While we all believe we need a fully featured document editor, such as Microsoft Word, the blunt reality is most of us can suffice with something with less bells and whistles. For me, I find myself  in Notepad under Windows 7 more than any other editor, both online and offline.

Recently I noticed a peculiar oddity within Notepad – the status bar isn’t available when utilizing the word-wrap option – a feature most everyone has enabled I suspect. With word-wrap enabled, the option to display the status bar is greyed out within the Notepad interface.

By turning off word-wrap, the option to display the status bar is returned.

This is frustrating for users who rely on the information provided in the Notepad status bar; such as, the line or column number for the current cursor location. While the necessity of this information is dependent on the composition in question, suffice to say many benefit from it’s inclusion.

Stepping back, it’s not hard to see why the option isn’t available with word-wrap – the information is ambiguous given how word-wrap actually operates. There is little concept of lines or column numbers to the application. However, to the user it can still provide valuable context. Consequently, you should know that it’s possible to use the status bar by making a quick change within the Windows Registry.

The key to look for inside the Registry is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad

Locate the key titled StatusBar on the right and toggle it’s value from 0 to 1. If you don’t see the appropriate key it’s because Notepad isn’t in word-wrap mode. What this means is, every time you enable or disable word-wrap within Notepad, this registry adjustment will need to be reapplied. For most, this probably isn’t a huge issue as word-wrap tends to be the desired behavior anyways.