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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#91

Post by sunaookami »

jajuuka wrote: post #50
SamuelAdams wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#92

Post by nottorp »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #55
pipeline_peak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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.

They've rewritten it in React?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#93

Post by tracker1 »

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.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#94

Post by pqtyw »

5o1ecist wrote: post #71
soupfordummies wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

> Welcome to 2026

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#95

Post by irishcoffee »

jmclnx wrote: post #77
JohnFen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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.

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.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#96

Post by dmitrygr »

Longhanks wrote: post #4

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...

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#97

Post by paxys »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #30
Longhanks wrote: post #4

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...

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.

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#98

Post by tracker1 »

MoonWalk wrote: post #83

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.

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.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#99

Post by tracker1 »

scoopr wrote: post #90
Longhanks wrote: post #4

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

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