Comment by voidUpdate
5 days ago
I found a copy of the win98 (I believe) notepad.exe a while back, and it works perfectly on windows 11 (though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??). I can write text into it, save it, and load text again. What more does notepad need? And it has a very nostalgic font too
Win9x Notepad in particular can only load files up to 64KB in size (edit: and supports only ANSI encoding, no Unicode). There were some actually useful additions to it up until Windows 10 or so - for example being able to handle LF (in addition to CRLF) line endings. But yeah, everything added in Windows 11 is just pure bloat.
I find notepad useful for sanitising clipboard content.
No bold text, italics, bullet points, invisible html.. Just get the text and can copy it to paste again somewhere else.
Ala Cmd+Shift+V on Mac
I somewhat regularly use the almost embarrassing key sequence Ctrl-C Ctrl-L Ctrl-V Ctrl-A Ctrl-X to sanitize text I’ve copied from a browser, using the address field to remove any formatting.
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You can Ctrl+shift+v to paste plain text in windows.
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I always used browser address bar for that. But giving it a second thought, I uploaded the data to Google servers.
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Win+r, ctrl+v, ctrl+a, ctrl+x, esc does this without spawning a non ephemeral window
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The reason being it is a plain text edit component, with a window around it, hence the limitation.
Yep. Back when I used to teach Windows programming in C commercially, the course exercise was to replicate notepad. It was surprising how many of its features you could implement in a week-long course, especially as many of our clients were no great shakes at C.
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Notepad is so slow at loading large files that it crashing quickly is a feature.
The windows 7-10 versions that could open anything would just get stuck for half an hour when you opened the wrong thing in them, which was rather annoying.
I extracted out notepad.exe, calc.exe and mspaint.exe from Windows 7. I use them on Windows 11. They work perfectly.
For those of you on macOS who still want to benefit from arguably the best drawing application ever conceived, https://jspaint.app/ is THE way. Use it all the time when editing screenshots.
Bonus point: that Windows 95 style "error" beep when pasting too large image. Always sends the shiver down the spine and confuses the coworkers around (we're an all-Mac shop).
my favorite "easter egg" hidden behind File -> Exit menu item of jspaint.app... I still remember how it blew my mind the first time I saw it!
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Kind of a weird feeling that in order to get the better Windows 11 experience one requires programs from four operating system versions earlier.
Windows 11 also takes a huge amount of time to get working as i intend. I have to remove a lot of 'features' and heavily optimize some processes. It's stable and it works, but i'm getting more and more annoyed by it that upcoming updates sometimes destroy all my effort.
Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.
> Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.
You won't know until you try. My mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 till Windows 7. She hated Windows 8, and that's when I decided to switch her to Linux (with XFCE) - and she felt the UI was a lot more familiar to her than Windows 8. I recently showed her a few screenshots of Windows 11, and she finds her current desktop (now on KDE) a lot more familiar than Windows 11. Same with Office, she prefers the older style toolbar of LibreOffice than the ribbon UI of modern versions Office.
So maybe install it on a spare device as a trial and see how they like it?
Probably the only good thing about Google Docs becoming so popular in school/education use... All you need is a current Chromium based browser mostly.
The Web versions of Office, err MS 365, err CoPilot App.. (OMG!>!!>) ... aren't so bad to use in a Linux browser either.
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I’d wish to use Linux.
But some things just don’t run there (properly).
Like Assetto Corsa EVO or SimHub.
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Might as well just use Windows 7 if the security surface is this bad on later windows.
Windows 7 market share was actually growing for a while according to:
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
Not sure what caused the inflection point in December 2025.
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I have the mspaint.exe from the same version too :P. It complains about registry stuff on launch but other than that it works fine. There's no spray can in the modern paint!
They also added strange hacked on half-support for alpha-transparency in modern MS Paint. Meaning there is an alpha layer, and imported staff may utilize it, but if you need to do anything with that layer, you're basically SOL.
Better to have no alpha-transparency than whatever this is. At least old Paint just turned it white, and you could manipulate the white layer, with this working with the alpha layer is a nightmare.
I like paint shop pro, I use 4.12.
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Why does it show registry error?
I copied out mspaint.exe and some resource files as well were needed.
It runs for me without error.
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There used to be a website that has these installable.
Update - it's just the games; I thought it had notepad and calc as well
I feel bad for anyone at MS who thought these applications needed anything more than bugfixes. Welcome to the Notepad team, the entire world would be better off it you did nothing at all!
I just don't get why they didn't just add these features to WordPad, where it would at least make more sense.
> (though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??)
It's because the program just calls a Windows API to display the version dialog of Windows itself.
Specifically, ShellAbout: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shellapi...
How do you edit notes using Microsoft Copilot 365 for Notepad Copilot using that version?
How do you write without being able to read with that version?
Windows 11 still includes the old notepad.exe in its Windows directory [0]. Windows just “helpfully” redirects it to the new app if you try to run it. You have to turn that off in Settings under “App execution aliases”. Then you get the old Notepad.
[0] In the unlikely case that it isn’t there, you can add it through System > Optional Features > Add an optional feature.
Also, delete the key NoOpenWith under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad.exe to enable file associations.
you can also just uninstall the "new" notepad, at which point Windows will let you run the old one again (which is still shipped!).
By using a version that is _that_ old you do lose out on some of the actually useful updates legacy nodepad received, such as LF line ending support.
What? Did they accidentally revert the improvements they already made to previously shipped versions of the old notepad program?
I think it's in reference to using Win9x notepad.exe as opposed to somewhere in the Win7-10 timeframe before they went over the top in Win11.
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> What more does notepad need?
Most of the features that were added in later versions: unicode, tabs, auto-reload, support for large files. CTRL+S is also nice.
> What more does notepad need?
AI! It needs AI. Did I guess it right?
Affermative. You have unlocked the following achievement: "Get a head start of 45 minutes when we start destroying humanity".
Since there'll be nowhere to run, could I be one the first? Don't wanna have to deal with the hassle of having to watch my loved ones being chased down.
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I feel vindicated by reverting to the old windows 10 notepad.exe
Apparently windows 11 still ships with classic notepad?
https://github.com/christian-korneck/classic-windows-notepad
Notepad always used to be essentially the standard MFC multiline text editor control in a window.
Wordpad was the same but a rich text editor control.
There’s very little need for it to have ever become more.
> though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??
For many built in windows apps, the 'about this program' menu item just invokes a separate program, 'winver'. If you go Start -> Run and type in winver, it does the same thing.
If you go that far, metapad (from 98) is still better than notepad ever was. Also loads 100k lines files quickly.
Get notepad.exe from reactos' nightly ISO, it's in reactos.cab
Extract both the ISO and reactos.cab wth 7zip.
It needs far more features apparently. Tons more. That's why Notepad++ is popular. Which also had a severe security vulnerability recently. Which was actively exploited by some state actor like China.
That recent Notepad++ incident was a supply chain attack, not a vulnerability in the original program.
Strictly, no. But it was a vulnerability in the design of Notepad++, key elements here being the featureset that requires frequent updates and the lack of integrity checks during the upgrade process.
This has prompted me to move on from Notepad++ - it's sad, because I've used it for many years, but this is too much.
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The OS provided option can be bare bones, stable, secure and just utilitarian. This promotes having people choose their own tools for the features they want and not really expecting much other than reliability from the OS version. They didn’t need to mess with a good thing.
Ok, tabs, I do like the tabs.
Support for Unix line endings at the very least.