically agree with you. For instance notepad++ takes a position on essentially every big controversial US geopolitical issue, but they are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they hadn't taken on any political positions, this isn't an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue, suddenly their not taking a position on one like this effectively <i>is</i> taking a position, but it's one that (for once) they don't want to say.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/870192?form=fpf" rel="nofollow">https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/870192?form=fpf</a>
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.<p>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.
reading about political messaging in any software should make you AVOID it, not "wishing to have it"<p>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.<p>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?
as a free human being, you can do whatever<p>as a program that tries to be used by others - stay in your lane, you are not an opinion cesspool, you are here to do work and let others do it too
Sublime is good too without the political rhetoric. It boggles my mind that windows users refuse the ways of vim.
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.<p>The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.
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...<p>Interesting. This is not actually true anymore, even for the masses.<p>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.
Notepad urgently needs some social features too, did they think about adding stories and a messenger???
It doesn't support basic code/monospace blocks using backticks:<p>> Unsupported Syntax Detected<p>> This file contains syntax that isn't fully supported in formatted view. Some content may not render as intended, and switching views could modify parts of your original Markdown. Do you want to continue?
So custom implementation, then? How very Microsoft.
When has MS ever implemented someone else's standard or even convention (MD is not really a standard)? They only ever implemented their own incompatible parody. They're even incompatible with themselves, because backticks do work in MS Teams. This software is probably vibecoded slop.
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..."
Why is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it.<p>Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y</a>
Markdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: <i>binary WYSIWYG</i>. 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 <i>that text, as is, and nothing else</i>. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence.<p>(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.
Notepad being a plain text editor, it always supported markdown. Versions of notepad from the 80s would be able to open and edit markdown, as it’s just plain text.<p>Apps like classic notepad are useful to have around, when apps that try to parse things like markdown get it wrong and the underlying file needs to be fixed.
Makes me wonder - with Notepad rapidly evolving into WordPad v2, and no default "just render bytes as text" solution in modern Windows to replace it, maybe there's still a way to hack one together on the go, just from pieces laying around in every default installation? I mean, rundll32.exe is a thing.<p>All I really need is a basic text box with a scroll bar, and a way to feed it with bytes from a file.<p>To make it a well-defined challenge: the task is to find a way to create a basic notepad - a multi-line textbox that supports scrolling, and can be fed bytes from a file to render as text directly. Additionally, this must be achievable through simple means - simple enough to <i>memorize</i> - and must work on standard Windows 11 installation, with no extra dependencies to procure. Solution can be e.g. something I can type from memory into "Run" (Win+R) box, but could also be a short list of GUI steps (e.g. open some program, click on "Help", drag file to help box).
Dave Plummer vibe coded one on his YouTube channel a couple months ago. Normally I wouldn’t share someone vibe coding something, but since he wrote the Task Manager, Zip Folders, and other such core Windows features back in the day, it hits different.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/bmBd39OwvWg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/bmBd39OwvWg</a>
If you're ok with a TUI instead of a GUI, Microsoft's documentation says the `edit` command is still around in Windows 11 (I don't have a Windows 11 machine handy to verify this): <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/edit" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...</a>
Huh. I was going to say, last time I saw this was 20+ years ago, and I forgot it exists - but I must be remembering something else. It seems `edit` is a <i>new thing</i>, if I'm to believe <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/</a><p>I can confirm it exists on my Windows 11 machine, and I didn't install it specifically, though it's definitely not a base install (upgraded from Windows 10, and plenty of dev tooling installed over the years). Still, it fits the bill (+/- GUI, but I didn't consider TUI at all). Thanks!
