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Am I the only one who thinks these features would be a better fit for WordPad instead of Notepad? They could've made a WordPad from scratch with Markdown, RTF, DOC(X), and ODT at this point and it would've been more complete than shipping a half-baked Markdown implementation in Notepad. Plus, it wouldn't break the decades old assumptions by users that Notepad is for plain unformatted text and WordPad is for formatted/rich/"enhanced" text.

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My thoughts exactly. I think this has mostly to do with marketing because pretty much nobody uses Wordpad and most people hate it, while everybody uses Notepad or a replacement (Notepad++ or similar) which usually already has a lot more features, including markdown support. So from their perspective I can understand this decision, even though I don't think that this is where Notepad should be heading. On Windows, I use NP++ and other tools if I need more features, but I specifically use Notepad for when I don't want fancy stuff and slow startup times, often for the sole reason of getting rid of formatting of copy'n'pasted text. Notepad is stupid, but that can be a good thing. If I want something else I use something else.

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