Microsoft’s Notepad is getting spell-check and auto-correct features 40 years after its launch

More than 40 years after the first simple text editor was introduced in Windows in 1983, Microsoft finally introduced Notepad’s spell-checking and auto-correct features in Windows 11. The software giant began testing both features in March and has now quietly started enabling them, rolling them out to all Windows 11 users over the past few days.

Notepad’s spell-check feature is almost identical to how Word or Edge highlights misspelled words, with a red line underneath to clearly indicate errors. I say nearly identical because when you right-click a misspelled word in Notepad, the spelling submenu doesn’t automatically expand like it does in Microsoft Word. So you have to click again to see the list of correct spellings.

It’s surprising that Microsoft hasn’t fully embraced spell checking in Word, especially since the company demonstrated the ability to right-click in Notepad and instantly select a correction during beta testing. Microsoft Word first featured spell-checking in 1985, when it was originally known as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix and MS-DOS systems. Microsoft originally developed Notepad, initially known as Multi-Tool Notepad, in 1983 as a simplified version of Word.

You can enable or disable spell checking based on file type in Notepad for Windows 11. So if you don’t want to see corrections in files like .md, .srt, .lrc or .lic, you can toggle it in the settings menu. Microsoft has added autocorrect to Notepad, which means typos are automatically corrected when spell check is enabled. Autocorrect can also be disabled in Notepad settings.