For decades, Notepad was the ultimate digital scrap of paper.
It's literally a tiny, instant, and gloriously simple. Users could open it in half a second, hammer out a quick note or a configuration file, and close it without ever thinking about fonts, formatting, or anything else. That purity is exactly why millions of people still loved it in 2025, even with Word, OneNote, Obsidian, and a dozen other apps begging for attention.
Now Microsoft is rolling out another update to Windows 11 Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels (Notepad version 11.2510.6.0), and the changes feel like the final stages of an identity crisis.
First up is honest-to-goodness table support.
A little grid icon now sits in the formatting toolbar, letting users click and drag to create rows and columns exactly the way they do in Word. They can also type Markdown table syntax if they prefer, then right-click to add or delete rows and columns.
On paper it’s useful.
With the feature, users can easily organize small data sets, or meeting notes inside a text file suddenly makes sense.
The second change is the one lighting up Reddit and feedback threads: streaming AI results for the Write, Rewrite, and Summarize features that nobody asked to see inside Notepad in the first place.
Instead of waiting for the entire AI response to finish generating, text now pours onto the screen word by word, giving the illusion of speed.
On Copilot+ PCs the Rewrite tool runs locally; everything else still phones home to the cloud, and all of it still requires a signed-in Microsoft account. The faster typing animation doesn’t change the core complaint.
As a result of this, many users express themselves blatantly, saying that they don not want a language model living inside what used to be the lightest text editor on Windows.
The backlash has been swift and predictable.
"Why are they not letting notepad be the super light and efficient tool that it is," said Reddit user. "I swear, MS doesnt even understand their own products, just feature bloat at this point."
Similar sentiments were shared by several people in the same thread.
"I don’t even trust using Notepad anymore. It used to be a super light, simple tool for quick notes and now it comes baked with AI and a bunch of unnecessary features nobody asked for," said another user. "At this point, they might as well have everyone use Word instead."
The darkest jokes point out that Microsoft killed off WordPad years ago only to slowly reincarnate its feature set inside the app that was supposed to be the opposite of WordPad.
Notepad has long stood as a steadfast companion, offering nothing more than a blank page that launched in an instant. Its simplicity defined its appeal since nearly the dawn of Windows. While the introduction of table support and streaming AI features isn't catastrophic on its own, watching this enduring app evolve into a more complex tool chips away at the very essence that has kept it relevant for four decades.
Read: Microsoft Puts Copilot Inside Windows's Notepad: Expect The Unexpected Upgrade