The WinForms Notepad Project: A Look at Notepad Over the Years (Premium)

As I struggle to duplicate some of Notepad’s more complex features, I was reminded that Notepad itself has changed a lot over the years. And so I decided to fire up some of my many virtual machines and reacquaint myself with the evolution of my quarry.

My first interaction with Notepad came in the early 1990s with Windows 3.0, but Notepad has been a staple of Windows since the beginning. Like most people, I never used Windows 1.x or 2.x when these product versions were current. But even the earlier Windows versions shipped with a basic Notepad application.

As you can see here, this ancient Notepad version---identified as version 2.1, in tandem with the OS version---has very basic editing features, but even this early application version includes Find and Find Next commands, placed under the Search menu. (Those commands, plus Replace, are among the big features that are currently dogging me.)

Oddly enough, this basic editing feature set continued forward through Windows 3.1 as well. (Here, again, Find and Find Next can be found under Search.) The bigger organizational change is that “About Notepad” has been moved from the File menu to Help.

In Windows 95, Notepad starts getting even more sophisticated. For example, Page Setup appears for the first time. And in Windows NT 4.0, the Replace command is added to the Search menu, alongside Find and Find Next, and there's a new Set Font option in the Edit menu.

In Windows 98, no major changes.

In Windows 2000, the Search menu is removed, and Find, Find Next, Replace, and a new Go To command are all moved to Edit, where they remain today. The Word Wrap and Set Font (now “Font”) commands moved from Edit to a new Format menu as well.

In Windows XP, Notepad picks up a new View menu item, with a single sub-item, for Status Bar. But the status bar that appears when you enable this feature only displays a single field, for the caret position (Ln 1, Col 1 to start).

I couldn’t find a Windows Vista virtual machine, but moving forward to Windows 7, we see the addition of Aero glass to the menu bar and, of course, the glass-style application icon, which also debuted in Vista. But the layout of the app---its available commands and menu structure---was unchanged from Windows XP.

I likewise don’t have Windows 8.x available virtually, but I’ll need to change that soon. And Windows 10 is a bit tough to check since there are so many versions of Windows 10, and because Microsoft has actually made several substantive changes to Notepad in recent years. Today’s Notepad includes new commands like Search with Bing, Zoom, and Send Feedback, and support for different encoding formats, which I believe is tied to the addition of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Windows 10. The latter feature is another major issue with our Notepad clone, and one I’m not sure I’ll be able to overcome.

Looking over these decades-spanning functiona...

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