(Modulo CR/LF, of course.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

(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.

For a UI I’ve been using VSCode. It is quite quick when you disable all extensions and most settings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

I know there are others and there are fine points. I would like to see a couple minor additions to support image placement (that aligns with Medium's editor) and finally a strike-through text notation. But that's about it.

I think this explains the lack of viewers; they are simply not needed.

This doesn't seem like a good idea.

edit.exe[1,2] actually. And it runs on Linux too! Linux had a real lack of good text editors.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

Do you need to log in to notepad now? What in the actual hell is going on?

And WordPad was built on top of the "RICHEDIT" window class, and exposed lots of the OLE features provided by the rich text control. "Insert Object" is a powerful and potentially dangerous feature with a lineage going back to the Windows 3.1 days. As long as your DLL is registered correctly, any document in an OLE-capable program can cause objects from that DLL to become instantiated and deserialized.

Getting rid of documents able to instantiate arbitrary OLE controls is a good reason to try to remove WordPad. It's not just some simple styled text editor.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/06/markdown-suppor...

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.