Microsoft ships buggy Notepad to Windows 11 Stable

Microsoft began rolling out a new feature update to Windows 11 version 22H2 yesterday. Although the update does not have an official name, it is likely what's referred to as "Moment 2" internally. It features a massive changelog with improvements to Taskbar, Search, Widgets, Task Manager, and more. You can read about all the changes in our dedicated review here.

Although this is all nice and dandy, it turns out that Microsoft has shipped buggy software to this Stable Windows 11 release, perhaps knowingly as the bug has been on the known issues list for a while. As Rafael Rivera on Twitter points out, the "Alt+F, X" shortcut is broken for the new tabbed Notepad, also available to Windows 11 Stable users via an update from the Microsoft Store.

The shortcut is meant to close the window that is currently in focus, but instead, it attempts to close all windows. This may interrupt your workflow if you are a heavy user of Notepad because as it attempts to close all Notepad windows, you will also get a bunch of dialog boxes asking if you want to save your changes before closing the application.

We can replicate this bug in an older version of Notepad too. However, the fact that this is being shipped to production is a bit of a disappointment considering that Microsoft is likely aware of the issue but is more eager to ship half-baked features to meet deadlines rather than releasing a fully functional app. It continues Microsoft's trend of "ship first, fix later" when it comes to Windows releases.

Regardless, Rivera has highlighted the issue on Feedback Hub, you can upvote it here.