Notepad++ was a good alternative when I was running Windows

Wow someone was using this?

You can likely still grab the exe and use it

I recently started using a markdown based note taking program called Joplin, that might be useful for you

I don't get why they aren't retiring notepad instead. WordPad is just as light and fast while having more features.

Not that I really care, I never touch either ever since MS basically stopped developing them 25 years ago. Notepad++, atom, etc, there are so many superb lightweight editors out there.