Windows Notepad now available as an app from Microsoft Store

Back in August 2019, Microsoft announced that it would be bringing the Notepad app to the Store, allowing for faster and more responsive updates to the much-loved app. Later in December, Microsoft abandoned the plan without giving much reason. Now, the Windows Notepad is available again for download from Microsoft Store.

Notepad has been the fast and simple text editor on Windows for over 30 years, and now it’s available in the Microsoft Store! View, edit, and search through plain text documents and source code files instantly.

The Notepad app in Microsoft Store also features a brand new icon. Once installed in your PC, you can pin this app to your Start menu or Taskbar for easy access. If you have not used Notepad app in the past few years, you should give it a try. Microsoft has delivered some key improvements like the below.

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.

You can download the Notepad app here from Microsoft Store.