Notepad gains support for Unix-like line breaks

Microsoft has released an update for Notepad to Insiders, which gives the basic word processor support for Unix-like line breaks, which are used in Linux distributions and macOS, for example. This improves the readability of text.

Microsoft writes in an announcement announcing the addition that Notepad has hitherto failed to properly display the contents of text files created on Linux, macOS, or Unix systems, much to the chagrin of developers. That was because Notepad only supported the Windows line endings, or “cr” in combination with “lf”. In addition, cr stands for ‘carriage return’, which in turn is derived from typewriters, where the so-called carriage with the paper has to be pushed back. Lf then again refers to ‘line feed’, which in that context refers to turning the paper to a new line.

Operating systems use different characters to indicate a line break and so Unix-like systems only use lf instead of the combination with cr. Microsoft illustrates by means of a bashrc file that this means that text with such characters in Notepad was almost unreadable because line breaks were missing. Users who do not like the change to Notepad can revert it by making a change in the registry. Microsoft has published instructions for this. New files default to the Windows format.

The Notepad editor is a basic text editor within Windows that has been present in versions of the operating system since the 1.0 variant of 1985.

Before and after images from Microsoft