[Review] Notepad Improvements in Windows 10

Notepad is a built-in text editor program in Windows operating system. Many Windows users including me love this tiny text editing tool. It’s small, simple and very light on system resources. If you want a simple text editing software, you don’t need to install any 3rd party software, Notepad is just perfect for you.

Notepad can be found in almost all Windows versions whether it’s good ol’ Windows XP or the latest Windows 10. But the poor Notepad was never upgraded to include new features. It always remained a basic text editing program.

Finally Microsoft gave some attention and love to this tiny program and made some major improvements to Notepad in newer versions of Windows 10 operating system. If you are using latest Windows 10 version, you’ll find lots of improvements and changes in Notepad.

Today in this article, we are going to review all improvements present in Notepad in newer Windows 10 versions.

Let’s start the review:

Notepad Status Bar Bug Fixed [Finally]

All Notepad versions present in all Windows such as Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10 contained a bug. We reported this bug long time back in 2007. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might remember it.

Check out following article for details:

Notepad Statusbar Bug Found in All Windows Versions

The bug was related to the Status bar. If you were working on a file in Notepad and you saved the file, the line number and column number displayed in Status bar were automatically reset to Ln 1, Col 1.

Finally Microsoft fixed this old bug in newer Windows 10 versions. Now the line and column number no longer reset to 1 when saving a file in Notepad.

Microsoft officially confirmed this bug fix when they released Windows 10 build 17713.

Status Bar Now Also Displays When Word-Wrap is Enabled

This is my favorite feature addition to Notepad. In older Notepad versions, the Status bar could only be enabled if word-wrap option was turned off. If you enabled “Format -> Word Wrap” option in Notepad, the Status Bar option present in View menu automatically grayed out i.e. disabled or locked.

So users were unable to display Status Bar in Notepad with word-wrap option enabled. Although there was a small Registry tweak to enable Status Bar in Notepad when word-wrap option is enabled [More Info].

Finally Microsoft addressed this issue and now Status Bar can be displayed even if word-wrap option is enabled.

So now you can enjoy Status Bar in Notepad whether word-wrap option is enabled or disabled. Now you can see line number and column number in Status bar when word-wrap is enabled in Notepad.

Now You Can Search for Selected Text on Bing

This is also a useful feature addition. You can select any word or phrase in Notepad and right-click and select “Search with Bing” option. It’ll open your default web browser and will launch Bing search results for your selected word or phrase.

You can also access the option from “Edit -> Search with Bing” menu. You can also use keyboard shortcut (hotkey) CTRL+E to use Search with Bing feature.

Extended Line Ending Support

This feature addition will please many developers and administrators. Notepad in all Windows versions always supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters – Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF). Because of this limitation, Notepad was unable to properly display contents of text files created on Unix, Linux and MacOS.

When Windows users tried to open a text file created in Unix, Linux or MacOS in Notepad, the text file contents looked garbled without correct line formatting.

Now the Notepad present in newer Windows 10 versions, come with built-in support for Unix/Linux line endings (LF), Macintosh line endings (CR) and Windows Line endings (CRLF). If you create a new file in Notepad, it’ll use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default.

The status bar also indicates the detected EOL format of the currently open text file.

If you face any problem with this new feature and you want to disable this new behavior and restore Notepad’s classic behavior, you can take help of Registry tweaks. Following Registry tweaks will help you in customizing how Notepad handles pasting of text and which EOL character to use when Enter/Return is hit:

Open Registry Editor using regedit command and go to following key:

In right-side pane, look for following 2 DWORDs:

• fPasteOriginalEOL
• fWindowsOnlyEOL

Both DWORDs are set to 0 by default which means Notepad will detect the EOL character of currently opened document and will modify the EOL character of the pasted text accordingly.

To disable this detection and force Notepad to always use Windows CRLF line endings, set both DWORDs to 1

Improvements to Find/Replace Feature

The frequently used Find/Replace feature (Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H) also got significant improvements. Now Notepad comes with “Wrap around” option in find/replace dialog box which means now Notepad remembers previously entered values in find/replace text box and the state of checkboxes (enabled or disabled) and automatically populates them the next time you open the find/replace dialog box.

Also if you select some text in Notepad and open the find/replace dialog, Notepad will automatically populate the search text box with the selected text.

Now You can Zoom Text in Notepad

Now Notepad comes with options to allow users to zoom text quickly and easily. You can access zoom option from View menu. You can zoom in or zoom out using “View -> Zoom” menu. You can also reset to default zoom level.

Hotkeys are also available to change zoom level. You can use Ctrl+Plus, Ctrl+Minus or  Ctrl+MouseWheel to zoom in and out and use Ctrl+0 to restore the zoom level to the default.

The Status Bar displays the current zoom level.

Some Other Important Improvements

Apart from the above mentioned improvements, there are some other small but important improvements in Notepad which are mentioned as following:

• There are significant improvements to performance when opening large files in Notepad
• Notepad now supports Ctrl+Backspace to delete the previous word
• Arrow keys now correctly unselect text first and then move the cursor
• Notepad now correctly displays lines that don’t fit entirely on the screen

These small features were always missing in Notepad. On the other hand, 3rd party text editing software always provided these essential features.