Microsoft's Notepad Gets Spellcheck and Autocorrect 40 Years After Launch (theverge.com) 72
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is finally rolling out spellcheck and autocorrect for its Notepad app in Windows 11, more than 40 years after the simple text editor was first introduced in Windows in 1983. The software giant started testing both features in March, and has now quietly started enabling them for all Windows 11 users in recent days. The spellcheck feature in Notepad is almost identical to how Word or Edge highlight misspelled words, with a red underline to clearly show mistakes.
Tutorial text editors are better than Notepad (Score:2)
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... but if you dig in and open up the control panel eventually you get the same old applications (and most of the look and feel is still from NT 3.5.1).
This is especially true of some ODBC dialogs; they retain the Windows 3 look & feel.
Re:Tutorial text editors are better than Notepad (Score:4, Insightful)
I see out those old style controls because they're much better than all the new ones.
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I agree (as did Seven Spirals before me). You can generally tell what they do (I'm thinking of controls that use alphabetic text, not hieroglyphs), and they're not in some faded colors, and--most of all--you can tell that they're actually a control, like a button. As opposed to some random piece of color.
Re: Tutorial text editors are better than Notepad (Score:2)
The text field control sucks because it only supports one level of undo. This is the only thing I don't like about classic notepad. The simplicity is otherwise a feature.
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If they put too much effort into the included apps, the EU will accuse them of unfairly competing with European third-party text editor apps and force them to remove it entirely.
Re:Tutorial text editors are better than Notepad (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of Notepad, this is a plus: it's perfectly fine and feature-complete the way it is.
If I want more sophisticated features (like spellcheck, regex find/replace, code folding, etc.) but still just handling pure text, I can open Notepad++ or what-have-you. If I want more sophisticated still, I can either go to a software IDE or a word processor (depending on use case).
So sure, Microsoft, go ahead add extra features to Notepad after all these years. But after asking "why", my next question will be "How do I turn them off?" The last thing I want is to open a *.bat file in this "improved" Notepad and have it vomit spellcheck errors all over the place or, worse still, have it start "correcting" things on its own.
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used Wordpad forever over the CR+LF vs LF issues notepad always had. Then switched to Editpad so that when windows decides to reboot my shit at 1am it saves whats on the screen since MS can be bothered to include such an easy event hook into their software. After a windows involuntary reboot Chrome seems to come back with every damn tab open with every session restored. But heavens forbid 37KB of kick the programmers ass at MS. For the most part notepad and its kin are the equivalent of scratch pads we use
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That's because it was never written as an editor, it's a Windows edit control with a menu bar added to the top. Its principal use is in pwnage competitions where the ability to run Notepad on a supposedly secure machine is used as an indication that you've bypassed the security.
I guess you could use it to edit text too, but once you've demonstrated pwnage with it why would you?
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Microsoft can seemingly never be bothered to update their older apps
Usually, Microsoft is given grief for maintaining support for their older apps *too long*!
- The DOS prompt still lives as CMD, and has many new commands and options as time goes on. BAT files that were written decades ago, still run.
- VBA still lives on inside of Word and Excel among others. That monstrosity should have been eliminated years ago!
- Speaking of Visual Basic, BASIC is a language that shipped with the very first version of MS-DOS, and has been updated and revised ever since.
- ActiveX, developed
WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows came with Write and Notepad. Notepad was for simple, Write was a basic word processor.
They rebranded Write as Wordpad.
They removed Wordpad because nobody used it
Now they stuff Word processing feature into notepad...
Seems like Windows product team has been replaced with a bunch poo-flinging monkies. Not talking about the actual developers, some of them many of them are very good but about the people deciding what the platform should be.
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Notepad was a fantastic UTF-8 editor that you knew was always there to edit text files. It just worked. I personally preferred EDIT.COM for tasks like this, but the was taken from us far earlier.
This multi-tabbed, UTF-16 monstrosity that has been forced down our throats only if it was downloaded from the Windows store is Microsoft-trying-to-be-Apple taken to a ridiculous extreme.
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If I want multi-tab with all of the bells and whistle, I use notepad++ (and I do).
Re: WTF (Score:2)
No love for Edlin?
In any case - up to Win11 Notepad was good because you knew that it couldn't mess up things and remove all formatting.
With autocorrect you have opened a can of worms for problems.
Spellcheck/autocorrect is also a total mess when you are writing in more than one language - or write mixed in a document.
Re: WTF (Score:2)
edlin? Is this the editor that Tim Paterson wrote in a couple of hours while cloning CP/M for a S-100 bus 8086 machine, and MS carried it over virtually unchanged until Windows 11 finally removed it? No, no love. I'd rather use CP/M's ED.COM or even TECO.
Re: WTF (Score:2)
It's the MS-DOS editor before EDIT came into existence (not sure if that was DOS 5 or 6 though)
Re: WTF (Score:2)
Yeah, it's the same thing then
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Edlin came with MS-DOS 1. Edit as introduced with MS-DOS 5. Edlin was removed from DOS 6.
