Remember when Notepad was just… Notepad? A simple text editor nobody asked to be modernized?
Yeah, Microsoft didn’t care either. They bolted on Markdown support and AI features anyway. And now we’ve got CVE-2026-20841. Remote code execution. Via a text file. This is the kind of thing that makes you go “oh come on, really?”
They’ve been enshittifying it for over a year.
Use LibreOffice instead. It’s available on both Windows and Linux.
LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a Notepad replacement. It does far too much for that.
If you want a lightweight text editor then Notepad++ is the one to look at.
Or rather it was until State Sponsored Hackers started running attacks on the domain. So maybe grab the software from GitHub instead.
Yeah, but notepad++ was recently hacked and been compromised. An unfortunate timing.
The software itself wasn’t compromised. But the download link was. So if you downloaded it in the last year, you downloaded state sponsored malware.