The other day, while jotting down something in Notepad, I noticed something new. Notepad was showing an asterisk in the title bar just before the file name. For a moment, I wondered what the asterisk was doing in the title bar.
A quick web search brought me to the official Windows team blog, which revealed that asterisk in the Notepad title bar is a new feature.
Why asterisk shows up in Notepad title bar?
The thing is that Notepad now displays an asterisk in the title bar (just before Untitled or file title) to indicate users that there are unsaved changes that will help users to save more often as Notepad has no functionality to recover unsaved files.
In short, Notepad displays an asterisk in the title bar when there are unsaved changes. Of course, like always, it will prompt you to save your work when you try to close it without saving your work.
Microsoft has documented this little feature in the what’s new in Windows 10 version 2004 blog post, but we are not sure when the feature was actually introduced as the feature is very much part of version 1909 as well.
In our opinion, this small feature is extremely useful for regular Notepad users as they can easily know if there is unsaved work. Earlier, we had to press Ctrl + S often without knowing if there is any unsaved work. Now, we will know the status, just glancing at the Notepad title bar.
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