Over the past two years, Microsoft has been gradually updating Notepad: at the end of 2021, Notepad received a dark theme and other interface improvements, and this year it has a tabbed system and automatic saving of changes.

And now, in the new Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26010, which is now available on the Canary Channel, the company has introduced further improvements to Notepad, among other things. The main innovation is the character counter in the status bar, which shows the total number of characters in the entire document and in the selected text fragment.

In addition, a new “Edit in Notepad” option has been added to the file manager’s context menu for all files (not just text documents).

Other new features in the 26010 build include new widget panel settings, scrolling view in the quick settings in the system tray, support for the Mica effect in the Task Manager, bug fixes, and more.