After testing it with a limited number of users a few weeks ago, Microsoft made the upgraded Notepad available to all Windows 11 users. The new Notepad matches the new look of the operating system. Similar to Paint and other Office apps, it has been updated with a “Fluid Design” that brings rounded corners in many places. Notepad also has Dark Mode compatibility, and the experience looks pretty consistent in Windows 11’s Dark Mode.
It even comes with new fonts for buttons, menus and more. This is the most significant update to Notepad in years, as the app’s overall interface hasn’t changed in several years. Notepad has always been a simple and fast text editing app for Windows, but on Windows 11 it’s been more sluggish than its predecessor. There were several Feedback Hub posts highlighting performance issues with the Notepad app, including a bug where vertical scrolling didn’t feel smooth.
“The vertical scrolling animation in Notepad 11 feels wrong and is inconsistent with other Windows apps (Explorer doesn’t animate at all, just scrolls by the configured number of lines, Settings and Edges scroll at a snappy pace).” One of the affected Users noted: “It either doesn’t scroll at all, or it scrolls faster.”
There’s also the issue of Notepad’s lag problem becoming more pronounced when users paste up to 50,000 lines of text from applications such as Microsoft Excel, which didn’t exist before. Users noted that Notepad’s load time was “infinitely slow and virtually never ends”. “Also pasting text copied from Notepad itself is also very slow. In the Win32 version it is quite fast”.
If you search for “Notepad”, you can find similar reports in the Feedback Hub.
Thankfully, Microsoft has acknowledged that Notepad does have performance issues, and it’s being fixed in the next update that’s being tested. According to the Microsoft team, the next update to Notepad brings additional performance improvements when users scroll through very large files or replace large amounts of text.
For example, if you copy text from a Word document and paste it into Notepad, and try to scroll, Notepad will no longer be slow. Microsoft is also improving accessibility for screen readers, text scaling, and more. The update now takes advantage of assistive technologies already in the operating system.
Microsoft has also updated Notepad to support ARM64, so now version 11.2204 will perform better on ARM64 devices.
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