Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

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 issues:

20260207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098 Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs? (187 points, 284 comments)

20260127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)

I was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...)

step 1: remove wordpad

step 2: omg there's demand for features

step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad

step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem

It doesn't support basic code/monospace blocks using backticks:

> Unsupported Syntax Detected

> This file contains syntax that isn't fully supported in formatted view. Some content may not render as intended, and switching views could modify parts of your original Markdown. Do you want to continue?

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..."

They’re turning Notepad into what Wordpad was (or was supposed to be). Now everyone looking for the light weightiest *.txt editor must find a new tool...

A notepad "welcome experience"? How is notepad turning into bloatware?

Markdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: binary WYSIWYG. I.e. if I type in some plain text and then open the file with anything else (including after moving to another machine/platform, or even viewing raw data stream in transit or on drive), I can trust to see that text, as is, and nothing else. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence.

(Modulo CR/LF, of course.)

Notepad going the way of Wordpad, EDIT.COM becoming the new Notepad.

What's next, in a few years we're rocking EDLIN when we need to operate on a text file safely?

Once upon a time, you could strip formatting from the clipboard in notepad with ^V ^A ^C, for example if you were trying to paste from edge into word. There's still a market for a non-rich text editor, without autosave, cloud, account login or AI.

This pretty much makes notepad pointless.

The whole point of notepad was a plain text editor.

Wordpad was the lightweight document creation software.

Why is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it.

Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y

Weird, it already does at my work computer since a month which aren't exactly first to get the latest updates and definitely don't get prerelease software. I wonder how all that works.

(Update: Ah, title is a little misleading. This update doesn't introduce Markdown, it adds support for nested Markdown lists etc.)

Personally, I think they should've kept Notepad as-is and reincarnated WordPad instead, rewriting it and giving it Markdown instead of RTF. It already had the basic formatting interface and all. It would've been a pretty smooth transition.

The problem is that Markdown supports quite a bit, even tables, which lends to feature creep. It was already more sluggish without any of this due to moving Notepad to WinUI.

> To use Write, Rewrite, and Summarize in Notepad, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

> To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. My god they love to identify you.

This is funny. A post about Notepad in an OS that is dying because of the AI Idioocracy.

So the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows?

Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.

I just found out that google docs has “markdown mode” as a beta feature. You can use headings, bold, italic syntax etc.

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en

I still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off.

Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.

At this moment ReactOS guys should consider distributing their apps separatelly from their bundle.

https://github.com/reactos/reactos/tree/master/base/applicat...

For everyone that wants a simple, lightweight, alternative to notepad there's edit.exe on recent version of Windows. Assuming you don't mind TUIs.

"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?

It's like they are trying to do the opposite of the Unix philosophy. Do many things very poorly.

Somewhere seemingly out of nowhere John Gruber got a strange sensation, like a goose walking over his grave.

> We’re also adding a fill tolerance slider, giving you control over how precisely the Fill tool applies color. To get started, select the Fill tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the tolerance to your desired level. Experiment with different tolerance settings to achieve clean fills or creative effects.

This tool would have been so useful 25 years ago when I had to manually recolour every pixel in the contour of the cool photo I was editing for my new desktop background because the fill tool didn't recognise the background properly.

Years ago replacing Notepad with an alternative was a given and everybody had their favourite. Before UTF everywhere you needed at least proper character encoding handling, other features followed.

Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.

Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.

Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then.

Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.

If notepad were to support Markdown by giving it a nice syntax highlighting and niceties like clickable links and automatic list numbering, while preserving the monospaced font, then that would be great. But with rich text formatting it has all the pitfalls of WYSIWYG editors like accidentally changing the style of something, having "formatting typos" where you tried highlighting only part of a word before making it bold, using the wrong header type, etc.

Don't forget Wine ships a faithful notepad.exe reimplementation. It should run just fine on Windows

edit: just checked the version that ships with Steam on Linux, yep, works great in a VM

hah, our original idea for Nimbalyst was just for it to be a better desktop markdown editor. Once we were able to get red/green diffs working in rendered markdown which made it much easier to work with AI it evolved into a full agentic work/coding environment.

On one hand, I don't feel strongly about this because I literally never use these builtin Windows tools. I can't help but think it'd just make more sense to include VSCode builtin though. It's already very good and has a nice startup time, and then you don't need to screw-up fundamental system utilities that are more break-in-case-of-emergency then something that should be feature rich.

They should rewrite windows from scratch using AI

Yes. Supports .md but when you try to save back to .txt it does something to line endings that you cannot see in notepad but if you grep your .txt files from wsl like, I do all the time, you get page long strings instead of matching lines. It's weird and I haven't dug into the cause as it was easier to save as a new note but pretty sukky for an IT company to miss something like that.

