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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

141–150 of 558 posts

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#141

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

From an elevated Powershell prompt:

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#142
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#143

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.

CRLF vs LF?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#144
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#145

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.

[deleted]

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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/

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#147

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.

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.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#148

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

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.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#149
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?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#150

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.

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.
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