Monday, June 2nd 2025
Microsoft Enriches Notepad with Basic Text Formatting
Microsoft has updated its most popular and most basic text editor with some new functionality. In Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels on Windows 11, Microsoft has updated Notepad to version 11.2504.50.0, introducing basic text formatting to its previously simple text editor. Now, it supports Markdown integration, featuring formatted Markdown and Markdown syntax views in the view menu, which allows users to type out Markdown syntax and view it rendered later on. While this may seem like a minor functionality improvement, it is an effort from Microsoft to enrich its basic text editor to a point where it is just enough for lightweight text editing but not close to its flagship Word text editor/processor. As you may recall, Microsoft also recently integrated Copilot, its AI assistant, into Notepad. This update, along with Copilot, will enable users to perform basic text processing with the help of AI, correcting grammar, spelling, and even Markdown syntax mistakes on the fly.
Source:
Windows Blog
17 Comments on Microsoft Enriches Notepad with Basic Text Formatting
The number one use of notepad is to dump text in there to strip off any formatting before pasting it somewhere else.
I think this new version is using enriched text and not exactly/fully Rich Text Format (RTF) which is what the deprecated Wordpad handled. I can be completely wrong with this assumption though.
MS has no clue what they are doing. It's incredible how they manage to develop all their software backwards.
Also Microsoft: adds wordpad's functionalities to notepad
It's still a farce how bad file explorer is and instead of fixing it they mess around with notepad.
or use the formatting options in the toolbar to have Markdown enabled.
Sort of. It seems the default view is "Syntax" for new Markdown tabs, which just shows plain text as usual and hides the format toolbar.
And only with windows 11 notepad I've had problem that text was messing notepad to not responding -.- and it was hard to kill.