14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has announced at the Build 2018 developer conference that Notepad is getting support for Unix/Linux line ending.
Despite the company making several other important announcements, the Notepad update has been received with much excitement by those attending the developer conference, which does nothing more than to confirm that the user base of this old-school app remains incredibly high.
What Linux line ending support means for Notepad is that the text processor should finally be able to correctly display the content of text documents created in non-Windows operating system, like Linux, Unix, and even macOS.
This happened because Notepad was only supporting the Windows End of Line, also known as EOL, characters, namely Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF). But given Microsoft’s push for deeper ties with the Linux world, adding support for Linux line ending was a natural thing to do, especially as the company wants to turn Windows into the right development platform even for Linux enthusiasts.
This new feature is coming to Windows insiders with the next build of Windows 10. By default, new files created in Notepad will use the Windows line ending, but on the other hand, texts created on Linux should be rendered correctly as well.
Some registry edits might be needed
A small tag in the status bar also indicates the detected EOL format when opening new documents in Notepad.
Microsoft explains that for some, the new feature might not work exactly as expected and a registry edit might be needed.
“As with any change to a long-established tool, there’s a chance that this new behavior may not work for your scenarios, or you may prefer to disable this new behavior and return to Notepad’s original behavior,” the company says.
To fix this, users need to navigate to the following path and edit the fPasteOriginalEOL and fWindowsOnlyEOL values depending on their preferred configuration:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad]
Further improvements could follow in the coming preview builds, and the updated Notepad will become available for everyone with Windows 10 Redstone 5.