Notepad's spellcheck and autocorrect are rolling out to everybody after 41 years | Hacker News Reader

Notepad's spellcheck and autocorrect are rolling out to everybody after 41 years

arstechnica.com

15 pointsthunderbong16 comments

I heard on Windows 11, they finally found a way to make even Notepad slow.

It's only called Notepad, but it's not the old Notepad.

And it's not slow. Compared to the rest of Win 11, it's actually very fast.

Notepad for the longest time was just a lightweight app wrapped around a standard edit control. The same edit controls anyone could use in their applications.

Notepad was almost killed years ago, but shell dev/guru RaymondC[1] adopted it because people thought it was useful and he kept it alive.

Edit controls did not have spellcheck or autocorrect 41 years ago. The Ars writers are chronically misinformed/misinforming.

1. This RaymondC: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Ars didn't say that edit controls had spellcheck or autocorrect 41 years ago.

They wrote:

> In March, Microsoft started testing an update to the venerable Notepad app that added spellcheck and autocorrect to the app's limited but slowly growing set of capabilities. The update that adds these features to Notepad is now rolling out to all Windows 11 users via the Microsoft Store,

though simple edit controls do have spellcheck and autocorrect these days (i.e. thinking the simple edit controls one expects from mobile devices / even the edit field I'm typing this into on a desktop web browser).

For reference, Apple has had native spell check since the initial release of Mac OS X.

> In March, Microsoft started testing an update to the venerable Notepad app that added spellcheck and autocorrect to the app's limited but slowly growing set of capabilities.

Do we now also call such things "apps"?

We don't need this crap. I use notepad to strip formatting fron text and sometimes, to read text files.

*from

There is a simple toggle button to turn Spellcheck on/off in Notepad settings.

Although it wouldn't have helped in this case, I do love the irony of a good typo in a post calling spellcheck and autocorrect "crap".

Powershell, Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.WindowsNotepad* | Remove-AppxPackage and get on with your life. It will restore the legacy notepad.exe (as will, like, right-clicking the new Notepad in the start menu and selecting Uninstall) -- but yeah, I know, you didn't opt in to this, <insert rest of generic Microsoft-related HN complaints here>

IIRC there was a writepad.exe, no?

Are you thinking of WordPad, a (very) lightweight Word?

ahh yes. The wordpad.exe shipped with every Windows. I wonder why not make improvements upon that.

Actually, in Win 3.1 I think it was called write.exe

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