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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#251

Post by throwaway85825 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #242
bubblewand wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps Somehow in this timeline AI can only be used to make things worse and sloppier

Software used to be built for users, now it just has to look good as a screenshot.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#252

Post by throwaway85825 »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #249

notepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated. But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat. My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decisi…

The core product teams are on like generation 5 of the ship of theseus and every generation has been cheaper and more technically inept than the last.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#253

Post by benbristow »

ondra wrote: post #162
paxys wrote: post #102

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... )

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

Well they're text generation engines, of course they do, it's all just text.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#254

Post by ruszki »

password4321 wrote: post #234
steve1977 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

This was one of the most outrageous data grab in the past years. They replaced the completely working simple Mail app, which I used until that point, with this garbage, and I was just lucky that I paid attention, and I stopped for a sec what is that warning which tells you that they grab literally all of your emails.

Btw, just before that I found this page regarding Edge, and this is why I paid more attention to these things: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/microsoft-edge/priva...

That list is way too long for my taste, and it really indicated me that Windows became completely adversarial.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#255

Post by BubbleRings »

QuiEgo wrote: post #246
porphyra wrote: post #245

If notepad were to support Markdown by giving it a nice syntax highlighting and niceties like clickable links and automatic list numbering, while preserving the monospaced font, then that would be great. But with rich text formatting it has all the pitfalls of WYSIWYG editors like accidentally changing the style of something, having "formatting typos" where you tried highlighting only part of a word before making it…

Typora is where it’s at!

When Typora has an iPhone client as good as their other clients, I’ll give up using a mix of Typora and Obsidian and just do all Typora. Neither of them seem to do everything I need. I hope MS does Notepad right, that could be useful.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#256

Post by BubbleRings »

MengerSponge wrote: post #225
leni536 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

(I heard this in Homer Simpson’s voice.)

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#257

Post by jug »

Weird, it already does at my work computer since a month which aren't exactly first to get the latest updates and definitely don't get prerelease software. I wonder how all that works.

(Update: Ah, title is a little misleading. This update doesn't introduce Markdown, it adds support for nested Markdown lists etc.)

Personally, I think they should've kept Notepad as-is and reincarnated WordPad instead, rewriting it and giving it Markdown instead of RTF. It already had the basic formatting interface and all. It would've been a pretty smooth transition.

The problem is that Markdown supports quite a bit, even tables, which lends to feature creep. It was already more sluggish without any of this due to moving Notepad to WinUI.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#258

Post by [deleted] »

j2kun wrote: post #189
password4321 wrote: post #179

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 issu…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#259

Post by mulmen »

nextaccountic wrote: post #242
bubblewand wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps Somehow in this timeline AI can only be used to make things worse and sloppier

It’s also weird that the productivity increases of AI lead to layoffs instead of hiring. If we can do more with AI why are companies scrambling to maintain the current output? Does leadership lack the vision of what to do with the additional productivity?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#260

Post by ruszki »

voidfunc wrote: post #89
hypeatei wrote: post #34

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.

Which response are we talking about which was problematic?
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