I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month.

20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (804 points, 516 comments)

20260210 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

> "An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad"

Other recent Notepad issues:

20260207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098 Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs? (187 points, 284 comments)

20260127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)

• j2kun

  today at 9:27 PM

  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.

  • 0xy

    today at 9:51 PM

    I think it's more likely that Microsoft is vibe coding slop garbage to replace their core apps that were literally better.

    Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.

    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.

    • steve1977

      today at 10:03 PM

      The best example is probably the new "Outlook", and I put that name in quotes intentionally.

      • password4321

        today at 10:24 PM

        In case anyone is not aware:

        20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials (666 points, 278 comments)

        > the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally

    • bubblewand

      today at 10:20 PM

      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 too hard in favor of "more efficient" webshit... even as the aforementioned stuff with growing team sizes, budgets, and timelines have happened.

• WithinReason

  today at 9:51 PM

  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?

  • dec0dedab0de

    today at 10:16 PM

    It looks like the exploit would cause notepad to retrieve and execute arbitrary code when a malicious link is clicked.

    • cyanydeez

      today at 10:18 PM

      The worst part of enshittification is all these search tools erring on the side of too many results than not enough.

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.

Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.

Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.

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.

Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.

I was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...)

• ondra

  today at 9:08 PM

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

step 1: remove wordpad

step 2: omg there's demand for features

step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad

step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem

• brokencode

  today at 10:28 PM

  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.

  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.

• datenyan

  today at 9:51 PM

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

  • cyanydeez

    today at 10:20 PM

    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.

The new workflow will be "AI, I need to view this text file and add some words to it. Create an app that displays it in a scrollable window, respecting the encoding. Now move the cursor to the line below the three dashes... no, the other three dashes..."

I built a tiny Notepad clone in ~5 minutes using an LLM: open/save, plain text, no surprises.

Lately I've been doing the same for other small utilities. Roughly half the little tools I use are ones I generated and kept because they’re predictable and easy to audit.

The point isn't replacing built-ins; it's reducing dependence on shifting defaults. I want to care less about what the software/os vendor changes this time.

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.

• hurfdurf

  today at 9:59 PM

  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...

  • kiwijamo

    today at 10:06 PM

    It doesn't work everywhere though as there are still apps that don't offer a plain text paste, and as you have noted the shortcut can be different in different applications.

• gmueckl

  today at 9:56 PM

  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.

  • leni536

    today at 10:00 PM

    Careful when doing it in Teams. ctrl+shift+V is "paste without formatting", ctrl+shift+C is "call everyone".

    • MengerSponge

      today at 10:10 PM

      Hey everyone! Check me out! I don't preserve formatting!

Notepad going the way of Wordpad, EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad.

What's next, in a few years we're rocking EDLIN when we need to operate on a text file safely?

• bananaflag

  today at 10:16 PM

  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).

• noinsight

  today at 8:51 PM

  > 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/

  • gmueckl

    today at 10:08 PM

    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.

    This isn't bad at all given how most other software evolved in thr the intervening 30 years.

• Apocryphon

  today at 8:40 PM

  https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ed.htm

• cyberax

  today at 10:01 PM

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

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...

• smusamashah

  today at 9:54 PM

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

• scoopr

  today at 8:18 PM

  Well, at least they brought back edit[0]

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

  • tracker1

    today at 8:26 PM

    If this was actually (pre)installed with Windows, I wouldn't mind the changes to notepad nearly as much.

    • Someone1234

      today at 8:40 PM

      While I'd love it installed by default, I still very much mind that they're ruining Notepad.

      Plus this Markdown preview functionality just caused Notepad to have a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in it.

      • tracker1

        today at 8:46 PM

        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.

        • Someone1234

          today at 10:06 PM

          Agreed. Resurrecting Wordpad and making it really cool/useful would make everyone happy.

          They can add as much AI and Markdown as they want to Wordpad as far as I'm concerned. Just leave my dumb featureless utility alone.

    • noinsight

      today at 8:52 PM

      It is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...

