How To Enable Notepad Status Bar In Windows 7
By default, Windows 7 build-in Notepad does not show the status bar (at the bottom of the window). However, it is necessary at times to know basic statistics of the document like number of lines consumed and current column location. By doing a little tweaking in Windows Registry, you can easily make the status bar apparent in Notepad. In this post we will let you know how to enable the status bar of Notepad.
This is useful for users who cannot enable Status Bar from View menu as shown in the screenshot below. Status bar can’t be enabled when Word Wrap is enabled. Since Status Bar option is grayed out, tweaking the registry is the only viable option.
Note:Enabling Status Bar of Notepad requires modifying the registry, before you begin with the process, make sure that you have ample knowledge of backing up the registry files to prevent any erratic system behavior.
To start out with, from taskbar click Windows Start Orb button, type regedit and hit Enter. This will bring up Windows Registry Editor dialog.
Now look for the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad
Once Notepad registry keys are opened, double-click the StatusBar key. This will bring up a small registry key editor, now change the value from 0 to 1. Click OK to save the changes.
Now close down the registry editor and open a text file in Notepad. At the lower part of the window, you will see a Status bar showing Line and Column number.
The above Registry tweaking was done on Windows 7.
Thank you very much it worked
Thanks….. it’s work…
Totally worked even on my win 8.
I was getting nuts with this bug :SThanks for the info ^^
Thanks, this has been driving me crazy since I started using Windows 7. So much easier to read the line number than have to count lines in Notepad…and I use it a lot.
F’Microsoft should update their note pad with basic features like what in text pad.
So the real point of this article is.
1) Turn off word wrap
2) Turn on the status bar.
Hey It helped a lot. Thanks Man!!!
Status bar can’t be enabled when Word Wrap is enabled.
So if you want to enable the Status Bar without doing the registry hack:
Notepad >> Format/Word Wrap (check it off)
Notepad >> View/Status Bar
Tada!
So your point being???
His first line states the point very clearly. The rest explains how to get out of that situation.
Microsoft punted on the somewhat-tricky situation of handling editor info when line wrapping is enabled. A reg hack to work around this is ugly. NotepadFreak pointed this out to me. It was quite valuable.
And, yes, I’m aware that this is a 5-year-old comment now. You are free to make the “LOL. That’s like 5 years old” comment which would fit your previous comment. FWIW, there are quite recent comments still in this thread.
Does this apply to all Windows 7 versions? I’ve got Ultimate and the status bar can be enabled by default with no hacks, don’t have other versions to test this on…
It works on all versions of Windows. I can enable status bar in my Notepad in Win 7 Ultimate without any registry hack too, but this option is disabled when Word Wrap is enabled. In this case, the above method is the only way to enable it.