Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason.<p>I don&#x27;t know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.<p>For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.<p>Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.<p>It&#x27;s nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.

10 minute QA because they don&#x27;t seem to have done it:<p>- It consistently starts slower than Notepad3 while having substantially fewer features to load (and also slower than the old Notepad of course)<p>- THEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS (especially when grabbing the scroll bar handle). Any amount of delay is too much in notepad<p>- the animation runs at 60Hz even on a high refresh rate screen, so it looks choppy<p>- the animation has to &quot;catch up&quot; when grabbing the scroll bar handle and moving it quickly<p>- 215k lines loaded, <i>moving the window itself</i> is choppy now? HOW<p>- another first party piece of software that ignores the &quot;no animations&quot; setting in windows<p>- I&#x27;ve grabbed a notepad.exe from Windows XP SP3 in comparison, no problems there, scrolling and editing is instant. Both have SIGNIFICANT lag in the new one.<p>- Don&#x27;t even try to resize the window with a big file open (&lt; 1 FPS)<p>EDIT: Note that I haven&#x27;t even complained about new features or anything, just the previous, basic features still working correctly.

The greatest thing about Notepad is that it runs and displays a blinking cursor ready for typing in much less than a second for a new document. On my Windows 11 machine it appears to be around 200 msec. I&#x27;ve tried setting my text file handler to other text editors but nothing else comes close to this speed of utility. I&#x27;m very glad they are not messing with that.<p>Overall, I&#x27;m very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It&#x27;s not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It&#x27;s more of a nicety to upgrade. It&#x27;s better looking but functionally not much different afaik

I was expecting a ribbon or other fluff (like write.exe &#x2F; WordPad), perhaps even ads (two days ago I saw at a friend&#x27;s that a Windows built-in game now has ads). Honestly I&#x27;m very impressed they kept the simple look. It&#x27;s just a larger-than-necessary menu bar and some unobtrusive theming and that&#x27;s it. The toggleable dark mode is also a welcome change for me.<p>I do assume we can open files larger than a few megabytes now and there were some more functionality issues that seemed very 90s, could it be that there was only one undo step or did they already fix that in a previous release? I truly haven&#x27;t used Windows in, dare I say, too long.<p>Edit: yes I did remember the undo problem correctly and that&#x27;s finally fixed: &quot;adding support for multi-level undo&quot;.

They added much more whitespace. In line with modern UI fashion trends.<p>Please can we stop this trend? It&#x27;s ridiculous. It universally makes the user experience <i>worse</i> by reducing the effective screen real estate for actual work. Nobody cares about the aesthetic, they get used to it after a few session.

It&#x27;s crazy to me that Windows 11 has already been released and yet they&#x27;re still adding what should be core functionality to the OS as an after thought.<p>If they are so set on redesigning Notepad and&#x2F;or all system apps to use the new design style, why would those not be prioritized and included in the original release from day 1?

What happened to UI customizablity since windows 7&#x2F;8?<p>Windows XP use to have software to make shell look like anything. Only ever felt the need for skinning since windows 8 to go back to old UI which has clear borders and boundaries for everything including windows, buttons, menu bars, menus taskbar buttons...and lots of other things.<p>Is it harder to skin now? Why there aren&#x27;t any software to give windows its classic look back?

From the Linux side of the fence;<p>Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big &quot;important sounding&quot; announcement for something so trivial? Why encourage or tolerate an operating system (slash ecosystem of apps) with such a limited view of choice? Announcements like this really lay bare the collective dumbing down that these centralized ecosystems encourage.<p>Someone&#x27;s going to respond with &quot;people don&#x27;t like thinking about choices for things and just want simplicity,&quot; and I will point you to an American grocery store to remind you what utter BS that is. This is monopoly(ish) leveraging, perhaps not at its most harmful, but it&#x27;s really silly.

I assume it will be at least as slow to load as the redesigned Calculator, and bug me to rate it Microsoft Store every now and then.

That &#x27;redesigned find and replace experience&#x27; covers the text in the same way the old notepad did, but the old notepad you could move the window.<p>I could have sworn it would have supported dark mode too. Was the old notepad using WHITE instead of the system window background color all that time?

I just hope the new version is fast and not like Paint 3D which sometimes spends multiple seconds &quot;creating a new project&quot; when opening a simple PNG on a 5950X.

&quot;with a lot of effort, Microsoft succeeded in adding undo&quot;<p>not 1987

I understand it&#x27;s reasonable to be cynical about Windows, but is it really appropriate here[1] when the changes of note are support for dark mode and multiple undo steps? At least wait for someone to find an actual problem.<p>[1] When I post this, the only other comments are complaints. The ones that are at least complaining about notepad are complaining that MS had the gall to change notepad without pointing to anything specific.

If you looked at the code for the old XP Notepad, it was the Windows standard text entry control resized to full screen.