• dmitrygr

  today at 8:24 PM

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

  • accoil

    today at 9:12 PM

    Probably better to get the Win 10 version if you can as it eventually got better line ending support (i.e. both LF & CRLF).

  • mkup

    today at 8:29 PM

    I also bring in the old paint from Vista. I never liked the new ribbon-based design from later version of Windows.

• canistel

  today at 8:12 PM

  Textadept is lightweight, and more...

• hypeatei

  today at 5:37 PM

  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.

  • Someone1234

    today at 8:51 PM

    The issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances.

    So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad."

    Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not.

  • voidfunc

    today at 8:17 PM

    I love Notepad++ but yea, zero confidence in that dev right now. Its programma non grata on my machines at the moment.

    Theyre also very political and giving them access to my machine now feels even more risky.

    • cogman10

      today at 8:53 PM

      If you'd like a lightweight replacement, here's Kate. It's somewhere around a zed featureset, a little less.

      A key benefit of it is that it's not an electron app. It's an old C++ app that's still just chuggin' along.

      https://kate-editor.org/get-it/

  • password4321

    today at 10:16 PM

    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.

    20260202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851548 Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors (917 points, 543 comments)

    20260203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878338 Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown (384 points, 198 comments)

    20250630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426049 High-Severity Vulnerability in Notepad++ (39 points, 14 comments)

    20230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385920 Multiple Notepad++ Flaws Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Code (83 points, 39 comments)

    20230830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320304 Buffer Overflows in Notepad++ (68 points, 61 comments)

    20211209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499002 StrongPity variant hides behind Notepad++ installation (45 points, 28 comments)

    20230829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311068 Notepad++ v8.5.6 still vulnerable to possible arbitrary code execution (18 points, 3 comments)

    20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251 Notepad++ issues attacked by Chinese commenters (237 points, 110 comments)

    20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400526 Notepad++ repository is being spammed after “Free Uyghur” release (82 points, 36 comments)

    20190317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329330 Notepad++ drops code signing for its releases (496 points, 327 comments)

    20170308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032 Notepad++ V 7.3.3 – Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ Issue (1101 points, 291 comments)

    20150112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876823 Notepad ++ hacked for Je Suis Charlie comments(web archive link) (65 points, 74 comments)

• reactordev

  today at 5:38 PM

  Vim is The Way.

• SamuelAdams

  today at 5:36 PM

  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.

  • tmtvl

    today at 5:43 PM

    > absolute lightweight

    > eMacs

    I love Emacs, but I don't see how a Lisp platform with a web browser, a Tetris implementation, and 4 terminal emulators (shell, term, ansi-term, eshell) can be considered 'lightweight'.

    • deathanatos

      today at 8:26 PM

      As the old saying goes, "emacs is an operating system lacking only a decent text editor".

      • noosphr

        today at 10:05 PM

        Not so. Evil mode is a great text editor.

    • 1bpp

      today at 8:17 PM

      To be fair you can say that of anything with a scripting engine, you could have all that in vim or stripped down emacs

      • wk_end

        today at 8:26 PM

        Anything with a scripting engine isn't lightweight compared to (classic) Notepad!

        (Also, a lot of that stuff comes bundled with Emacs out-of-the-box, further disqualifying it. Having a scripting engine is one thing, but having a scripting engine along with the whole rest of the jet is something else entirely!)

    • SamuelAdams

      today at 6:05 PM

      Ha, fair. Lightweight in this context is relative to Notepad or any modern Windows application.

      • kibibu

        today at 7:38 PM

        Notepad.exe used to be <200kB. Emacs is tens of megabytes

  • JohnFen

    today at 7:21 PM

    vi and emacs are absolutely not lightweight, let alone "absolutely lightweight".

    • jmclnx

      today at 7:42 PM

      If by vi you mean vim, then I agree, real vi is rather lite.

      As someone famous said, "everything is relative" :) Compared to the new applications that have been coming out, Emacs and vim are a paragon of lightness.

      • irishcoffee

        today at 8:23 PM

        I agree with you that vi is lighter than vim. I’ve seen more than a few instances of an OS just aliasing vi to vim.

