FIX: Notepad doesn't work properly in Windows 11

If ever there was a blog post that I didn’t ever expect to be writing it’s this one.

For such a long time, Notepad has been such a simple and stable application. That no longer seems to be the case.

Symptoms

Recently I had a situation where Notepad just didn’t work properly. I saw these things:

• If I double-clicked a .txt file, it no longer opened. What would happen instead, is that Notepad started, then reported that it could not find the file that I’d just double-clicked.
• In Windows Explorer, wherever I expected to see a text file icon like the one in the image above, what I saw was a simple rectangle (white with a black border).
• If I opened Notepad first, then used File>Open to go to the same files, they opened ok.

It was all rather frustrating.

Fix

After a large amount of fruitless searching, I eventually came across someone with a situation that he’d fixed by “resetting” Notepad.

I didn’t have the faintest idea that this was even a thing you could do.

If you navigate to Settings, then Apps, then open Installed Apps, you’ll find Notepad in the list. At that point, you can click the ellipsis and see this menu:

I must admit that I’d never thought about Advanced options here.  Opening that, revealed a surprisingly long list of options. But the one of interest was here:

Using the Reset option did fix my problem, after a reboot. Because it’s a shell thing, I suspect that just logging out and back in, might have also been enough once it was reset.

Anyway, I hope that helps someone. It certainly had me puzzled, and I’m left wondering what’s happened when Notepad has got to the point that this is necessary at all.

2025-01-17