Enable the Status Bar in Notepad with a Registry Hack

If you always use Word Wrap in the Notepad text editor built into Windows, you might have noticed that the Status Bar option is grayed out—but you can trick Windows into enabling it with a registry hack.

Normally you can only enable the status bar if the word wrap option is disabled, but the Addictive Tips blog writes up the quick registry hack to let you enable it either way—to make the registry tweak for yourself, close out any open Notepad windows after enabling Word Wrap, open up a registry editor and browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad

Find and change the StatusBar key on the right-hand side to 1 instead of 0, open up Notepad again, and you'll notice that the status bar is now enabled. If you disable Word Wrap the option will reset back to normal, so you'd have to make the registry hack again, but it's an interesting trick that might help if you keep word wrap enabled all the time.