Microsoft unveils wave of new Windows 11 features in Paint and Notepad — with better Markdown support and a new AI Color Book mode coming soon

Microsoft has unveiled a handful of new features coming soon to the Notepad and Paint apps on Windows 11 that are designed to enhance the experience for people who frequent the app.

First up, Notepad is gaining new Markdown capabilities. Specifically, it’s gaining additional syntax features such as strikethrough formatting and nested lists. Markdown shortcuts will work as you expect, but you can also use the formatting toolbar at the top to achieve your desired formatting effects.

In addition to the Markdown enhancements, Notepad is also gaining a new “Welcome Experience” popup that will appear when new features are added to the app. Notepad is updated so frequently with changes and enhancements these days, this will be handy for those who want to stay on top of what’s new.

Lastly, Microsoft says the ability to generate text in Notepad should appear faster thanks to “streaming” text, which will type out the generated response live so that results being appearing faster.

For Paint, Microsoft is introducing a new Coloring Book feature that uses the on-board NPU on Copilot+ PCs to generate drawing outlines that are designed to be colored in. “To get started, open Paint and select the Coloring book option from the Copilot menu. Once the side panel is open, type in a description of the coloring book you want to create, and hit the Generate button. Paint will then generate a set of unique coloring book pages based on your prompt.”

Paint is also gaining a new fill tolerance function, which lets the user adjust how strongly the fill tool actually fills a section of the canvas. You can adjust the strength, lowering it so that the fill tool doesn’t fill as much of the space you’ve selected.