Perhaps the only one pleased with this change. Another inch closer for more people to give up on this bloated O.S

Stop adding features to notepad. It was feature complete in 1995

It's not like I am thrilled, but it has at least some value over the last what, 5-10 years of windows changes. I can see me mistaking markup. I can't see me mistaking copilot.

This is why I uninstalled Notepad.

They are convinced it needs to be a worse vscode when all I want is something to edit plain text files.

notepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated.

But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat.

My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example.

they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad.

It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit.

Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.

We can just "uninstall" this notepad and it will restore old simple notepad.

Personally I'm not happy that they are touching and revamping most basic tool of the os. A Notepad, which is a innocent little thing in itself.

Notepad should be last thing they should be fiddling with.

I am sad that we have to install 3rd parties for basics now.

It's becoming Word-lite, like Wordpad used to be. Paint is becoming Photoshop-lite, and now has conflicting functionality with the Photos app.

Is it safe to assume LTSC versions of Windows will not have this crap shoved down their throats, as they don't get feature updates only security patches?

Isn't Markdown how they managed to get a Severity 8.8 RCE into notepad.exe?

This has been supported for a while now, so I wonder why this is being treated as news. But I guess it’s news to some people, so that’s fair.

I tried to take advantage of it, but the implementation felt really clunky (formatting seemed to be via menus only), so I’ve stuck with .txt files.

psa: you can "uninstall" the bad sloppad and disable "App Execution Alias" for notepad.exe to get the better notepad back. just fyi

So they kill Notepad, and then turn Notepad into Wordpad? It was supposed to be like this:

- Notepad: Plain Text

- Wordpad: Rich Text

- Word: Documents

Seriously? Markdown is the preferred method for rich text these days, so why didn't they just turn WordPad into a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?

They also shove Copilot into it, but that's a whole different problem. Who is this current iteration of Notepad actually made for?

I built a tiny Notepad clone in ~5 minutes using an LLM: open/save, plain text, no surprises.

Lately I've been doing the same for other small utilities. Roughly half the little tools I use are ones I generated and kept because they’re predictable and easy to audit.

The point isn't replacing built-ins; it's reducing dependence on shifting defaults. I want to care less about what the software/os vendor changes this time.

When I do agentic development with Claude Code, I use notepad to read/edit the .MD files, so this will make my life a little easier.

This seems to be a product management hickup. Call it either something else or add the functionality to WordPad.

Janaury 21st post including 'additional' Markdown support;

Meanwhile, 2 weeks ago:

Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516

Markdown is a superset of HTML. Does this mean notepad is now an HTML renderer as well?

Can't they just leave it alone?

Why must they ruin notepad instead of creating a notepad++.

Never in a million years would I have guess that fucking Markdown of all languages would become the dominant syntax for telling computers what to do, but thanks to LLMs and prompts... here we are.

Wow, what a time to be alive in this year of 2004!

(2004 is the year Markdown was invented. Notepad got introduced in 1983 and actually predates Windows)

10 IoT LTSC ftw!

This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.

A little bit slow, Mr. Microsoft ...

Just include Visual Studio Code, leave Notepad alone. Edit: On second thought, go ahead. I'm already off the OS, exactly because of things like this. The less relevant the OS becomes, the better my life will be.

> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

Oh boy.

Notepad++ already exists, is more reliable, and already has a md support plugin

recent vuln asside (big caveat ill admit) idk why you would use notepad at all when N++ exists

Leave Notepad alone!

( In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vw1rMkUFqyc )

Is the value add for Notepad not that it is litterally the most bare bones graphical text editor available in Windows?

Microsoft has already positioned VS Code as its code editor and OneNote as its notetaking app. Why should Notepad compete with these offerings?

i used notepad for the first time in a decade, and it's awesome. mine supports markdown, and tabs.

Honestly they lost me at tabs. I like my notepad ephemeral.

Oh look. Another random and unneeded feature appears in their legacy tool.

Hasn’t .md always been supported?

Video

Windows 11 LTSC still has the old school notepad.exe (and calc.exe) instead of this UWP abomination. Also: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

noooooo

Uh oh... https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/

Can Microsoft please stop? If I need Copilot and Markdown Support I use VS Code or any other software that supports it.

I recently used Windows Sandbox and was surprised that it does not have notepad. And why? Because it's a Store App now and that's unsupported inside the Windows Sandbox.

Notepad is supposed to be dumb, not Microsoft!

FUCK MICROSOFT.

Thanks, I hate it. How do I disable it? Oh, I can't. Thanks, I hate it more.

Yeah no.

Stopped using notepad when they added co-pilot. Stop shoving AI down our throats.

[dead]

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

TIL Windows still has Notepad.

Somebody should probably tell Microsoft we’ve all moved on to better things like Notepad++ (even when their update supply chain gets compromised).