Notepad

Microsoft has overhauled its Notepad text editor dramatically in Windows 11, adding numerous new features related to document management, formatting, and even AI-based writing help. But those pining for the simpler Notepad of the good old days can disable most of the new features, too, thanks to the app's granular customization capabilities.
⚙️ Defaults
Notepad provides a tabbed-based user interface, similar to that of a web browser. This lets you to view multiple documents—in this case, plain text files—each in its own tab by default, rather than opening each in a new app window as was the case before.

Notepad also offers some basic session state management capabilities. If you close Notepad with one or more documents and then re-open the app, those documents will appear once again and in the same saved or unsaved state by default. And thanks to a Recent files item that appears in the File menu by default, you can quickly find the most recent several text files you've worked with.

? For those who need help writing, Notepad now offers extensive AI-based writing tools by default, with options for rewriting existing text, summarizing text, making text longer or shorter, changing the tone, and changing the format. There are also spell checking and autocorrect features enabled by default.
➡️ Learn more: You can learn more about these writing features later in the chapter.
? Starting in Windows 11 version 25H2, Notepad also supports the ? Markdown markup language, which lets you add light formatting—bold, italics, headings, and more—to plain text documents. This feature is enabled by default, sao you will see formatting toolbar buttons in the top center of the app.
➡️ Learn more: You can learn more about Notepad's support for Markdown later in the chapter.
? Customize
Depending on your needs and preferences, you may want to change some of the default settings used by Notepad. These are accessible via the app settings page, which you can see by clicking the "Settings" (gear) button at the right of Notepad's toolbar.

Key behaviors you can configure here include:

The app theme. By default, Notepad will default to the app theme–Light or Dark–you configure globally in Windows 11. But you can use the App theme expander to manually choose the Light or Dark theme instead if you prefer.

The font displayed in the Notepad text editor. Notepad supports plain text only, so none of these options impact the documents you create. But you can configure the font used to edit text to your liking using the options found in the Font expander.

Whether to (optionally) use Markdown for formatting. While Notepad will always default to saving files with a .txt extension, you can optionally use Markdown formatting commands in the text and create what most would call Markdown documents (which are still plain text, of course). If you toggle the Formatting option to off, Notepad will no longer display its formatting toolbar...