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Microsoft is testing markdown formatting in Notepad

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft revealed it was adding AI-powered text generation to Notepad. Now, it has announced a lightweight formatting for the text editor.

Notepad for Windows 11 will soon let you use Markdown formatting. The text style allows users to format elements in a plain text document. It is very popular among programmers, and regular users as its syntax is user-friendly, and significantly easier to understand when compared to HTML.

Notepad has remained a basic editing app for plain text, it has never adopted proper formatting until now. That was probably because users preferred to use other apps like the now-discontinued WordPad app when they needed to edit their document with formatting styles like Bold, Italics, etc., for rich text documents.

In addition to such styles, Markdown will also let users create numbered lists, bulleted lists, add hyperlinks, headings in your documents. To access Markdown in Notepad, select some text, and then click on the formatting toolbar at the top of Notepad's interface. The toolbar also has an option to remove the formatting, and switch to plain text, this is also possible from the app's Edit menu. Notepad users can also toggle Markdown from the View menu, or by clicking on the Status bar at the bottom.

Microsoft says that users who don't want to use Markdown in Notepad can disable the feature from the app's settings. The new text formatting style is available in Notepad version 11.2504.50.0, for Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels. If it receives positive feedback from testers, Microsoft will likely roll out Markdown in the stable channel for Windows 11 in a few weeks or months.

While it is nice to see Notepad pick up Markdown formatting, some users are arguing that the app is getting bloated, but these criticisms are likely due to the AI features that are being shoved into the text editor.

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