Sunday, July 7th 2024

Windows 11 Notepad Gets Spellcheck Feature
Everyone's favorite plaintext editor, the Windows Notepad, now has Spellcheck. The latest update to Notepad in Windows 11 adds spellchecks, along with spelling suggestions. The company had released Spellcheck and Autocorrect to Insiders in March 2024, and has now rolled the feature out to the regular userbase. The feature is enabled by default. The app now also has an autocorrect feature that, well, automatically corrects common typos the way a fully fledged word processor would. Both Spellcheck and Autocorrect are now enabled by default, and can be turned off in the gearwheel screen. Starting with Windows 11, Microsoft turned many of the popular Windows Accessories to UWP apps. These used to be Win32 apps in previous Windows versions. The company continuously updates these apps through the Windows Store platform, and we've noticed that Notepad got several new features it never had over the past three decades, including tabs, session restore, and now Spellcheck.
46 Comments on Windows 11 Notepad Gets Spellcheck Feature
EDIT: I take it all back, see below. You are looking at keyboard layout sir. That's seperate from OS language IIRC.
English and Spanish for this test:
On the other hand, it doesn't highlight either metre or meter, so I guess the word "realise/realize" was a one off error?
Imagine editing a script, config file, or whatever, and have the damned thing autocorrect your variables.
Spellcheck is a nice addition, but defaulting autocorrect to enabled is just plain stupid. This is not a smartphone IM app.
Y'all still on Windows should pray that MS remembers they have VSCode. Else the next notepad "update" will have intellisense strapped on (because they won't just settle for petty syntax highlights a la notepad++, gnome-text-editor), and your 100kb readme will take two hours to launch. What makes a "modern OS," exactly?
Folks,
Block Notepad from online access with the firewall of your choice.
This is what I'm doing on IoT LTSC 2024.
"AS is"
"Unedited"
"yup I noticed there is a mistake here in the code"
type of stuff.
Adding spellcheck into notepad destroy the whole purpose of it.
(And I'd hardly call a yet-to-exist specification modern).
The rest is a nice wish list. Some are questions of implementation quality rather than existence (e.g. autoscaling), others are highly subjective. e.g. user friendliness. And I question equating it with modernity in the first place. See critique of flat design back when it was the symbol of modernity. Me thinks you're looking the wrong way there, mate. Reject modernity, embrace tradition!
winaero.com/classic-notepad-for-windows-11/#Download_Classic_Notepad_for_Windows_11
Windows as an offline OS that can do a lot locally is going to be a perk in an online world. They're throwing that away for a lot of people and its not only a shame, it will not help them differentiate from any mobile OS sooner rather than later. And we all know, they're not going to survive as just 'a mobile OS'. They're far behind on that front, their app store is still barely a factor of importance for example, and if they move towards gatekeeping all the things you do on Windows while Apple et all are just now getting forced to open up... Its not a big step either to hook a phone to a dock and a screen and work on it. You're using cloud anyway, right. Where's Windows Phone? :)
I don't know I don't see the space where Windows still needs to exist at that point. It'll be more of a 'yet another cloud service' that offers a rich Office experience and whatnot. So maybe they can carve out a bit of productivity-oriented space there in the consumer market. And then what's next? The next generation of users, or the one after that, grows up without Windows. Its already happening, except now Windows still has a chance to stand out as something special. Heck, you could probably do all of the productivity stuff just as well in any browser based app like Google Docs or something other that can often be had for free. Windows is the only ticket MS really has to keep a strong brand presence. And what will that generation opt for when they run their business next? Its far away I admit, but their cloud business alone won't save them, I think.