Notepad improvements (20H1)

With Microsoft working on getting the Windows 10 May 2020 Update (20H1) ready for release, there are tons of new features added in Windows 10 Insider Preview builds.

Notepad improvements:Notepad has been a well-loved text editor in Windows for over 30 years. Let us check what are new features getting added to Notepad over the last few releases.

Wrap-around find/replace:  An option has been added to do wrap-around find/replace to the Find dialog. Notepad will also remember previously entered values and the state of checkboxes. It'll automatically populate the next time you open the find dialog. And when you have text selected and open the find dialog, the search field will be automatically populated with the selected text.

Text zooming: Now its been made very quick and easy to zoom text in Notepad.There is a new menu option under View > Zoom to change the zoom level and the current zoom level is displayed in the status bar. You can also use Ctrl + Plus, Ctrl + Minus and Ctrl + MouseWheel to zoom in and out and use Ctrl + 0 to restore the zoom level to the default.

Line numbers with word-wrap: Ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled has been added now. And the status bar is made visible by default. You can still turn the status bar off in the View menu.

Modified indicator: Notepad will now show an asterisk (*) in the title bar before the title of a document to indicate that a document has unsaved changes.

Send Feedback: You can now send feedback directly from Notepad! Click Help > Send Feedback to open the Feedback Hub with the Notepad category selected and get your feedback directly to the product team.

UTF-8 Encoding: Significant improvements have been made in how Notepad handles encoding. An option to save files in UTF-8 without a Byte Order Mark and making this the default for new files is provided. UTF-8 without a Byte Order Mark is backwards-compatible with ASCII and will provide better interoperability with the web.

Expanding line support:  For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters – Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF). This means that Notepad was unable to correctly display the contents of text files created in Unix, Linux and macOS.

Now this issue has been fixed. Notepad will support Unix/Linux line endings (LF), Macintosh line endings (CR), and Windows Line endings (CRLF) as usual. New files created within Notepad will use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default, but it will now be possible to view, edit, and print existing files, correctly maintaining the file’s current line ending format. For example, Notepad earlier which used to incorrectly show the contents of a Linux .bashrc text file as garbled text, now the same .bashrc file contents are correctly shown. 

Some additional shortcuts: 

• Ctrl+Shift+N will open a new Notepad window.
• Ctrl+Shift+S will open the Save as… dialog.
• Ctrl+W will close the current Notepad window.

Notepad can now open and save files with a path that is longer than 260 characters, also known as MAX_PATH.

A bug where Notepad would count lines incorrectly for documents with very long lines is fixed.
A bug where Notepad would no longer create a new file when launched with a file path that didn’t exist is fixed.
Opening large files in Notepad is improved.
Notepad now supports Ctrl + Backspace to delete the previous word.
Arrow keys now correctly unselect text first and then move the cursor.
When saving a file in Notepad, the line and column number no longer reset to 1.
Notepad now correctly displays lines that don’t fit entirely on the screen.

So these are the improvements added to Notepad. And Microsoft with users feedback is continuously improving Notepad. (source)