Enlarge / "Notepad.exe but with spellcheck" looks pretty much exactly like you'd expect it to. (credit: Microsoft)

Whatever else you can say about Windows 11—and whatever you think about its pushy tendencies and the Copilot feature that has been rolled out to pretty much everyone despite being labeled a "preview"—the operating system has ushered in a bit of a renaissance for decades-old built-in apps like Paint and Notepad .

Notepad's development in particular has been striking; it had gotten small under-the-hood updates over the years, but in many ways, the version that was still in Windows 11 at launch in 2021 was the same app that Microsoft shipped with Windows XP, Windows 95, Windows 3.1, or even Windows 1.0.

An updated version of Notepad currently rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels is adding two more modern features to the old app: spellcheck and autocorrect. Per usual, spellcheck in Notepad highlights misspellings with red squiggly underlines, and right-clicking the word or pressing Shift + F10 will pop up a short menu of suggested fixes.

Enlarge / The venerable WordPad is one of the few built-in Windows apps that hasn't seen any kind of improvement in Windows 11, and now it looks like its days are numbered. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Whatever its other flaws, Windows 11 has given the operating system's built-in app suite its biggest overhaul in many years. For apps like Calculator, the changes have been merely cosmetic, but everything from Sound Recorder to Media Player to Paint to the Snipping Tool has gotten some kind of thoughtful redesign and new features, often for the first time in a decade-plus.

One exception was WordPad, the built-in rich text editor that Windows has included in every version since Windows 95. Though much more limited than Microsoft Word, WordPad was also more versatile than Notepad, capable of saving and reading .rtf, .docx, .odt, and .txt files (though its support for Word documents has always been prone to formatting errors). But its last substantial update came in Windows 7, when it picked up the then-new ribbon interface introduced in Office 2007. That version is still available in Windows 11, with few modifications.

According to Microsoft's deprecated features page for Windows , it looks like WordPad will never be getting a redesign to keep pace with the other Windows apps. The app is "no longer being updated," and though it remains available for now, it "will be removed in a future release of Windows." Microsoft doesn't specify whether it will be removed in an update to Windows 11, or some future major Windows release.

Enlarge / Doom as it was meant to be played. (credit: Sam Chiet )

Hackers of a certain age are intimately familiar with the "Will it run Doom " meme and the wide array of ports it has engendered (including a game of Doom that runs inside an instance of Doom itself ). Still, this week's viral video and eventual itch.io release of a Doom port running in Windows' standard notepad.exe text editor left us with a number of questions.

Chief among them: "How?" and "Why?"

“My favorite kind of magic trick”

When it comes to the "How?" DoomPad coder Sam Chiet told Ars that the hack is "my favorite kind of magic trick," the kind that "seems wild, but it's super simple."