Pedantic: does anyone find the existence of the gear icon very odd (out of place)?

windows 10 + 11 is such a mess.<p>It&#x27;s just a pretty skin on top of the same Windows NT Window chrome. The modern UI skin is baked in with a bunch of none-sensical UX decisions.<p>I also hate how Windows&#x27; happy-path setup, does not encourage use to create and operate with a low privileged local account. Instead, if you click through the setup process, you end up running the OS w&#x2F; an admin level account.

It&#x27;s interesting how a multibillion company can make a simple editor a little worse, while a single guy with a few contributors can make something so useful (Notepad++).<p>Of course it&#x27;s important with backwards compatibility but.. is it worth the cost?

I use Notepad almost daily to &quot;strip&quot; formatting before pasting content. I hope they don&#x27;t ever change that ability.

I hope they put in some way to search Bing using Edge, with no way to change the search provider or browser I use.

It bugs me that the toolbar now takes up more vertical space than before. Not only does the padding just look funny, but vertical space is a premium in widescreen layouts! C&#x27;mon Microsoft!

Here&#x27;s a few features I&#x27;d like to see for Notepad which I don&#x27;t think would compromise its performance or minimalist design:<p><pre><code> - multi-cursor support - tab to indent selection - encoding selection - fully controllable with hotkeys - [optional] line numbers - [optional] visible whitespace characters - [optional] column ruler - [optional] spaces instead of tabs - [optional] unix-style line breaks</code></pre>

They should just open source the consumer level userland apps and outsource the dev work to third party contributors. It would save quite a bit of money.

I don&#x27;t really see the selling point of upgrading to Windows 11 - what does it get me, a moderate power user who is moderately set in his ways

This is nice. I run dark mode everywhere and I used to use notepad for quick notes and stuff. Problem is that notepad is a giant wide window so it would burn my eyes out when opened, so I had to switch to something else. Now I can use it for that purpose again... Providing I move to Win11 that is. Still not a fan of the task bar lacking features I use a lot.

&gt; including rounded corners<p>I have no idea how I got on all these years with square corners in my text editor.

I moved from Windows to Xubuntu recently, and the single thing that I miss most is this feeling of simple sturdy low latency applications that Windows once provided. Notepad, Paint, the whole Windows pre-Vista aesthetic. It was even present in IE6 - every website felt as a heavy paper form in it. Now everything went to Chrome-like weightless fragility. Microsoft should&#x27;ve fixed all the WPF issues (including blurry rendering, stupid lack of margins by default etc.) 12 years ago and made it ready for the cross-platform evolution of dotnet. That would&#x27;ve solidified their desktop presence for a decade at least. Now they are just putting more and more nails into the coffin.

Did they extend this popular feature?<p><pre><code> Edit -&gt; Search with Bing... (Ctrl-E)</code></pre>

This is underwhelming. Textarea in any web application has more features, such as spellcheck, and now in Edge, even grammar check!<p>Multilevel undo&#x2F;redo should have been delivered at least 20 years ago.<p>How about the ability to handle files with Mac or Linux style linebreaks? Wordpad can handle it but not Notepad.<p>How about showing recent files in File menu?<p>Really what Microsoft ought to do is to ship VSCode as the new text editor for Windows (after removing all coding features that might confuse end users). Retain the old Notepad for people who use it in established workflows, no point in updating it at this point because it is hopelessly obsolete.

It seems to me that the new OS arms race is about tooling, not just base UX, and Windows is starting to play catch up. The modern Mac OS and Linux desktop environments don&#x27;t just match up to Windows, but surpass it in many respects.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised to see many &quot;new&quot; functionalities being introduced to Windows tools in the near future, with the catch that you will lose out on performance for a multitude of reasons: like trying too hard on aesthetics, trying to emulate the tooling of entirely different systems, or maintaining backwards compatibility.

Notepad is a decent editor, lacking only a good operating system to run on.

I would love for Windows to ship with a command line text editor so that I could be guaranteed to have something when using a remote command line. The moral equivalent of knowing vi will be on any Linux system from a server to doorbell. Maybe I&#x27;ll learn about one from the HN crowd. I&#x27;ve tried my old DOS go-tos (e.g. edit), but they&#x27;re no longer around.<p>Sometimes I just copy and paste file contents to local, edit, and write it to out with command line utilities or powershell.

I thought the reason for putting apps into windows store was to make them easily upgradable across versions of windows.<p>It is here - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;p&#x2F;windows-notepad&#x2F;9msmlrh6lzf3#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;p&#x2F;windows-notepad&#x2F;9msmlrh6lz...</a> so where did that go and why it is not updated on Windows 10? Why is this exclusive to crappy windows 11?

30 years on and now we have rounded corners.