The documentation doesn't make this entirely clear, but I think these are two separate things: the original `edit` command which is built into Windows 11 (and has been built into prior Windows releases), and a replacement written in Rust that can optionally be installed.<p>Note that my link is dated 2023, whereas Wikipedia says that Microsoft Edit was first released in 2025: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor</a>
The old EDIT never shipped with any 64-bit Windows IIRC, since it was a 16-bit MS-DOS application. I believe 32-bit Windows 10 has it..?<p>As someone who (mercifully) only occasionally has to touch Windows machines, I keep forgetting this, and then when I try to do stuff I’m flabbergasted that <i>the operating system does not include a terminal text editor.</i> (In a fit of pure desperation I even typed EDLIN into the Command Prompt — no go ;)<p>That was the case with Win11 about a year ago; if they finally started shipping EDIT64 then hey, that’s one positive recent change in Windows I suppose.
Well, there was a workaround (that I only learned today) for creating new files:<p><pre><code> copy con file_to_edit.txt
</code></pre>
Type text, end with CTRL+Z. Don't make any typos.<p>That's what web search told me, but then looking at the remarks in docs for `copy`[0], I have to wonder if this works now, and if it would've worked back then:<p><pre><code> copy prefix.txt+con+suffix.txt output.txt
</code></pre>
If it does, then combined with some clever use of `find`, `findstr` or `for` (whichever was available back then), you could probably get something that's half-way between EDIT.COM and a line editor.<p>(`more` would come in handy here, but AIUI, there's no way to run it non-interactively in cmd.exe? Don't have a Windows machine handy to check it right now.)<p>--<p>[0] - <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/copy#remarks" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...</a>
Thanks, this explains the mystery, and now the timelines add up.<p>So it turns out, EDIT.COM was one of the first - if not the first - computer programs I ever saw and used, back when the first PC showed up in the house. For some reason, someone in the family guessed that 9yo me will be interested in DOS and QBasic. A few years later, I used it from Windows for some time, when I was learning X86 assembly (I wanted to learn how to make a video game, so I went to the local library looking for some "intro to programming" book, and mistakes were made).<p>Afterwards, it was Borland C++ 3.1 (another TUI classic) and vim/Emacs, and I forgot about EDIT.com entirely. This new Microsoft Edit is something new, and something else, but similar enough that it brought those memories back.<p>Thanks again!
Remember this?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts</a>
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.<p>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."<p>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.
Notepad going the way of Wordpad, EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad.<p>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.<p>edit.exe[1,2] actually. And it runs on Linux too! Linux had a real lack of good text editors.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/edit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/edit</a><p>[2] <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/</a>
So I was about ready to rant about bloat in modern software, but I checked first: the new edit.exe for Windows is 260kB. The old editor for DOS 6.22 was actually provided by qbasic.exe, which had the editor and a full BASIC interpreter packed in 250kB. Edit.com was just a tiny wrapper.<p>This isn't bad at all given how most other software evolved in thr the intervening 30 years.
I remember first finding out about Edlin in 2003 while reading DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin. Experienced a lot of anemoia that day. That short section about Edlin was the most touching part of the entire book (probably because it took place before the DOS 5-6 / Win 3.x era which already felt old).
<a href="https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm" rel="nofollow">https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm</a>
Oldie bit goodie: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html</a>
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.
Apparently pasting unformatted text in browsers can be done with Ctrl+Shift+V. Pasting it in Office is Ctrl+Alt+V. Always the odd one out.
Taken from here: <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=107124" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10...</a>
I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:<p><pre><code> ^+v::
Clipboard:=Clipboard
Send ^v
</code></pre>
That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.
Unless it changed recently, the faster way is to just press ctrl+shift+V for "paste special" in Word, which should open up the paste dialog with "Unformated Text" preselected (IIRC), so immediately pressing Enter should close the dialog and paste the stripped text.
Notepad in Windows 11 (while not autosave) will preserve unsaved documents.
I like that it default to view or more precisely a WYSIWYG experience. I wish vs code did the same. I am just no sure that notepad is the right tool for this. It serves as such a important tool to stripping formatting and working with plain text. We are not far away from loosing 30 years of that trust. One little bug away. They should have used wordpad for this.
