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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#441

Post by sznio »

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

>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

The inverse has been happening. AI seems to be best at JS and React, so many projects use this just to have the best results. I think this is the whole reason that Claude Code is actually React that's then mapped onto a terminal.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#442

Post by zombot »

waldrews wrote: post #172

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..."

This is how futuristic MS is, because they already work that way when creating slopware like this.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#443

Post by sznio »

procone wrote: post #381
datenyan wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor” Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features. Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.

Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows. What are these horrible takes?

>Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files.

then put the markdown support there to supplant rtfs?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#444

Post by angry_octet »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #377
dataflow wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close. I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extensi…

The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator . It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network. The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sor…

Is that Windows, or the EDR that is hooking every system call and pinning a whole core with analytics?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#445

Post by iqandjoke »

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…

Much worse: CVE-2026-20682 Apple Notes Note Deletion Logic Flaw (An attacker may be able to discover a user’s deleted notes.) Many has not upgraded to iOS 26.3 yet.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#446

Post by reef_sh »

krige wrote: post #423
LevGoldstein wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS. So we're back to the woes of Active Desktop on Windows 98. Everything old is new again.

You could at least disable Active Desktop to dethrottle your PC. Meanwhile, my work W11 PC has a second+ delay for explorer right click and there's nothing I can do about it.

You can actually restore the old right-click menu on W11 with some regedit. Not ideal in any way, and a setting would have been a much better way to toggle this, but it is an option.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#448

Post by egorfine »

torginus wrote: post #424
jchw wrote: post #405

> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it doesn't run locally, whic…

I feel the deepest existential pain in my heart that despite companies being 'all in' on AI, they can't integrate anything meaningful that would make sense to the end use, but would require even a braincells worth of mental effort of ML expertise or actual requirements people have. My two favourite 'AI' tools in image editing have been ones that can replace tedious work. One such example are segmentation models that…

Proper color fill will not make shareholders happy while AI-powered image color replacement will.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#449

Post by 5o1ecist »

soupfordummies wrote: post #321
5o1ecist wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yeah that’s fair. It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance. I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with. Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH

[flagged]

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#450

Post by TeMPOraL »

einr wrote: post #412
eurleif wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation doesn't make this entirely clear, but I think these are two separate things: the original `edit` command which is built into Windows 11 (and has been built into prior Windows releases), and a replacement written in Rust that can optionally be installed. Note that my link is dated 2023, whereas Wikipedia says that Microsoft Edit was first released in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor

The old EDIT never shipped with any 64-bit Windows IIRC, since it was a 16-bit MS-DOS application. I believe 32-bit Windows 10 has it..? As someone who (mercifully) only occasionally has to touch Windows machines, I keep forgetting this, and then when I try to do stuff I’m flabbergasted that the operating system does not include a terminal text editor. (In a fit of pure desperation I even typed EDLIN into the Command…

Well, there was a workaround (that I only learned today) for creating new files:

    copy con file_to_edit.txt
Type text, end with CTRL+Z. Don't make any typos.

That's what web search told me, but then looking at the remarks in docs for `copy`[0], I have to wonder if this works now, and if it would've worked back then:

    copy prefix.txt+con+suffix.txt output.txt
If it does, then combined with some clever use of `find`, `findstr` or `for` (whichever was available back then), you could probably get something that's half-way between EDIT.COM and a line editor.

(`more` would come in handy here, but AIUI, there's no way to run it non-interactively in cmd.exe? Don't have a Windows machine handy to check it right now.)

--

[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

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