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Edlin came before MSDOS 1, and it still exists in Windows 10.
Re: WTF (Score:2)
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How old are you to not have ball peen hammers when you were a kid? Looking quickly, I see that ball peen hammers were commonly used by blacksmiths to peen carriage springs and may have been used in ancient Greece to peen bronze armor. Peening metal has been a thing for 4500+ years.
Likewise drilling hammers have been around for a long time, a one handed sledge is handy for masonry, blacksmithing, chiseling stuff, etc.
Bet you were amazed at the steam hammer.
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How old am I? sheesh, some days it feels like I have been alive forever. Other days, not so much. A couple of years back the youngsters in the HSI department wanted to do a study on keyboard spacings, because they thought no one ever had done such... well, I pointed to one done maybe 100-120 years back, which is where keyboard spacings were originally specified and sa
Re: WTF (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve been to the Craftsman research labs in the last couple years and got to try a prototype hammer that was flat out amazing. They had a novel way to prevent recoil and drive that energy back into the nail just with changing the shape of the hammer. New tech for hammers is a thing, surprisingly (at least to me).
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Next up: They'll add Clippy^W, err..., an "AI Assistant" to Notepad.
- Milk
- Eggs
- Brocc
"Hi! Sorry to interrupt, but I see you're writing a shopping list. Can I suggest some items from our trusted partners? How about a box of Cascade Platinum Dishwasher Pods? Use code SAVE24 to get 10% off! Could I also interest you in a bottle of Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Cold Brew coffee?"
oli
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when did they remove wordpad? I still use it for LF vs CR+LF formatting issues when I just need to read the damn ReadMe
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Write/Wordpad was a wrapper for the RICHEDIT control of Windows. It could do whatever RICHEDIT could do, and also included menus and buttons to insert things into the document that typing alone could not do.
One interesting feature was the support for OLE objects (later called ActiveX), which was wiz-bang cool for the pre-Internet era, and a huge security hole later on. Nowadays, most Windows applications do not bother implementing OLE support, so you can no longer "Insert Object" and use that application
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They removed Wordpad because nobody used it
Speaking just for myself, I didn't use Write or WordPad due to one issue: they lacked spell check.
Why? (Score:2)
Pick A Struggle, MS (Score:4, Interesting)
Text editors are there to edit text. If you need a text editor, you probably don't want spell check.
Spell check is great for a lightweight Word Processor, like WordPad...oh, wait...we decided that too many people were using it instead of subscribing to MS Office or using the browser-based version of Word...
Seriously, Notepad has been perfectly serviceable since Windows 95...bloating it up makes it even more useless.
On the upswing, I've finally been compelled to see if Nano exists for Windows, and it does: https://github.com/okibcn/nano... [github.com].
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if you are just editing text why not use 'edit' ? now if you use notepad as a digital scratch pad instead of a physical legal pad, Editpad works nicely as it keeps a backup of any open file should windows decide right now is the perfect time to reboot without your consent. Though the latter has happened a lot less than when windows 10 first came out. At one time you could only reserve 8 hours of a day as your 'working time' and anything outside that was fair game to spontaneously reboot. In such cases you
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Computers are 1000x faster since Win 95. Spellcheck is no longer on the scale of bloat.
Even nano has spell integration.
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Autocorrect, however, is an absolutely *bonkers* thing to put in a text editor. This effectively makes Notepad completely unusuable for its primary intended purpose (editing things like config files).
Coming soon... (Score:2)
They lost focus (Score:2)
AutoCorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's add AutoCorrect to a tool used to edit configuration files. What could possibly go wrong?
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And, let's have it use American spelling no matter what country you're in.
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not sure 'notepad' was designed with the intent to edit configuration files. That was the job of 'edit'. Notepad got its name to replace an ACTUAL notepad you had sitting on your desk. Its job was to be lightweight and jot down information to use later, such as taking _notes_ from a meeting. If the developers only intended the application to be used to edit config files they would not have named it 'notepad'. They would have named it WinEdit. Just because you used it contrary to its original design does not
Re: AutoCorrect (Score:2)
I looked in Windows just now. I could not find an application named 'edit'. I tried googling but the term is too generic. Where is this app?
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"Edit" was the MS-DOS text editor.
Fun fact, before Windows 95, the file "edit.com" was secretly just a stub that launched QBasic in edit mode.
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MS-DOS Editor, commonly just called edit or edit.com, is a TUI text editor that comes with MS-DOS 5.0 and later,as well as all 32-bit x86 versions of Windows, until Windows 11. It supersedes edlin, the standard editor in earlier versions of MS-DOS. In MS-DOS, it was a stub for QBasic running in edit or mode. Starting with Windows 95, MS-DOS Editor became a standalone program because QBasic didn't ship with Windows.