At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.<p><a href="https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applications/notepad" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...</a>
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.
I need to tell everyone, we can just uninstall this modern notepad which restores plain old notepad.
I use MS Windows for sooo long and I've never discovered that. Amazing!
Hey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?
Windows is about GUI, tho
Weird, it already does at my work computer since a month which aren't exactly first to get the latest updates and definitely don't get prerelease software. I wonder how all that works.<p>(Update: Ah, title is a little misleading. This update doesn't introduce Markdown, it adds support for nested Markdown lists etc.)<p>Personally, I think they should've kept Notepad as-is and reincarnated WordPad instead, rewriting it and giving it Markdown instead of RTF. It already had the basic formatting interface and all. It would've been a pretty smooth transition.<p>The problem is that Markdown supports quite a bit, even tables, which lends to feature creep. It was already more sluggish without any of this due to moving Notepad to WinUI.
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?<p>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.<p>I think this explains the lack of viewers; they are simply not needed.
No, it doesn't. First, I don't know what you mean by "HTML form." It's not HTML at all.<p>Second: If the formatting codes are going to be ignored by all the viewing applications, why are they in the document in the first place?<p>Every time this comes up, someone floats this weird "but all you need is a text viewer" argument... indicating that Markdown is pointless.
That doesn't explain it since that point is theoretical, in reality markdown is poorly readable even for the basics (table with a few bold red words in a cell easily breaks alignment / readability)<p>(also seeing all those marks isn't aesthetically good, hence the need for a viewer)
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://github.com/rabfulton/ViewMD" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rabfulton/ViewMD</a><p>Markdown viewer for Linux
PowerToys had a Markdown renderer for the Preview window added in version 0.16.0, which was released around late March 2020.
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.
Notepad is turning into the text app I desperately want, except for the association with Copilot. And then with new changes, it had the recent security vulnerabilities issues. The only thing it doesn't have that I want is a sidebar that shows folders or files like so many text editors already do.<p>I never use Notepad anymore. I have been using Pulsar, which is okay, but not exactly what I want.<p>I want a text editor that can do markdown if I want, spell check, minimal tool bar with some formatting shortcuts, etc.<p>I'd love it if a "dumbed down Typora" had a love child with Notepad.
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.<p>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.
All text editors have always supported markdown, even before markdown even existed.
Where does current Notepad store its settings? How could I distribute settings to new users, eg. by applying a reg file?<p>It looks like to me that it stores its settings at "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe\Settings\settings.dat", which is some binary format.<p>Why is registry being abandoned? If it is, why isn't ini or json or a plain text format used? Who are working at Microsoft now, abandoning both the windows ways to approach tasks, and also the other generic sane default approaches?
They should have done this with Wordpad. Notepad should stay most basic editor.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>This doesn't seem like a good idea.
Notepad was historically just a thin wrapper for the "EDIT" window class, along with file loading and saving.<p>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.<p>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.
The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit
<a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/</a>
It isn't minimal since it depends on a terminal
I didn't remember that they'd shipped that. I remember reading about it but I ever tried it. My hot take, after 10 minutes, is that it's frustrating and not at all a replacement for Notepad. (Fortunately you can uninstall the shitty "Windows Notepad" and the real notepad.exe takes over.)<p>This new "Edit" is completely tone-deaf in that it doesn't keep the keybindings from Notepad (i.e. no CTRL-H for find/replace, no F5 for the current date/time). You can't turn off the status bar or the line numbers. It doesn't follow the OS theme (instead pretending to be a text-mode application). It tries to be "helpful" with indentation.<p>At least they bothered to get Find Next with F3 right.<p>It would have been immensely better if they'd just ported the old MS-DOS EDIT / QBASIC over to Windows.
There is something in the toolbar that looks like an avatar in the screenshots on the page.<p>Do you need to log in to notepad now? What in the actual hell is going on?
