After 40 years, Microsoft has just updated a basic software on Windows

More than 40 years after its launch, the Notepad app has finally been updated by Microsoft with spell checking and auto-correction in Windows 11.

After more than 40 years, the Notepad app has been updated with spell checking and auto-correction. Photo: Future.

According to The Verge, Microsoft has quietly rolled out an update to spell check and autocorrect errors for the Notepad app in Windows 11.

In fact, Microsoft has started testing both features since March. Accordingly, the spell checker feature in Notepad is almost the same as Word or Edge, which is to highlight misspelled words and underline in red to show errors to users.

However, a minus point on this app is that when you right-click on a misspelled word in Notepad, the sub-menu will not automatically expand as it does in Word. Instead, the user must click again to see a list of correctly spelled words.

This is confusing because Microsoft used to demonstrate the ability to right-click and immediately chose to fix bugs in Notepad in the beta testing stage.

Meanwhile, with the autocorrect feature, Typo errors will be automatically corrected by Notepad when the spell check is enabled. Users can easily turn both spell checking and autocorrect features on and off in Notepad’s settings.

Windows Notepad first appeared in 1983 and is seen as a stripped-down version of Word. This more than 40-year-old application has been “frozen” for many years when there are almost no significant differences between versions on different operating systems.

It wasn’t until Windows 11 that this text editor app received significant updates. Specifically, Notepad has a dark mode setting and the menu bar has also been rearranged.

On Windows 11, users also don’t need to open a new Notepad page to jot down some ideas, annotations, or source code. Instead, press the (+) button to open a new tab in the same window. This feature helps keep ideas about the same problem and thoughts appearing and organized at the same time.