Notepad, 41 years old, goes from strength to strength. In the wake of WordPad's demise1, Windows' basic editor is picking up a couple of fancy word-processing features—spellchecking and autocorrect. Tom's Hardware's Mark Tyson reports that "Microsoft had always classed spell checking as a premium feature, out of the reach of the bundled WordPad."
Windows 11 launched in late 2021, and it also brought some noticeable Notepad enhancements. Among the best new features were probably the dark mode compliance, auto-save / session restore, and a useful new tabbed interface for handling multiple files. Now we have an integrated spellchecker, it feels like the ambassador is really spoiling us.
Notepad's future is perhaps not as a text editor, in the traditional sense. A minimalist app for code 'n' config is just not the Microsoft way, and those functions are part of the Visual Studio suite. When I'm on Windows I like to use the homely but capable Notepad++.
1. Microsoft to take workhorse app WordPad out back after 28 years [boingboing.net]