I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.
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
If you think about it, Wordpad was always just the free "lite" edition of Word for people who didn't buy Office to use. Like Outlook Express was to Outlook.<p>But in the world we seem to be heading toward, where you can only log into Windows with a Microsoft account, and where your Microsoft 365 subscription state controls which "edition" or "desktop experience" of Windows you get as said logged-in user (regardless of which machine you're logged into)... there'd be no need for Wordpad.<p>In that world, Word <i>the software package</i> would <i>always</i> be pre-installed. (Why? Because even if <i>you</i> aren't paying for M365, someone who <i>is</i> could always log into your PC as a roaming user; and that person would want Word to work immediately without having to wait for it to download+install.)<p>And in a world where Word <i>the software package</i> is always preinstalled, then Microsoft could just let anyone launch Word (whether they have an M365 subscription or not); and then, at launch, rather than just putting a paywall in the face of anyone without an M365 subscription, Word could instead use the logged-in user's M365 licensing state to determine whether the spun-up Word process should run the full-fat Word UI, or some kind of degraded unpaid-mode Word UI.<p>And "Word running with some kind of degraded unpaid-mode UI" could be every bit the "Word lite" offering that Wordpad is. Which makes Wordpad itself redundant.<p>(The only weird part to me, is that they deprecated/removed Wordpad <i>before</i> pulling the trigger on all of this.)
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.
Isn’t notepad now react?
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<p>wordpad is all-included on its own
After 30 years on windows I recently switched my gaming desktop over to linux mint. So far proton has handled every game I've thrown at it with only a minor FPS hit. Do note that I only play older games so if you are a bleeding edge gamer it will probably be harder for you. But the peace of mind I get from not being tied to the spyware infected microsoft ecosystem has been well worth it, and the only cost was backing up data from windows for the switch, and the inevitable linux fiddling that's required.
Are there any text editors for Windows that are feature-for-feature and bug-for-bug compatible with the Windows 95 build of Notepad?<p>I'm looking for a plain and simple text editor with no programmers' features—no line numbers, syntax highlighting, etc.—no tabs or MDI whatsoever. No, I'm not looking for something with "you can turn these off", just a complete reimplementation of Win95 Notepad made via black-box testing.
The original notepad was completely broken in the first place anyway. Can't handle large files, ctr+Z would cancel a large random number of previous actions, the search feature is case sensitive and barely useful, etc. What do you miss vs a Notepad++?
I absolutely need a pure SDI workflow. I like browsing through files on disk by the double-clicking them, reading through them a bit, and then using Alt+F4. I tried that with Notepad++ once and I ended up with hundreds of files open in tabs because Notepad++ remembers everything you've ever opened even if you Alt+F4 the app.<p>I also like sometimes having multiple files open at once and drag the windows around my monitors as I need to and you can't do that in Notepad++.<p>Also Notepad++'s UI is bloated. There's just too much going on.<p>And please don't suggest I muck around in settings, I'm not interested in spending hours mucking around in a gigantic bloated settings dialog, I want something that Just Works™ with no configuration just like Win95 Notepad.<p>Edit: My specific use case here is for viewing files, not editing them. I use a different editor when I'm actually writing stuff but for browsing I just want old Notepad.
Honestly, if you need this, just extract NOTEPAD.EXE from a Windows 95 (or NT 4) installation.
> 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.<p>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.
A notepad "welcome experience"? How is <i>notepad</i> turning into bloatware?
I don't consider any of window apps light. I'd rather open a vim on WSL because anyway I always have WSL open on windows. But I welcome markdown support in fact. I can quickly jot down something that is pleasingly presentable to people, say during presentation or meeting. For bloatware perspective, I would be more worried of LLM support which I had no idea it had. I learned it from a comment.
On the face it's reasonable until you remember how frequently we get "welcomed" to Windows and then to Edge.<p>Before you know it every month this thing will appear over the top of what you actually want to do.
