Comment by canucker2016
2 days ago
Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-...
The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF.
Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use...
Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :)
You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science.
Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.
I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.
The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95.
Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit.
see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...
Cheers, thanks