The terrible menu bar in the Windows 11 Notepad

It’s been seven weeks since I last complained about something in Windows on this blog. That feels like too long, so here’s a post about menus – specifically, the menu bar in the modern version of Notepad in Windows 11. That menu bar has, unfortunately, quite a few regressions compared to the menu bar in the old Win32 version of Notepad. There’s a longstanding behaviour on Windows where you can press and hold the primary mouse button on one of the top-level items in the menu bar (like ‘File’), move the mouse pointer over one of the items in the opened menu, and then release the mouse button to choose that item and dismiss the menu. Here’s that behaviour in action in the Registry Editor: It’s pretty much the only way I use menus opened with a left-click Does that work in the new Notepad? Nope. Here’s a rather pointless recording of what happens: Spoiler: nothing useful happens As an extension of that problem, you also can’t hold the mouse button down and move between top-level items in…