I just found out that google docs has “markdown mode” as a beta feature. You can use headings, bold, italic syntax etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en</a>
Ah, finally windows is gaining its edge over Linux. Will 2026 e the year of the windows desktop?
Somewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.
notepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated.<p>But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat.<p>My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example.<p>they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad.<p>It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit.<p>Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.
The core product teams are on like generation 5 of the ship of theseus and every generation has been cheaper and more technically inept than the last.
> You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding.<p>It's funny because they are actively <i>destroying</i> existing branding these days. Like how they renamed Office after their failed AI assistant, rather than the other way around.
Everything is copilot, so much so that I don't even know what copilot is.<p>From the security side, everything is Microsoft Defender. When talking to people I have to say things like "defender but the AV thing that's on by default, not the paid cloud thingy, and by that I don't mean the cloud protection one but the thing that protects endpoints using cloud stuff". They can't come up with good names and they confuse the crap out of their users. I hate to say it's just MBAs, since I don't really know but that'd be my guess. Someone at an Ivy league school somewhere is perpetuating this perhaps?
Years ago replacing Notepad with an alternative was a given and everybody had their favourite. Before UTF everywhere you needed at least proper character encoding handling, other features followed.<p>Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.<p>Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.<p>Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then.<p>Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.
If notepad were to support Markdown by giving it a nice syntax highlighting and niceties like clickable links and automatic list numbering, while preserving the monospaced font, then that would be great. But with rich text formatting it has all the pitfalls of WYSIWYG editors like accidentally changing the style of something, having "formatting typos" where you tried highlighting only part of a word before making it bold, using the wrong header type, etc.
Typora is where it’s at!
When Typora has an iPhone client as good as their other clients, I’ll give up using a mix of Typora and Obsidian and just do all Typora. Neither of them seem to do everything I need. I hope MS does Notepad right, that could be useful.
Yeah. I would happily pay $100 for a typora that supports iOS and encrypted folders.<p>Bear is my fallback on iOS, but I much prefer some of the themes available for Typora, and simple files in folders over tagging.
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.
> To use Write, Rewrite, and Summarize in Notepad, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.<p>> To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.<p>you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. My god they love to identify you.
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.
"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?
I actually welcome this. Markdown is this incredible, future proof, portable and elegant format… up until you have to collaborate on something with a normie
Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S
That's what wordpad is for! Notepad was supposed to be an app that starts faster than you can blink for any file size and show it's plain nature
This is why I uninstalled Notepad.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I want to be able to search text and see text. Not compose a document or talk to an LLM.
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?<p>I hope they give notepad a keyboard shortcut to transition to ascii only like textedit has on the Mac
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?
Stop adding features to notepad. It was feature complete in 1995
A lot of comments about how this is another case of useless bloat. I don't know, markdown is just incredibly useful and widespread and yet it is pretty annoying to find a good editor:<p>- There wasn't anything that comes with Windows that natively supports it (before now)<p>- All your favorite text editors don't support it natively, and plugins vary<p>- You can pay for a nice markdown editor but for some reason your more powerful usual text editor is still free?<p>- You can open VSCode, which is hilarious overkill if you just want to take some notes. Obsidian is excellent but same problem.<p>- Maybe something I'm missing?<p>Basically I think it is a great thing if I just get a lightweight markdown friendly editor built in, because I'll probably use it all the time.<p>...except if it immediately leads to a CVE, I guess.
We can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.
Don't forget Wine ships a faithful notepad.exe reimplementation. It should run just fine on Windows<p>edit: just checked the version that ships with Steam on Linux, yep, works great in a VM
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.<p>Notepad should be last thing they should be fiddling with.<p>I am sad that we have to install 3rd parties for basics now.
It's not like I am thrilled, but it has at least some value over the last what, 5-10 years of windows changes. I can see me mistaking markup. I can't see me mistaking copilot.
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.<p>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.