        On that note, why are the keybindings for vi on a “modern” Ubuntu different from fedoras? I remember having to mess with ^H in a vimrc or something to that effect to mimic the behavior I was expecting.

        • cwillu

          today at 10:25 PM

          Sounds like the terminal (not vi) you're using has different defaults; backspace and delete are the two common keys that vary.

  • paxys

    today at 8:25 PM

    I'm sorry but you cannot use VS Code and lightweight in the same sentence.

  • today at 5:45 PM

• zer0zzz

  today at 5:30 PM

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

  • embedding-shape

    today at 5:31 PM

    How about a CTRL+Z that don't undo the past 11 years of changes you've done, and instead just undos one smaller change?

• vee-kay

  today at 8:57 PM

  [dead]

• somenameforme

  today at 5:32 PM

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

  • wk_end

    today at 8:33 PM

    I don't have any use for Notepad++, but reading about this makes me wish I did:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messag...

    The possibility of software being a personal, creative, expressive endeavor (which often includes politics), something I believed in back when I was in university twenty years ago, is a feeling that's receded deeply into the past. That might be as much about me as it is about the world, but I miss it.

    • bigstrat2003

      today at 8:58 PM

      I think that different people want different things. It seems to me like these days the idea of software being a personal expression is in vogue more than not, but there are always going to be those who want that and those who don't.

      That said, if software is a personal creative expression, one must be prepared for the possibility that some people aren't going to like what one has to say. Often when the politics angle comes up with Notepad++, people will say "it's his software project, he has the right to put in political messages if he wants" as if that somehow compels people to be ok with the political messages. The author certainly has the right to use Notepad++ as a platform for his political opinions, and I would never dream of saying otherwise. I don't want him to go to jail, or get fired by his employer, or anything like that. But I similarly have the right to decide that I don't want to see his political opinions and use another piece of software. You pick up both ends of the stick, as the old saying says.

      • pharrington

        today at 9:17 PM

        Where is the place you'd like to see someone say "Declare variables, not war"?

    • NooneAtAll3

      today at 9:25 PM

      reading about political messaging in any software should make you AVOID it, not "wishing to have it"

      the moment software stops being neutral, it becomes a target

      • wk_end

        today at 9:37 PM

        I guess this is true in a professional context - you don't want your user's or company's data somehow becoming compromised because of your choice of text editor.

        But, at the same time, that's exactly the sort of thinking that's killed off that feeling I'm sentimental for. As a free human being, I don't want to live in fear of expressing my political views; and as someone who wants to view the software I make as a form of art or expression, I don't want to be afraid to express my political views through my software either. Should a writer avoid being political for fear of becoming a target? For fear of their books or readers becoming a target?

        • NooneAtAll3

          today at 10:13 PM

          as a free human being, you can do whatever

          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

  • throw4re2ef

    today at 7:54 PM

    I remember a few years back there was an update where it would actually type the political message when you created a new text document. I abandoned it ever since.

    The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.

    • zzrrt

      today at 8:55 PM

      > The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.

      Why would someone express political messages without being selective? It’s understandable not wanting overt politics in your software, but this line is odd.

  • reactordev

    today at 5:37 PM

    Sublime is good too without the political rhetoric. It boggles my mind that windows users refuse the ways of vim.

    • vunderba

      today at 9:08 PM

      Was hoping to see Sublime mentioned here. Super stable and available for nearly everything (Windows, Linux, Mac).

  • today at 5:36 PM

  • BuckRogers

    today at 5:35 PM

    And they were running on such a shoestring deployment that N++ was hacked by the Chinese last year. I'd stick with VS Code.

• 5o1ecist

  today at 5:46 PM

  > 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.

  • soupfordummies

    today at 6:43 PM

    Please show me the few sentence prompt to create a windows 10 level notepad.exe clone that I can quickly open and use by hitting win+r

    • tracker1

      today at 8:31 PM

      I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.

      FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...

    • 5o1ecist

      today at 7:17 PM

      https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hackerne...

      Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter.

      Welcome to 2026. You're late.

      • well_ackshually

        today at 8:51 PM

        >python

        >tkinter

        so you missed the part where notepad starts instantly, doesn't choke on files larger than 25KB and uses native Win32 controls ?

