Hacker News

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.

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?

This might be the reason for Markdown support, LLMs love it.

Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.

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: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10...

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.

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).

> 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

Oldie bit goodie: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

You can just uninstall this modern notepad. It will bring back plain old notepad.

Well, at least they brought back edit[0]

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

notepad.txt now joins calc.txt in my list of EXEs i bring from an old WinXPx64 install to all new windows installs

Textadept is lightweight, and more...

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.

Vim is The Way.

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.

All we wanted back in the day was Unix line ending support, and they would give even that.

notepad++ is great, though they have a dubious habit of dumping political messages on releases.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Until a future Window release doesn't include the old notepad anymore.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/06/markdown-suppor...

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.

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.

The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.

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.

Wouldn’t VSCode be a better alternative to wordpad?

I need to tell everyone, we can just uninstall this modern notepad which restores plain old notepad.

Windows is about GUI, tho

Hey that's neat! Where do you find out about new features like this?

Why’s this poor?

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?

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.

Just uninstalling the new "Windows Notepad" application is sufficient. No registry changes necessary. I've put a command line in another comment.

Why not use VSCode? It has native Claude Code integration and is literally designed for Markdown from the ground-up.

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

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

Yup. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-20841

RIP Aaron Swartz for inspiration via atx.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

From an elevated Powershell prompt:

> Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -like 'Microsoft.WindowsNotepad*' } | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

> 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.

Just disable Copilot?

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.