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Can’t display notepad status bar

You may know that notepad has a nifty little feature called a status bar - this can make notepad much more useful by displaying line numbers, which is ideal if you are looking through code. Unfortunately, by default you can’t display the notepad status bar as it is greyed out. So, to turn the status bar on…

  1. Open regedit, ‘Start - Run - regedit.exe’ - hit enter
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT _USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad
  3. In here, double click on the ‘StatusBar’ option and change the Value data to 1

Enable Notepad Status Bar

That’s it!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


2 Responses to “Can’t display notepad status bar”

  1. Sam Hale Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 7:18 pm

    Cheers for this, worked a treat, but why the hell was it greyed out in the first place?

  2. Ian Says:
    October 25th, 2009 at 10:35 pm

    The Status Bar option is greyed out if Notepad is in “Word Wrap” mode.
    Turn off Word Wrap from the Format menu and the Status bar option will be available.
    I assume this is beacuse it is somewhat meaningless to have line numbers displayed in Word Wrap mode; the number of line then depends on how wide you make the Notepad window.

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