        • Dylan16807

          today at 9:23 PM

          It only takes a few megabytes to make notepad have serious delays. Are you sure the linked program is any worse?

          • cwillu

            today at 10:29 PM

            There's a world of difference between 25kb and 2mb

      • soupfordummies

        today at 7:41 PM

        while this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter, adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc.

        Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.

        • 5o1ecist

          today at 8:14 PM

          > discounting the overhead

          Are you moving the goalpost?

          The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.

          I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.

          • javascriptfan69

            today at 8:41 PM

            >Are you moving the goalpost?

            I mean you did originally claim that this was something that was "for the masses" and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.

            Not that I doubt it couldn't one shot something this simple with a .exe wrapper.

      • pqtyw

        today at 8:23 PM

        > Welcome to 2026

        But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?

Markdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: binary WYSIWYG. I.e. if I type in some plain text and then open the file with anything else (including after moving to another machine/platform, or even viewing raw data stream in transit or on drive), I can trust to see that text, as is, and nothing else. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence.

(Modulo CR/LF, of course.)

• tracker1

  today at 8:34 PM

  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.

• java-man

  today at 6:08 PM

  Remember this?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

  • Terr_

    today at 8:15 PM

    I think the Real Bug™ here comes from product-management: Nobody should be taking this kind of stochastic guess process and then just... 100% trusting the outcome with no feedback to the user and no way for the user to correct bad guesses.

    For example, a prompt when opening the file like: "It's unclear what kind of data this is, here are a few options with a preview, pick which one you'd like me to use."

    Annoying, but them's the breaks when you're making software and aren't willing to put in hard requirements about what it is expected to (not) operate on.

  • TeMPOraL

    today at 6:37 PM

    Ah, the times when computing used to be full of wonder and discovery.

Why is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it.

Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y

• hirako2000

  today at 9:28 PM

  We are hard wired to perceive addition as value.

• falcor84

  today at 9:10 PM

  I for one hate it when product managers update systems to make them simpler and remove features/settings that I depend on.

  • hsbauauvhabzb

    today at 9:13 PM

    Exactly, this is why I want notepad to be as simple as possible. I rely on it. The W11 notepad is frustrating and useless if all I want to do is open a file. I wish they would fix notepad by pushing whatever version was shipped in w10 as the default.

Somewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.

• madeofpalk

  today at 9:51 PM

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

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

So the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows?

Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.

• return_to_monke

  today at 8:29 PM

  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.

• tracker1

  today at 8:25 PM

  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.

  • segphault

    today at 8:40 PM

    Github does publish their spec: https://github.github.com/gfm/ The CommonMark spec is largely based on it.

• delaminator

  today at 9:54 PM

  PowerToys had a Markdown renderer for the Preview window added in version 0.16.0, which was released around late March 2020.

• AdrianB1

  today at 8:55 PM

  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.

At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.

https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...

I still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off.

Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.

• LatencyKills

  today at 8:44 PM

  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.

  • cogman10

    today at 8:49 PM

    Well, you see, they got rid of all the QA so those tests stopped adding value ;)

    • seanthemon

      today at 8:58 PM

      they have AI, they don't need QA or tests, come on man, aren't you a 9999999x engineer?

• Dwedit

  today at 9:38 PM

  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.

• larrybud

  today at 9:27 PM

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

• abrudz

  today at 9:36 PM

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

• WD-42

  today at 9:22 PM

  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?

• deafpolygon

  today at 8:27 PM

  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.

  • ronsor

    today at 8:49 PM

    They could've shoved Copilot in Wordpad

    • deafpolygon

      today at 8:53 PM

      And it would still compete with Word. They want you to switch to Office 365 (I mean, Copilot 365).

      • SllX

        today at 8:59 PM

        You jest but they did name change it to Microsoft 365.

        Confused the hell out of me recently when I was looking for Office 365 on their website.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_365

        • ronsor

          today at 9:21 PM

          It's actually the Microsoft 365 Copilot App

        • mikestew

          today at 9:22 PM

          That’s Microsoft 365 Copilot” to you, buddy.

          https://www.office.com/

          • SllX

            today at 9:58 PM

            Of course it is.

