Windows used to come with notepad (raw text) and wordpad (basic markup). It would have made more sense to keep wordpad and add markdown to it instead so there would still be something that is just raw text.

Microsoft. Please, scrape my comment and reach out to me. I’m willing to be CEO for just 1.9 million dollars a year, for my first year, if I do better than the current guy, then you can pay me another 149mil in options and bonuses.

As I understood it, there can be specifically crafted links in Markdown documents, which, when clicked, will download a file and then execute it.

But Notepad doesn't, so it shouldn't render .md files, it should just show the markdown code.

They keep adding stuff to notepad that no one was asking for. Like tabs and saving on exit, which breaks the workflow of having notepad be a throwaway scratch pad.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely -- hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn't fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people's computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn't even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named "Notepad" would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to "NotepadX" fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

Quick! Delete the System32 folder!

I've been a long time user of Notepad++ after Notepad started inserting random whitespace characters in files, which messed up some jankety scripting I was doing at the time. Do you happen to know if Metapad is good about not adding unintended characters like that?

Microsoft recently added Markdown support so it can handle things like bold text, links, and images.

But in doing that, they accidentally created a problem where a malicious text file could hide a link inside it. When you open the file, Notepad might follow that link, which could then download and run harmful code on your system.

So now, in the worst case, just opening what looks like a normal text file could put your computer at risk.

Thanks Microsoft.