I've been on a roll lately highlighting some of the apps that Microsoft has greatly improved in Windows 11. So far, I've covered Paint and the Snipping Tool, both of which have evolved immensely in the past couple of years.

Now, it's time for Notepad. This simple, but essential app in Windows was mostly the same for years and years, but Windows 11 has changed a lot to make this app better than ever. Let's look at why I feel that way.

6 Copilot and AI features

It's not much, but it doesn't hurt

I'm not really a sucker for most AI features in Windows, but the integration in Notepad might come in hand for some people. Copilot in Notepad is currently only available to Windows Insiders, and it offers a feature called Rewrite.

Rewrite lets you select a phrase or block of text in your Notepad document and ask Copilot to rewrite it with a different tone or length, allowing you to turn rough ideas into text that's more suitable for specific environments. Copilot has always been able to do this on the web, but having it directly in Notepad is certainly interesting.

5 Dark mode

With a modern UI

The UI of Notepad didn't really change all that much for decades after its introduction, but Windows 11 finally changed that. This big update introduced a whole new version of Notepad with a totally modernized UI, featuring transparency effects and, most importantly, support for dark mode. That means that the app window and background will now be dark if you're using dark mode, making Notepad far more comfortable to use at night.

What's more, the UI in Notepad has been modernized with all kinds of improvements. The UI now includes a total character count, as well as counting characters for selected blocks of text, the menu has been simplified, and context menus now have icons to help make features easier to understand.

4 Native Arm support

It was about time

Despite starting the Windows on Arm initiative all the way back in 2017, Microsoft didn't put enough effort into it until the Windows 11 era, and Notepad was one of the big apps to benefit from it. The new Notepad app now runs natively on Arm64 PCs, so all the Snapdragon X PCs out this year can run it at full native performance.

More importantly, older devices like the Surface Pro X also benefit from this. These devices were significantly slower than the Arm PCs launching in 2024, so native support goes a long way in making the experience better.

3 Spellcheck

Write more confidently

Typos and misspellings are something that happens to everyone at some point, but it can still be embarrassing to share a document that has one or more of them. In Windows 11, Notepad has finally accounted for this and added a spellcheck feature that highlights misspelled words and provides options for correcting them.

You can choose to ignore certain corrections if there's something you spell frequently that keeps being flagged, and you can also turn spellcheck on or off based on specific file types, so you don't have to worry about errors appearing in documents where a lot of what's written may not be a real word. It's a small improvement, but one that goes a long way in making Notepad a proper text editor, which is particularly important since Windows 11 no longer includes WordPad.

2 Tab support

Finally, we can work on multiple documents

Working on multiple Notepad documents at a time used to be a hassle with each file taking up its own Notepad window. The concept of tabs is nothing new at this point, and Microsoft wanted to address this problem by making every app a tab in a window with Sets. But after that got cancelled, Notepad was one of the apps to get that capability built in.

With multiple tabs, Notepad can now handle multiple documents in the same window, with titles for each one making it easier to keep track of what you're working on. It handles it smartly, too. Unlike, say, File Explorer, whenever you open a new Notepad file, it defaults to opening in a new tab, so you don't accidentally end up with a bunch of windows open. (Seriously, Microsoft, why doesn't File Explorer do this too?)

1 Auto save

Stop losing your work

Finally, one of the features that's been most crucial to my personal use of Notepad has been auto save. Windows 10 already introduced an important feature in Notepad that added a warning for unsaved changes, but Windows 11 lets you just forget about it. All the changes you make are saved automatically, and the next time you open Notepad, they will be right there for you. Notepad always picks up where you left off when you close the app.

The fact that I can easily open Notepad, write down an idea, and forget about it makes things so much easier for my workflow. I don't always have the patience or need to save a document as a proper file so this makes things so much easier.

If you don't like, you can disable this and make Notepad open a fresh session every time, too. For me, though, automatic saves have been a huge time saver.

Notepad has become so much more useful to me

Much like the Snipping Tool, Notepad is a tool I rarely ever touched on Windows 10 and prior. I did use it more than the Snipping Tool, but the difference between what it used to be and what it is now is night and day. The modernized UI, tab support, and auto saving have changed the game for me, and I use Notepad all the time now simply for writing down quick notes knowing I don't have to worry about saving them. I highly recommend giving Notepad a go if you're not using it yet.