Microsoft continues to enhance Notepad, the plain text editor of the Windows operating system. After adding features such as tabs, auto saves, or text formatting to Notepad, it is now testing spellchecking support.
The latest version of Notepad, version 11.2402.18.0, includes the functionality. It is available in the Canary and Dev development channels only. Not all testers get the feature right away, as Microsoft is — once again — rolling it out gradually to users. It can very well take weeks or months before a particular feature reaches all testers.
Microsoft describes the functionality on the Windows Insider Blog:
With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type.
Notepad Spellchecking
Microsoft notes that misspelled words are highlighted automatically by the editor. They appear in red. A click or tap on the word or phrase displays spelling suggestions. The keyboard Shift-F10 does that as well, but it appears less practicable to use.
Select a suggestion with the mouse, by touch, or keyboard, and it takes up the place of the misspelled word.
An option to add words to the dictionary is provided. This is useful if a word is spelled correctly but marked as misspelled by Notepad. There are also options to ignore words in a single document.
Spell checking is enabled for some file types only. For others, including log files and some files used for coding, it is turned off. Options to change the behavior are available in the settings.
AI or not?
Microsoft makes no mention of AI in the Windows Insider blog. The spell checking feature seems to run locally on the system. I cannot test it, thanks to Microsoft’s habit of rolling out features over a long period of time.
It looks to be a local feature that checks words using a local dictionary. Again, I could not confirm this at this stage.
Closing Words
Spell checking is a useful feature, even for a plain text editor like Notepad. Users who do not need it can turn the feature off in the settings.
With Wordpad deprecated, it looks as if Microsoft is putting the focus on Notepad. While it is not a full replacement, it is now getting features that Wordpad never supported.
Notepad is one of the few native Windows apps that I use regularly. What about you?
I cannot see the comments of others. Is that intentional or is it a problem on my side?
This is not intentional. Must be on your side. Try clearing the cache maybe?