Windows Notepad returns to the Microsoft Store with new features

It's one of the most basic components of Windows, but also one of the most loved and most useful. Notepad has been with us for decades, and now it has found a new home in the Microsoft Store.

This is not the first time the app has appeared in the Microsoft Store. Originally announced in August last year, Notepad appeared for a while before vanishing. Now it's back, and it's better than ever with a host of new features.

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While still very much a no-nonsense, no frills app, Notepad has come a long way in its 30 years of existence. Microsoft bills it as an app that you can use to "view, edit, and search through plain text documents and source code files instantly", and it can be used for this and so much more. Microsoft's decision to add the app to its Store came after the company made it possible for people to uninstall Notepad from Windows 10.

If you've not investigated Notepad for a while, there have been a number of changes that you may well not be aware of:

Wrap-around find/replace: We've made significant improvement to the find/replace experience in Notepad. We added the option to do wrap-around find/replace to the find dialog and Notepad will now remember previously entered values and the state of checkboxes and automatically populate them the next time you open the find dialog. Additionally, when you have text selected and open the find dialog we will automatically populate the search field with the selected text.

Text zooming: We've added options to make it quick and easy to zoom text in Notepad. There is a new menu option under View > Zoom to change the zoom level and we display the current zoom level 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: A long outstanding request has been to add the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled. This is now possible in Notepad and we've made the status bar visible by default. You can still turn the status bar off in the View menu.

Other Improvements:

• We've improved the performance when opening large files in Notepad.
• 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.

If you would like to install the Microsoft Store version of Windows Notepad, you can grab it here. In order to use the app, you need to be running Windows 10 version 19541.0 or higher.