• hsbauauvhabzb

  today at 9:11 PM

  Wouldn’t VSCode be a better alternative to wordpad?

  • lunar_rover

    today at 9:25 PM

    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.

    • overgard

      today at 9:34 PM

      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

  • sigzero

    today at 9:21 PM

    No, not at all.

  • NooneAtAll3

    today at 9:21 PM

    vscode requires downloading all the plugins on top, which is bothersome

    wordpad is all-included on its own

We can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.

• kiwijamo

  today at 10:09 PM

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

  • pelcg

    today at 10:29 PM

    This is my concern with Notepad and the old one will just be gone for ever. Same thing happened with paint.

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.

Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S

Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?

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?

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.

• smusamashah

  today at 9:57 PM

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

• NooneAtAll3

  today at 9:25 PM

  Windows is about GUI, tho

• beart

  today at 5:43 PM

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

  • dijit

    today at 8:35 PM

    Hackernews, mostly.

It's like they are trying to do the opposite of the Unix philosophy. Do many things very poorly.

• pipeline_peak

  today at 5:40 PM

  Why’s this poor?

  • 0cf8612b2e1e

    today at 5:45 PM

    My work machine is Win11 and the new Notepad is hilariously buggy. Repeatedly encountered bugs where the screen fails to paint, takes multiple seconds to load, hard refuses to open files of a certain size, etc.

    Notepad was never fancy, but it was a reliable tool to strip formatting or take a quick note, and now I cannot even count on that.

    • nottorp

      today at 8:21 PM

      They've rewritten it in React?

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.

• ljm

  today at 8:54 PM

  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.

• today at 8:53 PM

• poolnoodle

  today at 8:52 PM

  CRLF vs LF?

> We’re also adding a fill tolerance slider, giving you control over how precisely the Fill tool applies color. To get started, select the Fill tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the tolerance to your desired level. Experiment with different tolerance settings to achieve clean fills or creative effects.

This tool would have been so useful 25 years ago when I had to manually recolour every pixel in the contour of the cool photo I was editing for my new desktop background because the fill tool didn't recognise the background properly.

Honestly they lost me at tabs. I like my notepad ephemeral.

Personally I'm not happy that they are touching and revamping most basic tool of the os. A Notepad, which is a innocent little thing in itself.

Notepad should be last thing they should be fiddling with.

I am sad that we have to install 3rd parties for basics now.

This is why I uninstalled Notepad.

They are convinced it needs to be a worse vscode when all I want is something to edit plain text files.

• cogman10

  today at 8:46 PM

  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.

  • noinsight

    today at 8:57 PM

    > Kate

    So install Kate? There's a Windows build.

    • cogman10

      today at 8:59 PM

      Oh I've ditched windows or I would go grab Kate (I use it on my linux box). I'm just commenting on how even if you were to enrich the features of notepad, the direction to take it is towards a kate editor and not towards an wordpad editor.

psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi

• EvanAnderson

  today at 9:26 PM

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

This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.

So they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this:

- Notepad: Plain Text

- Wordpad: Rich Text

- Word: Documents

Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?

They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?

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.

• Someone1234

  today at 8:38 PM

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

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

• awakeasleep

  today at 5:27 PM

  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

  • rideontime

    today at 5:29 PM

    Gone since Windows 11 24H2, according to Wikipedia.

• aldousd666

  today at 5:35 PM

  Word and wordpad are terrible for editing code snippets tho, markdown solves this problem.

• TiredOfLife

  today at 6:28 PM

  Word and wordpad were rich text editors. Markdown is plain text

This has been supported for a while now, so I wonder why this is being treated as news. But I guess it’s news to some people, so that’s fair.

I tried to take advantage of it, but the implementation felt really clunky (formatting seemed to be via menus only), so I’ve stuck with .txt files.

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

• ceejayoz

  today at 5:36 PM

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

Janaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support;

Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago:

Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516

Wow, what a time to be alive in this year of 2004!

