14 DAY TRIAL // Notepad was, is, and will certainly continue to be one of the most popular applications in Windows. While for many people it’s just an easy way to write down something like a phone number or an address, others use it for more advanced tasks, such as coding.
As weird as that may sound, especially given there are plenty of coding apps out there, Notepad is an incredible tool that has a well-deserved place in Windows.
And this is the reason Microsoft keeps improving the experience with the app with every major feature update.
After updating Notepad with a dark mode, Microsoft is now getting ready for another significant makeover with the release of the next Windows 11 feature update. The company is bringing tabs to Notepad, and insiders in the Dev channel can already try them out.
Several years ago when Microsoft started the work on Sets, Notepad was one of the main apps to benefit from this idea. The project was supposed to bring tabs all over the operating system, all powered by Microsoft Edge and as part of an approach that many considered a substantial transformation of the Windows experience.
The idea was eventually dropped, pretty much because the original version of Microsoft Edge failed to make an impact, and the company promised to resume the work on tabs at a later time. This later time seems to be happening right now, and after File Explorer was updated with tabs, it’s now Notepad’s turn to get the same capabilities.
After using tabs in Notepad for more than a week, I can finally say that this little app feels like a completely new first-class citizen of Windows 11.
With tabs, you can obviously work on multiple documents in the same window, and needless to say, you can jump from one to another with the tab bar at the top. The experience is as straightforward as you expect it to be, and if you’ve used tabs in a browser, for instance, you’ll find it extremely familiar.
You can drag and drop tabs, pull them from a certain window to create a new separate window and work with documents side by side, control tabs with keyboard shortcuts, and so much more. Microsoft has also added an option to decide whether you want files to open in a new tab or in a new window, just like you do with links in a browser.
“With this update, we are introducing support for multiple tabs—a top requested feature from the community—where you will be able to create, manage, and organize multiple files in a single Notepad window! You can also continue to work with files across multiple windows by dragging a tab out into its own window, and a new app setting lets you customize whether files open in new tabs or a new window by default,” Microsoft said.
Needless to say, the same keyboard shortcuts that you use to manage tabs in a browser work in Microsoft Edge as well. For instance, you can press CTRL + T to open a new tab.
“There are also new keyboard shortcut keys to support managing tabs as well as some improvements to managing unsaved files, like automatically generating the file name/tab title based on content and a refreshed unsaved changes indicator,” Microsoft says.
At the end of the day, the addition of tabs is an overhaul that Notepad has long deserved. I understand that some people don’t want tabs because they make the app more complex, and I respect their opinion, but in a modern operating system like Windows 11, this just had to be done. And with this update, Notepad just feels at home once again on Windows.