Under the strong promotion of Microsoft, the development of Notepad in the Windows 11 system entered the fast lane, not only did a lot of optimization on the interface, the introduction of dark mode, etc. but also significantly improved in function and performance. In the recent update of Notepad, the function of RichEdit has been further enhanced.
New enhancements include “Alt+x” for entering Unicode characters, “Ctrl+}” for switching between matching brackets/parentheses, multi-level undo, drag and drop, colored emoji, block selection and automatic URL detection.
In this update, users will no longer have to deal with problematic Unix-convention lines ending in LF (U+000A), not CRLF (U+000D U+000A). Microsoft writes: “To solve this problem, Notepad does a better job: it checks which line ends first, and then uses that line ending as the default end of the file. So a file with LF-terminated lines is still LF end, and it is displayed correctly”.
So, with this update, users will be able to use all the features in the classic app as they are powered by RichEdit. That said, displaying Unicode control characters is now available in this new version of the app, which also includes emoji.
Microsoft says
The RichEdit build used in Notepad is the same RichEdit source loaded with Microsoft 365 applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. It’s not Windows RichEdit in msftedit.dll. So Notepad has the latest RichEdit improvements.
Over the years, we’ve fixed a bug where the RichEdit plain text control didn’t appear, in part because, prior to Notepad, instances of plain text were small.