Windows 11 Notepad gets spellcheck, autocorrect 41 years later

Microsoft's stripped-down Windows text editor can finally play with the big boys.

Microsoft quietly rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect features to Windows 11 Notepad over the last few days, per The Verge.

These additions went into limited preview testing back in March, but now they're available for all. This is pretty wild because Notepad has been around in some form or another since 1983 and only got spellcheck now.

Naturally, it seems to work more or less the same way as it does in Microsoft Word, where squiggly lines underneath a misspelled word will be your key to fixing it with a right click. The Verge pointed out that you can turn off spellcheck and autocorrect for individual file types (primarily those associated with coding), and of course, you can turn them off altogether, too.

Notepad was never really meant to be the home of the kind of long-form writing that benefits from spellcheck, but if you want to use it for that, now you can.