[canucker2016]

Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-...

The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF.

Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use...

Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :)

You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science.

Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.

[projektfu]

I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.

[canucker2016]

The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95.

Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit.

see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...