Microsoft keeps improving and adding more features to the Windows 11 Notepad application, the latest being a built-in character counter.

There are a handful of updates but nothing was as surprising as Notepad getting a character count after 40 years of missing the feature.

You can change the default Character Encoding in Notepad from UTF-8 to ANSI, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE, UTF-8 BOM. using Registry Editor.