Microsoft pulls Notepad from the Microsoft Store

Microsoft announced this week that it won't offer Notepad through the Microsoft Store anymore. Notepad, the default plain text editor on Windows, is included in every version of the operating system.

The functionality of the text editor has been improved in recent times; Microsoft added support for text zooming, new shortcuts, improved text wrapping, line endings, and more.

New features landed in stable versions of Windows 10 whenever a new feature update was released.

Microsoft announced in August 2019 that it would move the text editor to the Microsoft Store to push out updates more frequently. Instead of releasing Notepad updates every six months -- the frequency of new feature update releases for Windows 10 -- Microsoft could release updates whenever they were ready for release.

The release notes of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 19035 confirm that Microsoft has reversed the decision.

Thank you for all the feedback you provided on the Store version of Notepad. At this time, we’ve decided not to roll this out to customers. Insiders may notice some changes as we remove this change from this build:

• If you pinned Notepad to your Taskbar or Start menu, you will need to re-pin after you upgrade to this new build.
• If you had certain file types set to open in Notepad by default, you will see a prompt when you try to open files of that type again and will need to re-select Notepad.

The change affects Notepad on Insider versions of the Windows 10 operating system only. Insider users may need to re-pin Notepad to the Taskbar or Start Menu as the original icon will be removed when the new build of Windows 10 is installed. Additionally, Notepad needs to be selected again when file types are opened for the first time that were mapped to Notepad previously.

It looks as if the new version will uninstall the Store version of Notepad from the system and replace it with an integrated version of the text editor instead; this explains why it is necessary to re-map file types to the editor and re-pin it as well.

One consequence of the decision is that Notepad updates will be rolled out only in new feature update versions of the Windows 10 operating system and not faster.

Now You: do you use Notepad or another plain text editor?