This pretty much makes notepad pointless.<p>The whole point of notepad was a plain text editor.<p>Wordpad was the lightweight document creation software.
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?
WYSIWYG editors are the worst editors.
This is funny. A post about Notepad in an OS that is dying because of the AI Idioocracy.
Janaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support;<p>Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago:<p><i>Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516</a>
hah, our original idea for Nimbalyst was just for it to be a better desktop markdown editor. Once we were able to get red/green diffs working in rendered markdown which made it much easier to work with AI it evolved into a full agentic work/coding environment.
So they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this:<p>- Notepad: Plain Text<p>- Wordpad: Rich Text<p>- Word: Documents<p>Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?<p>They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?
psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi
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.
Don't care never going to use it
I built a tiny Notepad clone in ~5 minutes using an LLM: open/save, plain text, no surprises.<p>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.<p>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.
This seems to be a product management hickup.
Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.
Wow, what a time to be alive in this year of 2004!<p><i>(2004 is the year Markdown was invented. Notepad got introduced in 1983 and actually predates Windows)</i>
Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?
Let me guess: It uses Copilot to roll the dice on MD rendering. MS might also want to involve OpenClaw, while they're at
it.
They should rewrite windows from scratch using AI
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.
Why must they ruin notepad instead of creating a notepad++.
10 IoT LTSC ftw!
This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.
Can't they just leave it alone?
Never in a million years would I have guess that <i>fucking Markdown</i> of all languages would become the dominant syntax for telling computers what to do, but thanks to LLMs and prompts... here we are.
Notepad++ already exists, is more reliable, and already has a md support plugin<p>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.
If you dont need any of the ++ why would you use notepad++ over notepad?
I always liked Crimson/Emerald more myself.
just nuke notepad in favor of zen-mode vscode. It has everything you want from text editor and it does it quite well
> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.<p>Oh boy.
OneNote should officially get this as well.
Is the value add for Notepad not that it is litterally the most bare bones graphical text editor available in Windows?<p>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.
A little bit slow, Mr. Microsoft ...
Leave Notepad alone!<p>( In case you forgot: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc</a> )
Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.
Honestly they lost me at tabs. I like my notepad ephemeral.
Eh. Tabs are nice. And the auto restore functionality is REALLY nice, and that would just be more difficult to design (though not impossible) without tabs. But new features in notepad should have an extremely high bar for being added, in general.
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.
Windows 11 LTSC still has the old school notepad.exe (and calc.exe) instead of this UWP abomination. Also: <a href="https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841" rel="nofollow">https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...</a>
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.
You can get LTSC. It's a bit of a quest, but it's possible.<p>You need to buy 5 regular Windows licenses and then you'll be able to unlock the LTSC option. It works out to about $300.
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.<p>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.
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i used notepad for the first time in a decade, and it's awesome. mine supports markdown, and tabs.
Video
noooooo
FUCK MICROSOFT.
Uh oh... <a href="https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/" rel="nofollow">https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/</a>
Can Microsoft please stop? If I need Copilot and Markdown Support I use VS Code or any other software that supports it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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",
There's a setting in barcode that disabled AI entirely and the sidebar with it. Works flawless for me since it landed.
Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.
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.
Are we so uncurious that we can’t even look in notepad settings?<p>I’d expect better from an HN user.
simple, replace Windows with Linux or a BSD :)
At this point I'll just switch vendors.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>Enshittification at its finest stink.
Here's an even crazier idea, don't click the Copilot button. WHOA.
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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.<p><a href="https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20841" rel="nofollow">https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...</a>
true! more features is more risk.<p>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 <i>way</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>But we think we're right and still we thought they were wrong.<p>If we were in a PHP forum, this would be my signature: I'm getting too old for this shit.
Today Markdown. Tomorrow WordArt (but with AI probably).
It's fashionable to hate on anything Windows. Especially in tech circles.
TIL Windows still has Notepad.<p>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.