They finally did it. Microsoft has successfully over-engineered a text editor into a threat vector.
This CVE is an 8.8 severity RCE in Notepad of all things.
Apparently, the “innovation” of adding markdown support came with the ability of launching unverified protocols that load and execute remote files.
We have reached a point where the simple act of opening a .md file in a native utility can compromise your system.
I miss oldskool Notepad being present on the system. Win11 Notepad is a worthless piece of shit.
But … any computer or vm that I use for more than a few hours gets a copy of Metapad.
I’ve been using Metapad for … umm … decades.
Metapad is a simple, extremely lightweight editor, intended to just barely be better than Notepad, fixes a lot of shit that MS never did and stays simple.
https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
Metapad gang +1
Back in the old Web 1.0 days I used to label my websites “Coded by Notepad.exe”.
Well, you couldn’t pay me to use today’s Notepad. But Metapad fills that gap perfectly.
Windows 11 ltsc comes with old Notepad. Looks like the same one from Windows 10.
Hmm. This is what mine looks like.
That looks like a nightmare.
Windows 11 ltsc is interesting in that its like a time capsule. More like Windows 7 than 10. Has no Microsoft store, no onedrive, no game bar. And has old Microsoft paint, calculator, and notepad from Windows 10 with no tabs.
There’s not really anything to uninstall. And it just gets security updates. Its a bare bones OS that feels closer to Linux because of that without the crap that even Windows 10 had showing tiktok and meta in the start menu to remove.
I have a laptop still running Win10. I’ll look into this. Thx.
I’ve been a long time user of Notepad++ after Notepad started inserting random whitespace characters in files, which messed up some jankety scripting I was doing at the time. Do you happen to know if Metapad is good about not adding unintended characters like that?
I use EditPadLite and have done for a loong time. It has regex find and replace, is fast and you can tell it to display word wrapped or not, numbered lines or not, font, size, colours, syntax highlighting scheme, all based on file extensions. I have it as my default text editor and for all kinds of other files as well as text.
If I want to do major coding, I fire up the IDE and choose from my recent projects, but if I want to quickly edit some xml or a single source file, I double click it and edit it in EditPadLite.
This is the first I’ve heard of EditPadLite. From a cursory examination of their site, it appears to be written with the same general design philosophy as Metapad, albeit not as low profile. I’ll give it a tentative thumbs up.
The EditPadLite download is 18mb. My copy of Metapad is 190k. Small and fast.
The only time it’s ever in the least bit slow to load is when it’s on a onedrive folder at work and Microsoft don’t cache it locally so there’s a delay getting the thing in the first place.
Does metapad have regex find and replace? If so, smaller and even faster is appealing.
Yes. Metapad is too dumb for that shit. By design.
It’s only barely smart enough to be better than Notepad.
It’s not smart enough to do anything dumb.
Its free, extremely mature, and you already know how to use it.
Metapad is a feature-for-feature drop-in replacement for Notepad.
I love this. Amazing quote
Thanks! I’ll check it out 🍻