(2004 is the year Markdown was invented. Notepad got introduced in 1983 and actually predates Windows)

• burnt-resistor

  today at 8:17 PM

  RIP Aaron Swartz for inspiration via atx.

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.

> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

Oh boy.

This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.

Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.

Notepad++ already exists, is more reliable, and already has a md support plugin

recent vuln asside (big caveat ill admit) idk why you would use notepad at all when N++ exists

• JohnFen

  today at 7:25 PM

  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.

  • Night_Thastus

    today at 8:33 PM

    It may have features, but you don't need to use them - and at least for me it starts up very quickly and none of those extras get in the way.

• fastasucan

  today at 9:14 PM

  If you dont need any of the ++ why would you use notepad++ over notepad?

  • Dylan16807

    today at 9:44 PM

    I think just about anyone can appreciate having multiple undos. And keeping your unsaved notes safe against crash/reboot.

    I do think notepad recently got those, but for a long time it was a compelling reason to use notepad++.

    And you can avoid copilot.

• tracker1

  today at 8:35 PM

  I always liked Crimson/Emerald more myself.

Hasn’t .md always been supported?

• eks391

  today at 9:36 PM

  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

• Superbowl5889

  today at 9:02 PM

  Article is published in January.

Is the value add for Notepad not that it is litterally the most bare bones graphical text editor available in Windows?

Microsoft has already positioned VS Code as its code editor and OneNote as its notetaking app. Why should Notepad compete with these offerings?

• akgoel

  today at 8:14 PM

  In a Copilot world, Notepad is now meant to render Copilot output, which LLMs do a good job of spitting out Markdown.

• embedding-shape

  today at 5:30 PM

  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?

  • CivBase

    today at 9:22 PM

    I'd think the answer to "why not?" would be because in being a bare bones, dead simple text editor is Notepad's core feature. And by adding these redundant featues, they are effectively removing Notepad's core feature without even providing a replacement.

noooooo

I don’t see why people are complaining. If you use notepad for txt files, nothing changes.

• SamuelAdams

  today at 5:40 PM

  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...

  • john_strinlai

    today at 8:47 PM

    true! more features is more risk.

    but i dont think most people here are complaining because of security risk... otherwise they wouldnt be recommending things like notepad++, other obscure editors, or editors with way larger code bases.

  • jajuuka

    today at 5:44 PM

    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.

    • sunaookami

      today at 8:19 PM

      More code = more vulnerabilites. It's a simple fact. Complexity kills.

• EvanAnderson

  today at 8:54 PM

  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.

• encom

  today at 8:12 PM

  Today Markdown. Tomorrow WordArt (but with AI probably).

• jajuuka

  today at 5:46 PM

  It's fashionable to hate on anything Windows. Especially in tech circles.

  • pipeline_peak

    today at 5:47 PM

    Oh I’m well aware, I just think this reaction is ridiculous.

    Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.

    • bigstrat2003

      today at 8:45 PM

      We used to have a perfectly good application that came with the OS. Then Microsoft ruined it. Yes I can make my own Notepad, but I shouldn't have to. If Microsoft really wanted a built-in text editor that had features Notepad didn't, they should've made a second application rather than ruining the minimalist one.

    • JohnFen

      today at 7:28 PM

      > Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.

      If you use many different machines throughout your workday, this means you have to carry a copy of your bespoke solution with you on a memory stick or something, and hope that the machine you want to use it on allows the use of memory sticks or unapproved software.

      It's far better to use an application that you can count on already existing on the machines.

      • tracker1

        today at 8:43 PM

        TBF, a lot of people used to keep portable apps like this... then IT started locking down even being able to mount a USB storage device. I used to do this for my email and mail profile with a portable Thunderbird.

        I even worked on an app in a relatively secure environment where the work around for an early SPA and IE6-8 company wide, was for the systems analysts using our app to use a portable firefox browser on the user desktop. IE6-8 in particular were really bad when you had an SPA as you had events tied to dom elements across the COM bridge that wouldn't release unless all dom and script references were freed up. jQuery actually did this, if you managed everything through it, but our app was an early version of extjs... so after 3-4 hours it would just run out of memory and die.

