Microsoft is releasing a new preview version of Notepad. Microsoft is releasing the first preview of a new Notepad app built specifically for Window 11, featuring a new Fluent design interface that matches the rest of the Windows 11 UI, and finally introducing dark mode alongside it!
New Features
- The new Notepad app is rolling out now for Insiders in the Dev Channel on the latest Windows 11 preview build, 22509.
- Outside of a face lift, it doesn’t appear there are any new features shipping with today’s preview update.
- In the current version of the app that ships with Windows 11, the text search tool and the find and replace tool are two different pop-up windows, accessed by two different keyboard shortcuts. The redesign combines them into one floating bar instead of something that looks like it’s from the XP era.
- Microsoft is slowly, but surely, updating its in-box apps on Windows 11 to align them with the rest of the Windows 11 design language.
- It’s the first time since Windows 7 and Windows 8 that we’ve seen a consorted effort by Microsoft to align the design language across all Windows apps, which should make for a much more polished user experience when complete.
- The new version of Notepad is beautiful in both light and dark mode. It has modern fluid context menus too, though not all of the dialogs and popups have been updated with the modern interface yet.
- This is just the first preview build, so more updates are expected before it starts shipping to production PCs.
- Microsoft also says it’s adding multi-step undo, which replaces the old version’s undo system that only lets you go back one step.
- It still doesn’t work like you might expect a modern app to, letting you hit Ctrl-Z to delete one word at a time, but it clearly has more memory than the old version of Notepad.
