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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#521

Post by Rohansi »

shakna wrote: post #413
Rohansi wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This Notepad vuln, allows you to click things like ssh://x.... Which just opens up SSH connecting to a server. Is that really RCE? It'll also only work with URI schemes that are registered on your system. It's not running arbitrary commands - software you install on your PC registers URI schemes and sets what command it should run when opened. It's then up to that software to parse the URI and handle it properly. I…

It doesn't only work with protocols registered by "your system" - Notepad doesn't register protocols. And Notepad is the user agent, here. It works with your _locally_ registered protocols, not just the _remote_ protocols. Which is why it works with JScript. And Powershell. And Visual Basic. This is a bug that replicates why IE 4 was called insecure. Its not something that should ever surface again, today. It is... T…

As far as I can tell there is no URI scheme registered on Windows for JScript, PowerShell, or VBScript. They have file associations but those are not URI schemes.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#522

Post by dangus »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #40
pipeline_peak wrote: post #23

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

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...

Did Microsoft ban you from using something else?

Fun fact: you can uninstall Notepad!

The truth is, unless Notepad got some kind of makeover, it was a useless vestige. It obviously wasn’t a good text editor for plain monospaced text. Having basically zero features didn’t serve anyone - why not use Notepad++ or vim in that case?

I think the most popular use of notepad is to read text files quickly and these days that often includes Markdown files. It makes perfect sense for Notepad to evolve into something that’s actually useful for lightly formatted text formats.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#523

Post by dangus »

sunaookami wrote: post #91
jajuuka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sell your computer. Now you have perfect security!

Fun fact: you can uninstall Notepad if you don’t like it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#524

Post by JohnFen »

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.

Vim is heavier, but vi is not at all "lite".

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#525

Post by JohnFen »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #112
JohnFen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find Notepad++ to be a good replacement for (the old) notepad, personally. It's too feature-filled. The big win of notepad was that it was genuinely minimalist.

It may have features, but you don't need to use them - and at least for me it starts up very quickly and none of those extras get in the way.

True, I can ignore them, but they're still a distraction and impact performance. For the use cases that I want the old Notepad for, Notepad++ isn't a great alternative for me.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#526

Post by throwaway85825 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #299
throwaway85825 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The user is not the customer. Microsoft builds software for the enterprise now, so Windows 11 is full of new features for the enterprise and has nothing for the User. They forgot that Enterprises are made out of Users.

All the enterprise users I know are extremely unhappy with the direction of development.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#527

Post by accoil »

jwrallie wrote: post #293
accoil wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably better to get the Win 10 version if you can as it eventually got better line ending support (i.e. both LF & CRLF).

I got curious about the Wine version, if it has feature parity it may well be the best supported version of notepad right now ;)

If not anything else, I guess it could be added :) Makes me wonder though if that's a limitation of text boxes in Windows (so a translation will need to be made during loading/saving).

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#528

Post by cpill »

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…

Come on man, the usual reason: $$$

Its is Micro$oft after all :P

The reason we're getting this AI gumbo is that obviously the product people at M$ we're told: "Make money by selling AI features!!!". Which flipped their minds from their usual "I am Steve Jobs" fantasies, which tell them to _consider the User experience first_, to _Consider the companie$ experience first_, and they can't keep the two concepts in their little heads at the same time because they are, after all, just product people.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#529

Post by LtWorf »

pferde wrote: post #489
LtWorf wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it also allowed me to type what I want instead of changing every single word due to "spell check" it would actually be a useful tool!

Spell check is fine - highlight misspelled words, offer corrections when asked. What's incredibly harmful is autocorrect, as it slowly but surely causes vast majority of computer users to become partly illiterate. And nobody gives a damn, because hey, we're efficiently saving time!

It didn't cause me to become illiterate, it caused me to give up using it and find something else since it was "correcting" a lot of things that were correct to begin with, and going back to re-change them became a chore in the only 10 minutes I used it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#530

Post by fuzzfactor »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #484
abustamam wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The new calculator isn't just slow to open, it seems to have actual input lag too. God I miss the old calculator. To me it's not sad, it's infuriating. This corporation is worth a trillion dollars. Why can't they do their jobs? I'm sure the old calculator could be maintained and improved without screwing it up beyond belief. Send us some fat stacks and we'll do it.

>God I miss the old calculator.

Prayer won't help you now ;)

With numbers >1000 they are of course displayed with thousands separators as 1,000 (text) now like you would see in financial reports, how attractive. Big numbers have a few commas too. No longer displayed as unseparated numerical constants, like you know, computers have always used.

And if you copy the figure from the calculator display, by right-clicking for the context menu or CTRL-C, you get the whole separated text with commas included to paste into where you need it.

So the receiving textbox you pasted to now needs to have the commas manually edited out before you can go forward, unlike any other Windows calculator.

I guess somebody forgot that people might want it to be at least as useful as it was since the 1990's.

You can still paste plain numeric text in without any commas, it just doesn't copy back out in the same usable format like it always did before.

You can't make this up.

A calculator is supposed to be the perfect example of a no-brainer :\

Edit: If you do the math it must have been more than one person who forgot, you have to think, is it even possible for one person alone to be responsible for quality declines like we have seen on their own? If so who would that be?

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