• whynotmaybe

  today at 5:43 PM

  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.

  • today at 5:45 PM

Windows 11 LTSC still has the old school notepad.exe (and calc.exe) instead of this UWP abomination. Also: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

• embedding-shape

  today at 5:33 PM

  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.

  • cyberax

    today at 10:05 PM

    You can get LTSC. It's a bit of a quest, but it's possible.

    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.

  • gigel82

    today at 7:44 PM

    It is unfortunately. I have access to a MSDN Subscription (or VS Essentials or whatever it's called nowadays) that comes with some "test" licenses.

    Let's just say I haven't concluded my testing yet, it's ongoing :)

  • today at 5:46 PM

• zaruvi

  today at 5:58 PM

  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.

• vee-kay

  today at 8:48 PM

  [dead]

Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.

• EvanAnderson

  today at 8:52 PM

  From an elevated Powershell prompt:

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

Uh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/

Can Microsoft please stop? If I need Copilot and Markdown Support I use VS Code or any other software that supports it.

I recently used Windows Sandbox and was surprised that it does not have notepad. And why? Because it's a Store App now and that's unsupported inside the Windows Sandbox.

Notepad is supposed to be dumb, not Microsoft!

• embedding-shape

  today at 5:34 PM

  > 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.

  • Avicebron

    today at 5:43 PM

    have you tried adding this to your settings json? workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility": "hidden",

    • tracker1

      today at 8:44 PM

      It's still annoying to have it by default even if you do make use of it.

Yeah no.

Stopped using notepad when they added co-pilot. Stop shoving AI down our throats.

• p_ing

  today at 5:31 PM

  Just disable Copilot?

  • miroljub

    today at 5:32 PM

    Please show us the magic Windows settings that would disable Copilot everywhere.

    • bool3max

      today at 5:36 PM

      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.

      • avazhi

        today at 5:43 PM

        Even with all the debloat scripts you can’t get rid of it in places like Edge. And if your solution is to tell me to use a different browser then… exactly lol.

    • jmclnx

      today at 6:17 PM

      simple, replace Windows with Linux or a BSD :)

      • Crosseye_Jack

        today at 7:01 PM

        Sure, Its the first thing I plan on doing once Autodesk port Fusion to it.

  • munk-a

    today at 5:32 PM

    At this point I'll just switch vendors.

    I don't have the bandwidth to babysit all the different ways MSFT tries to break tools to bother using them.

    • bigyabai

      today at 5:38 PM

      Yep, same as the "just disable notifications asking you to Try the New Safari!" contingency.

      Defaults should not be offensive. If you try to kill me with papercuts, I will stop using your software and never look back.

  • dietr1ch

    today at 5:39 PM

    Just disable recall, copilot, ai, intrusive cookies, ads.

    It's not fine just because you sneak a button to (temporarily) get rid of it. Just make features worth enabling instead.

  • beart

    today at 5:35 PM

    In my experience, most of these features are just turned back on after a Windows update.

  • Thanemate

    today at 5:45 PM

    What happened to "just enable X if you need it"? Why are we always okay with every new thing being enabled by default?

    Is it because the average person isn't as tech savvy as most (if not all) HN readers to know any better, and those companies want the headcount of usage to look high to please stakeholders?

    Enshittification at its finest stink.

  • today at 5:37 PM

  • jajuuka

    today at 5:41 PM

    Here's an even crazier idea, don't click the Copilot button. WHOA.

    • inetknght

      today at 9:03 PM

      Easiest way to do that is to not have the Copilot button at all.

      Easiest way to do that is to use Linux instead.

      • jajuuka

        today at 9:08 PM

        Of course. Story about Windows 11 someone has to chime in "just use Linux".

        I welcome it, because hopefully that will be less people having a meltdown over an icon on a menu bar.

TIL Windows still has Notepad.

Somebody should probably tell Microsoft we’ve all moved on to better things like Notepad++ (even when their update supply chain gets compromised).

• recursive

  today at 9:15 PM

  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.

• ecshafer

  today at 9:17 PM

  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.