Microsoft apparently made the refreshed
Notepad available for all Windows 11 users a few weeks ago
after testing it with a limited set of users. The new Notepad
matches the refreshed look of the operating system. Similar to
Paint and other Office apps, it has been updated with a Fluent
Design makeover, which brings rounded corners to many areas.
Notepad also comes with dark mode compatibility and it looks
great on Windows 11. It even features new font for buttons,
menus, and more. It’s the most significant update of Notepad in
years as the overall interface of the app has remained
unchanged for several years.
Notepad has always been a simple and fast text editing app for
Windows, but it’s apparently slower than usual on Windows 11.
There are several Feedback Hub posts highlighting the
performance issues of the Notepad app, including a bug where
the vertical scrolling doesn’t feel smooth.
“Vertical scrolling animation in Notepad 11 doesn’t feel right
and is inconsistent with other Windows apps (Explorer doesn’t
animate at all and just scrolls by the amount of configured
lines, Settings and Edge scroll at a snappy speed). Notepad on
Windows 11 11 scrolls by the amount of configured lines, but
does so very sluggishly. It should either not animate at all,
or animate faster,” one of the affected users noted.
There’s another problem where the Notepad won’t process texts
quickly when you paste up to 500,00 lines from apps like
Microsoft Excel.
The Notepad load time is “infinitely slow and never ends
actually”, one of the users noted. “Also pasting text copied
from notepad itself is very slow. It was pretty quick in the
Win32 version”.
You can find similar reports in the Feedback Hub if you search
‘Notepad’.
Thankfully, Microsoft has acknowledged that Notepad does have
performance issues and it’s getting fixed in the next update
which is under testing. As per Microsoft officials, the Notepad
update brings additional performance improvements when you
scroll very large files or replace a large amount of text.
For example, if you copy texts from a Word document and paste
it into Notepad, and try to scroll, Notepad won’t run slow
anymore. Microsoft is also improving the accessibility for
screen readers, text scaling and more. The update now makes use
of assistive technologies already available in the operating
system.
Microsoft has also updated Notepad with native ARM64 support,
so the performance is now obviously better on ARM64 devices on
version 11.2204.
You’ll see faster and better performance when you grab the
update for Notepad.