The Editor version 1.0 appeared in MS-DOS 5.00, PC DOS 5.0, OS/2, and Windows NT 4.0. These editors rely on QBasic 1.0. This version can only open one file, to the limit of DOS memory. It can also open the quick help file in a split window.
the Editor version 1.1 appeared in MS-DOS 6.0. It uses QBasic 1.1 but no new features were added to the Editor.
PC DOS 6 does not include the edit command. Instead, it has the DOS E Editor. This was upgraded to support mouse and menus in version of 7.0.
The Editor version 2.0 appeared with Windows 95, as standalone app that no longer requires QBasic. This version has been included with all 32-bit x86 versions, until Windows 11. Being a 16-bit DOS app, it does not directly run on x64, IA-64, or ARM64 versions of Windows.
The FreeDOS version was developed by Shaun Raven and is licensed under the GPL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
pretty simple for editing batch files and config files. Leaps and bounds over edlin
This could cause problems (Score:2)
Can I change the language from English to Powershell?
Sticky Notes exists for short notes in English / whichever human language you prefer to use. Notepad is for editing configuration files, writing Powershell scripts and stuff like that.
'Gilding the lilly' (Score:2)
Notepad didn't need any of that. It was supposed to be just very basic.
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Re: 'Gilding the lilly' (Score:2)
"Gilding the lily" is a common English (England) phrase for taking an already beautiful thing and adding extra gaudiness for no gain (and often for detriment) ⦠like adding gold foil to a lily.
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Broken (Score:2)
In Microsoft's infinite wisdom to entirely re-write Notepad from scratch, they broke some of the basic functionality of the application... that being the ability to type characters into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Please, Microsoft. Stop with this shit already!?
OS Level feature? (Score:2)
Why could this not be an OS level feature, applicable for any text area? At least one other operating system provides this as a system feature.
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I'm not aware of of a desktop environment/UI which doesn't. Android, iOS, MacOS, KDE, probably even Gnome.
You can integrate spellcheck into the console on linux with aspell, even, if the fancy strikes.
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Back in the MS-DOS days, there actually was such a thing; it ran in the background (I think they called such programs terminate-and-stay-resident). One advantage over having each application have its own spell checker was that if you added a word to your personal dictionary, it was there for spell checking in all applications.
These days, I think all MS-Office programs share a personal spelling dictionary, but I'm sure there are other programs (Vivaldi, Thunderbird, maybe other browsers and email clients) t
Do Not Want. (Score:2)
I use notepad occasionally because it's a clean, well-behaved text handler. Before I installed "puretext", I used it to strip formatting from text in the clipboard. I don't want it to try to be "smart". I'm hoping these things can be disabled.
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Silly (Score:2)
This is silly.
Android, iOS, KDE, MacOS, etc. all have the ability to do spellcheck natively within the OS. All apps have it, by default, everywhere.
Windows is still stuck in the 90s.
Finally? (Score:2)
What moron has been screaming to have spellcheck and autocorrect added to Notepad? The entire point of Notepad is to write something down without being harassed. You know, like a real notepad. You write a note on it. You don't care about misspelled words or grammer. You just want to jot something down so you don't forget it.
Considering how abysmal Windows 11 is, one would think they could have spent their money and resour
That's WordPad you goofy bastards (Score:1)
More bugs and bloat (Score:1)
Type two lines and make an empty new line at the end. Try to click on the second line. You can't.
Now, type a long line and notice that the right margin doesn't exist.
Notepad should be a lightweight text editor like it always was. Some of the newer features are nice, like LF support, but why would anyone want a spellchecker for in their quick and dirty notes app?
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"Type two lines and make an empty new line at the end. Try to click on the second line. You can't."
Yes, I can. What are your settings?
"Now, type a long line and notice that the right margin doesn't exist."
Not sure what you mean; it wrapped near the right side of the window. Do you mean you want it to insert hard newlines at 80 characters or something? How quaint!
Just leave it (Score:2)
It's been 40 years, just leave it alone and link to vim or emacs downloads.
Anyone who want's to edit will not being using that now. By all means, improve it, but it's wasted efforts. To make it industry level would probably bring complaint from the editor unions who would probably argue monopoly.
Nobody will say great work over this.
Hopefully you can switch it off. (Score:2)
Kate has stuff like that, and I have to make notes when making a new install to disable such things.
(I use Kate or notepad when vim motions aren't ideal for the task at hand.)
Metapad (Score:3)
Metapad: one small binary file, super portable, has all the little features you need and none of the shit you don't.
I've churned out thousands upon thousands of pages in Metapad and I was glad to see it runs flawlessly under Wine.
I use kate or Notepad++ now, sometimes xed, but once in a while I'll use Metapad for the nostalgia. :)
21st century goals for notepad.exe (Score:3)
[*] spellcheck
[ ] cloudification
[ ]monthly subscription
Better late... (Score:2)
... than never? :P
leave it alone (Score:1)