[Windows Tip] Show Status Bar with Word Wrap Enabled in Notepad

If you use the built-in and default text editing program “Notepad” in Windows operating system, you’ll find this article useful. Notepad is a small, light-weight and basic text editor which comes bundled with all Windows versions. If you want to read text files or perform basic tasks on a text file, Notepad is perfect tool for you.

Notepad comes with Word Wrap feature which makes the full content of a text file visible on your computer screen. If word wrap feature is enabled and some lines in a text file are long, Notepad doesn’t hide the content behind the scroll bar. It splits the long lines into multiple lines to show the whole content on screen so you don’t need to use the scroll bar to read the text.

Word wrap feature is not enabled by default in Notepad and you need to enable is using “Format -> Word Wrap” menu. But there is a small glitch/issue with word wrap feature and this issue is present since many years. If you enable word wrap option in Notepad, another option to display Status Bar is automatically grayed out i.e. locked.

If you check “View” menu in Notepad, you’ll find “Status Bar” option which can be used to show Status Bar in Notepad. But as soon as you enable word wrap option from Format menu, Notepad automatically disables Status Bar. If you try to re-enable the Status Bar using View menu, you’ll find that the option is grayed out i.e. disabled and you can’t enable it any more.

Following screenshot shows the grayed out Status Bar option in Notepad:

This is the reason behind many Notepad users problem. Many people ask why the Status Bar option under View menu in Notepad is always disabled i.e. grayed out? It happens because they enabled word wrap option in Notepad which disabled Status Bar option and they are not aware of this fact.

If you disable word wrap option, it’ll unlock the Status Bar option. Now you’ll be able to turn on/off Status Bar from View menu again.

If you want to enable word wrap feature and Status Bar at the same time in Notepad, this tutorial will help you. There is a small registry tweak to forcefully enable Status Bar in Notepad when word wrap feature is enabled.

Following screenshot shows Status Bar and word wrap enabled at the same time in Notepad:

Actually this registry tweak is very old and we shared it long time back in 2007 in following article:

Notepad Statusbar Bug Found in All Windows Versions

Today in this tutorial, we are going to discuss the same registry tweak in details. We decided to create this exclusive article as newer Windows 10 versions come with this fix built-in. Now in newer versions of Windows 10, you can enable word wrap and Status Bar at the same time in Notepad without any need to registry tweak.

We told you about this feature in following review article:

[Review] Notepad Improvements in Windows 10

If you are using older versions of Windows and want to display Status Bar with word wrap enabled in Notepad, following steps will help you:

1. Press WIN+R keys together to launch RUN dialog box. Now type regedit and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

3. In right-side pane, look for StatusBar DWORD.

If word wrap is enabled in Notepad, StatusBar value would be set to 0 in Registry Editor which means Status Bar is disabled.

To enable Status Bar, double-click on StatusBar and change its value to 1

Close Registry Editor and open Notepad and now you’ll get Status Bar and word wrap feature enabled at the same time in Notepad.