If this was actually (pre)installed with Windows, I wouldn't mind the changes to notepad nearly as much.

While I'd love it installed by default, I still very much mind that they're ruining Notepad.

Plus this Markdown preview functionality just caused Notepad to have a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in it.

Oh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.

Agreed. Resurrecting Wordpad and making it really cool/useful would make everyone happy.

They can add as much AI and Markdown as they want to Wordpad as far as I'm concerned. Just leave my dumb featureless utility alone.

It is preinstalled. Server 2025 (even Core Edition) and Windows 11 24H2 (or 25H2, not sure)...

Edit is unironically one of my favorite text editors these days. It opens incredibly fast compared to everything else I use, it's easy to use, works fine on Linux. It's not going to replace emacs or VS Code, but it's incredibly handy for basic editing chores.

Have you tried Micro? https://micro-editor.github.io/

If you don’t need to render rich text and want a plain text editor then TUIs are the least likely to get a bunch of dumb features