Microsoft Notepad gets spell check and autocorrect 40 years after launch

Microsoft is finally rolling out spell checking and autocorrect for its Notepad app in Windows 11, more than 40 years after the plain text editor was first introduced in Windows in 1983. The software giant has started testing both features in March and has now quietly started activating them for all Windows 11 users over the past few days.

The spell check feature in Notepad is almost identical to the way Word or Edge highlights misspelled words, with a red underline to clearly show the errors. I say almost identical because when you right-click a misspelled word in Notepad, the spelling flyout doesn’t automatically expand like Microsoft does in Word, so you have to click again to see a list of correct spellings.

It’s strange that Microsoft hasn’t fully embraced the way spell checking works in Word, especially since the company showed off the ability to right-click and instantly select the correction in Notepad during the beta testing phase. Microsoft Word first had a spell checking feature in 1985, when it was originally known as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix and MS-DOS systems. Microsoft originally created Notepad, which was initially known as Multi-Tool Notepad in 1983, to be a simplified version of Word.

You can turn spell checking on or off based on file type in Notepad for Windows 11, so if you don’t want to see corrections for files like .md, .srt, .lrc, or .lic, they can be toggled in the settings menu. Microsoft has also added autocorrection to Notepad, meaning typos are automatically corrected when spell checking is enabled. Autocorrect can also be turned off in Notepad settings.