this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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They finally did it. Microsoft has successfully over-engineered a text editor into a threat vector.

This CVE is an 8.8 severity RCE in Notepad of all things.

Apparently, the "innovation" of adding markdown support came with the ability of launching unverified protocols that load and execute remote files.

We have reached a point where the simple act of opening a .md file in a native utility can compromise your system.

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[–] Armand1@lemmy.world 123 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (13 children)

To be fair, markdown is a very cool standard.

While I don't know if it really makes sense for Notepad to be anything other than a plain-text editor, there are better tools for that, supporting markdown is kind of nice.

This means you have support for it on fresh Windows installs, which could be good for virtual machines. That said, Markdown is intrinsically pretty readable without formatting anyway.

It's a shame they flubbed the implementation though...

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 131 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Windows used to come with notepad (raw text) and wordpad (basic markup). It would have made more sense to keep wordpad and add markdown to it instead so there would still be something that is just raw text.

[–] ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 71 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

[–] ChristerMLB@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Pretty sure no type setter or graphic designer would use Word for anything else than making Word templates.

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