Notepad on Windows 11 gets spellcheck feature 41 years after launch

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped a blog post detailing the upcoming addition of spellcheck for Notepad in Windows 11's current Insider Preview. This updates comes to us 41 years after Notepad's introduction in 1983.

Shift + F10 or simply clicking/tapping the impacted word is the quickest way to bring up a list of spelling recommendations, at least according to the original blog imagery. Considering Windows 11's increasing focus on built-in AI features, it makes some sense we'd finally get basic spell checking functionality in Notepad.

Fortunately, spellcheck won't apply to a number of file types commonly associated with config files, log files, and other coding matters— unless you manually re-enable it. Notepad's app settings and Windows 11's Settings app allow deeper customization of the feature.

Dave Grochocki, Principal Product Manager Lead of Windows Inbox Apps closes the original blog post with an encouragement to submit feedback with the Windows + F shortcut. We presume this is for cases where suggested corrections are particularly absurd, don't match selected language, or are simply on a file type they shouldn't be.

In any case, this is a pleasant, if long overdue addition. Perhaps it could have prevented mistakes like The Asus motherboard with a spelling error. Unfortunately, this or even assistive AI is unlikely to catch a mistake like AMD accidentally listing an incorrect $100 discount on its Ryzen 9 7950X3D— issues like that tend to require another pair of discerning human eyes.

Now that we can enjoy Notepad with spellcheck in select Windows 11 Insider Previews (Canary and Dev Channels), we can likely expect this feature to emerge in Windows 11 proper in the coming months, or the next major update for Windows 11.