&gt; also adding support for multi-level undo<p>To think that this feature is &quot;new&quot;...<p>I know notepad is supposed to be as simple as possible, a very fast default and always available text editor. But single undo is for me the single reason I always install notepad++ if I plan to use the computer in the future, or use Wordpad if not.

Ever since I started using a macbook for work, I have searched far and wide for a notepad.exe replacement and every single app has come up short. Let&#x27;s hope this revamped version retains the snappiness, simplicity that made the original great, unlike calc.exe&#x27;s replacement.

Notepad has been an annoyance for decades. Before I clicked the link I thought there might be enhanced features and reworked usability. Unfortunately the new features fall short. The one they seem proudest of is a dark mode.

When I saw this, I was really scared that they&#x27;d ruined Notepad by adding features. But fortunately it looks like this update is acceptable. I am still worried they won&#x27;t have the sense to stop, though

Does this mean Microsoft have re-written Notepad to use something like Electron?<p>As the original Notepad was written in Win32 app, doesn&#x27;t that also signed the death sentence for Win32 on Windows?

It still doesn&#x27;t have half of Kate&#x27;s (Plasma&#x27;s default editor) functionalities. The only addition seems to be the dark mode, which is very opinionated and unchangeable

Well that’s the one decent remaining bit of windows fucked up.

&quot; are also adding support for multi-level undo&quot;<p>Wow, how advanced. For those of you who did not know, Notepad allowed exactly ONE undo step. ONE! In a frickin text editor.

Could it be rewritten in Electron? Out of bazillion words they could have chosen they used &quot;electron&quot; to show a find and replace feature.

can you choose line endings as LF not CRLF in Notepad?

I wish they would just notify us when this Windows 10X v.2 cadaver will reach feature parity with Windows 10.

Bummer, they didn&#x27;t add tabs :(

Binary Fortress’s Notepad Replacer no longer works in Win11 to set Notepad++

Microsoft has not added any functionality to their operating system or applications since 1998–only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors. I can’t think of one thing I can do in the Microsoft Office suite I couldn’t do 20 years ago. It’s just slower.

&gt; We know how important Notepad is to so many of your daily workflows…<p>Perhaps the single funniest line ever penned by Microsoft.<p>Cannot imagine any “Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel” who use, let alone rely on, Notepad for any serious work.<p>EDIT: I stand corrected - mea culpa!

Redesigned search&#x2F;replace? OK, I want regex support.

can&#x27;t wait for the next version which will have an annual subscription cost (or ads)<p>just like solitaire: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;external-content.duckduckgo.com&#x2F;iu&#x2F;?u=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic2.businessinsider.com%2Fimage%2F55b6862b2acae76e098b8fa1-1280-1000%2Fmicrosoft%2520solitaire%2520collection%25207_27_2015%252012_24_07%2520pm.png&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;external-content.duckduckgo.com&#x2F;iu&#x2F;?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs...</a>

If it doesn&#x27;t collect &quot;telemetry&quot; about every keystroke, mouse movement, and cough, I don&#x27;t want it.

Does it have freaking linewrap?

Tech-debt-shockwave incomming!

They are really into breaking things that didn&#x27;t need fixing over the past year or so.

marginally less suck-ish.

why this late?<p>when was windows 11 released?<p>why do they act a small indie company working on a week-end school project?<p>this is so fishy..

There is something pathologically dysfunctional about a trillion-dollar organization that thinks a few imperceptible improvements to decades-old programs that individual programmers have created far superior versions of for free are worth announcing like it’s a marvel of engineering. We saw the same thing with Windows Terminal—they even made a trailer for it.<p>Like, these are the kinds of updates that would take one person a weekend to accomplish. Nor would that individual think to brag about implementing rounded corners. But the bureaucracy inside Microsoft is so sclerotic and hostile to excellence that even these changes require heroic allocations of effort.

I was a little surprised to learn that my four-year-old processor (i7-7700) was locked out of running windows 11. It&#x27;s certainly not processor speed issue, it&#x27;s still plenty fast for games today. It&#x27;s not TPM either, which it supports. The best I can tell, Microsoft drew a line and said &quot;too bad,&quot; for everything before a certain generation.<p>I really only play games on my computer--I have no idea when I&#x27;ll upgrade the CPU. The last one lasted nearly a decade before I replaced it. I guess it&#x27;ll be a while before I see Windows 11. I&#x27;m not too mad though--Windows 10 is a fine Operating System.

&quot;Productivity, performance, and reliability are paramount in Notepad. Regardless of how you incorporate Notepad into your workflows, we will ensure that Notepad continues to excel in those areas.&quot;<p>Is this from Microsoft? Is this real?

Hacker News: Windows is terrible because the user interface is inconsistent<p>Microsoft: Okay, we&#x27;ve made a small visual refresh of Notepad so that it&#x27;s more visually consistent with Windows 11<p>Hacker News: Stop breaking my childhood!