Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#491

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

abustamam wrote: post #407

matheusmoreira wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator. It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be. Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.

Yeah, I think that is a common first task when learning to program. Learning about strings: write a first-grade-math expression calculator. Learning Java: make a GUI calculator. Now convert between prefix, infix and postfix notation. This is all even before you learn about classes or files.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#492

Post by projektfu » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

canucker2016 wrote: post #362

brokencode wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-... The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-…

I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#493

Post by intrasight » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

leeter wrote: post #490

When MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move. When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS... When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts... When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it... When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history... When their updates refused…

I still have a Win7 VM I fire up sometimes for nostalgia sake. Beautiful and snappy. Bittersweet.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#494

Post by ubermonkey » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

Pass.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#495

Post by krater23 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #493

leeter wrote: post #490

When MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move. When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS... When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts... When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it... When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history... When their updates refused…

I still have a Win7 VM I fire up sometimes for nostalgia sake. Beautiful and snappy. Bittersweet.

I still use Windows 7 regulary. And guess what, the virus and bot apocalypse doesn't happened as the support stopped.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#496

Post by krater23 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

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.

Making automatic updates mandatory is another name for 'Give M$ remote code execution'.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#497

Post by krater23 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #477

nxobject wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1] Step 6: GOTO 1. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it. Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682

The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more? OK. The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#498

Post by brazzy » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

reef_sh wrote: post #480

brazzy wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the old righ-click menu is ALSO much slower on Windows 11. Shows a fucking spinner for half a second before the menu appears.

I've found that ( at least for me ) that was caused by some entries doing some checks before showing up. Getting a context menu editor and removing some of them can help.

Doesn't matter, it's a shit user experience and Microsoft's fault for putting the onus on the user to fiddle around at that level, rather than putting a hard, very low limit on how long shell extensions can hold up the context menu before they're banned from it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#499

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

leeter wrote: post #490

When MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move. When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS... When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts... When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it... When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history... When their updates refused…

> To me the best windows would be Windows 11's kernel and libraries with Windows 7's UI and apps.

Does anyone now how to achieve that? What happens when you replace the kernel in a Windows 7 installation with the one from Windows 11? How is the manual update procedure for kernels on MS Windows?

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#500

Post by catapart » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

For anyone still using Windows' notepad app, I strongly recommend Notepad2[0].

It's a drop-in replacement for Notepad that does add a few extra features, but does not have even the minimal suite of features that something like Notepad++ has. Where Notepad++ is great for code editing and extensible functionality via plugins, Notepad2 is more suited for people who just want Notepad, without the Windows/Microsoft. It has line numbers and (limited) syntax highlighting and a dark mode - bits and bobs like that - but it does not have tabs and ftp-on-save and the more complex stuff that requires a larger binary size.

It's free, it works like Notepad, and it acts like a bare bones text editor. In many, many cases, it's exactly what I want, and it's always exactly what I want in cases where my original intention would have been to use Windows' Notepad.

[0] https://notepad2.com/