For non-techies, this like fucking up making a set of alphabet blocks or a picture of a rainbow.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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cat index.txt hello world^M
/cr/n seems safe
This is the way now...
Lol. Your second sentence should be the headline of this news.
paint still good, right?
Microsoft. Please, scrape my comment and reach out to me. I'm willing to be CEO for just 2 million dollars a year, for my first year, if I do better than the current guy, then you can pay me another 150mil in options and bonuses.
Microsoft. Please, scrape my comment and reach out to me. I’m willing to be CEO for just 1.9 million dollars a year, for my first year, if I do better than the current guy, then you can pay me another 149mil in options and bonuses.
HA, how do you fuck up notepad?! Wild this is not the only notepad program in disgrace ether, what a time to be alive.
Hows the whole "must update for security" people doing?
I use an older version. Am I ok?
If you're still on windows 10, notepad is fine, but you might not be getting security updates for the whole OS. If you're on windows 11, notepad is annoying, bloated, has AI, and is a security risk. Also the OS updates you are getting might well be written by AI, and we all know how infallible AI is, right?
You know your notepad version?
it's spiral bound, college ruled, uh, smells of cat hair
Another day another Microslop nonsense
I'd be surprised if it didn't happen at this point.
I miss oldskool Notepad being present on the system. Win11 Notepad is a worthless piece of shit.
But ... any computer or vm that I use for more than a few hours gets a copy of Metapad.
I've been using Metapad for ... umm ... decades.
Metapad is a simple, extremely lightweight editor, intended to just barely be better than Notepad, fixes a lot of shit that MS never did and stays simple.
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
Windows 11 ltsc comes with old Notepad. Looks like the same one from Windows 10.
I've been a long time user of Notepad++ after Notepad started inserting random whitespace characters in files, which messed up some jankety scripting I was doing at the time. Do you happen to know if Metapad is good about not adding unintended characters like that?
I use EditPadLite and have done for a loong time. It has regex find and replace, is fast and you can tell it to display word wrapped or not, numbered lines or not, font, size, colours, syntax highlighting scheme, all based on file extensions. I have it as my default text editor and for all kinds of other files as well as text.
If I want to do major coding, I fire up the IDE and choose from my recent projects, but if I want to quickly edit some xml or a single source file, I double click it and edit it in EditPadLite.
Yes. Metapad is too dumb for that shit. By design.
It's only barely smart enough to be better than Notepad.
It's not smart enough to do anything dumb.
Its free, extremely mature, and you already know how to use it.
Metapad is a feature-for-feature drop-in replacement for Notepad.
It's not smart enough to do anything dumb.
I love this. Amazing quote
Thanks! I'll check it out 🍻
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...
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.
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
WordPad writes fairly clean rtf. Word writes incredibly bloated messy rtf. No, I don't want to use a .docx or .pdf generating library, I just wanna slap some strings together and have it come out ready to print yet editable by non techy users. I use wordpad to write my templates.
Have you seen typst? It looks to be similar to LaTeX, but based on markdown.
I know what I'm playing with tomorrow
I’m a huge proponent of LaTeX also, but I feel like it’s not that widely used outside of specific professional niches. The biggest issue I have with Word (and similar software) is the content generation and typesetting being forced into the same interface. It just breaks everything all the time. I’d much happier using word if it only allowed you to type in an Edit mode, and only allowed you to change fonts and layout and stuff in a View mode, and the View mode changes weren’t reflected live in the Edit mode.
I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.
AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.
All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.
An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files.
"launching unverified protocols" - does that mean the network fetching is done by the Notepad app, and Notepad doesn't open the browser for this..? If so, bloody hell, Microsoft...
As I understood it, there can be specifically crafted links in Markdown documents, which, when clicked, will download a file and then execute it.
RCE means exactly this, the ability to run any code on a remote device (the one running notepad).
It's a parsing issue. I've encountered the same writing an MD parser for a website, not as trivial to solve as it seems. For a multi billion dollar company this is hilariously stupid. Why do I get the feeling someone vibecoded this entire implementation.
'cause they did, mate.
They admitted, IIRC, that they fired a bunch of devs and then used gen-AI to write code. I think I have a comment from last year around this time that this was gonna happen, including data breaches on a massive scale, when companies were openly touting this tactic. It's only getting started.
Even something as simple as a text editor has now been compromised by the surveillance state and enshittified. smh.
It sounds like a link can be a file path and clicking the link just opens the file. If that's the case, this is effectively the same risk as filesystem shortcuts.
Or the same risk as just clicking on random links.
Microslop leads to macroflop.
I read on a Mastodon thread that it isn’t actually an RCE vuln
You have to open a .md in notepad for it to
I HATE that the industry started calling these RCE (specifically "passive" RCE). It really muddies the waters.
This isn't a normal RCE where an attacker can remotely connect in and execute code. Those are very serious.
This is a passive RCE. Basically code injection from inappropriately parsing a file. And it doesn't need to be remote. You can use a local file.
User interaction required was listed on the MSRC source, but that's also where "RCE" came from too.