Markdown in Windows 11 Notepad

My instinctive reaction to the news that Windows 11 Notepad has gotten text formatting support was to reject it outright. What a blasphemy! After reading the article, however, it seemed quite interesting: the formatting is Markdown, you can toggle between formatted and plain text with a click, and most importantly, you can completely disable formatting in the app’s settings.

(This is yet another reason why it’s always good to read beyond the headline. Microsoft’s blog post announcing this feature, for example, doesn’t mention Markdown, which made me expect the worst.)

TextEdit, macOS’s notepad equivalent, offers rich formatting (*.rtf format). It’s horrible. I think I only use it when I open the app for the first time after reinstalling the system or when setting up a new computer. My first move is always to switch the default to plain text in the settings.

That said, I would love for macOS TextEdit to have native Markdown support, even if it were just syntax highlighting — that is, without rendering the formatting.

Back to Windows Notepad, I learned that the version Microsoft has been updating with cool features (Markdown) and questionable ones (Copilot/AI) over the past three years is actually a whole new app. And that the old app — the one that was abandoned by Microsoft for over two decades — remains accessible at C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe. And if the new one is uninstalled, the old one automatically becomes the default. It’s good to have a backup when major changes hit previously reliable software.

(At least that’s what this commenter on Ars Technica says. I don’t have a Windows PC to verify this information.)