Notepad in Windows 11 could support RTF, syntax highlighting and more

Notepad has been a core application in Windows since the very first version of the operating system. However, unlike other features of the operating system, the text editor received no improvements.

This changed recently, when the Redmond company gave the text editor a much-needed overhaul. If you’re out of the loop, the latest version of Notepad brought several new features such as multi-level Undo and Redo, Emoji support, text drag and drop, Unicode characters, etc. The program’s interface received a makeover which has a fluid design. with rounded corners, new menu styles, a settings page, and even a dark theme.

RicoEditar

A development blog article on the Microsoft website highlights the technical details behind the improvements made to Notepad. The classic version of the text editor had a couple of features like end-of-line detection (CR, LF, CRLF) and displaying Unicode control characters. These obstacles made it difficult for Microsoft to transition to the new version.

The latest version of Notepad uses the RichEdit engine that is implemented in Microsoft Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. This allowed the developers to modernize the program to add features like automatic URL detection, colored emojis, etc. Notepad is available in the Microsoft Store, and this has provided the company with an easy way to update and improve the app.

The future of the notepad

A blog post from a Microsoft engineer, Murray Sargent of Microsoft, describes the plans that Notepad has in store. Since RichEdit was successfully implemented in Notepad, the tool could gain additional formatting options, such as text coloring, spell checking, and other Rich Text Formatting (RTF) features. Notepad may be able to help programmers write code faster with features like syntax highlighting, indentation for XML files, toggle between start and end tags for HTML/XML, JSON.

It’s certainly interesting to see the direction the basic but essential text editor is headed. I admit I was worried that the new Notepad would get bogged down with new features. But it has been pretty similar in terms of performance, compared to how the previous version used to run. Of course my use case might not be the same as yours. I mainly use the program to view/edit small documents, or to take notes, simply because it is the fastest program on Windows.

The Microsoft article mentions that the program has difficulty handling large files. It turns out that automatic URL detection is one of the culprits affecting the experience. But he also goes on to say that the text editor’s performance needs to be improved for such tasks, so that’s something we can look forward to. The post also indicates that some of the features that were added to the text editor were inspired by options that are available in Visual Studio Code. These include the new Find and Replace dropdown menu, character selection, and plain text controls.

I wish Notepad had an auto save option, tabs and sessions supported like in Notepad++ and CudaText.

What features do you want to see in Notepad?

advertising