Notepad is the Internet Explorer of text editors. People use it because it comes with your computer, it’s the default, and sometimes it’s all you need for a task.
LEAVE NOTEPAD ALONE!
seriously though. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather have be more basic than notepad. It’s entire literal existence is to open, edit and save basic text files. There’s zero need for additional features or updates.
I mean, I don’t even see their precious AI in office yet, and they’re getting hard over adding it to fucking notepad? I expected an AI powered clippy to return to office before this shit.
Throws table
I like the typical plaintext editors you get with any Linux distro, which can do stuff like syntax highlighting but are still light and fast.
I use notepad++ on Windows it’s great.
Fuck Notepad. All my homies use Kate.
Kate is freaking awesome. So many nice features for coding short of using a full IDE.
I always thought that my local use of a plain text editor should use a lot of CPU power (and electricity) in a huge data center.
Your owners gotta know what you’re doing at all times eh. Can’t leave notepad out of the
trackingeco system
I know it’s dumb but I was always a bit disappointed that Microsoft overhauled Paint in Windows 11 with layers and polish. To me, paint is always that terrible pre-packaged program that makes bad art. There was a community around making things in paint, which was noticeably impressive because making decent art in paint is a nightmare.
Now that it’s actually fairly good… I don’t know, it’s lost its charm.
Its not actually good, and many actually good art programs far outshine it.
So its lost what made it unique, by being comedically bad, and become the death knell of most things in a capital focused system; mundane.
My primary use case for MS Paint is its almost non-existent system usage, to quickly crop screenshots or strip metadata from files. Paint.net handles almost every other use. Same rationale for Notepad and stripping formatting from copied text. Bloat the program with ‘value added USP features’ to compete with actual image editing software, and I’m out.
Microsoft saw how the Apple ecosystem lock-in has benefited them long term, and made big pushes to ‘improve’ their first party software and close the ecosystem to the Microsoft store. Vanilla Windows fresh off an install throws all kind of “You sure? Like for real sure?” UAC warnings popups at any executable, while seamlessly processing their App Store use. Zero-low literacy users want that kind of UI/UX and Microsoft sees money to be made funneling them towards first-party and ‘partner’ software
there’s an easier tool to crop screenshots and strip them of metadata. Snipping tool! As barebones as notepad and paint, and extremely useful. I genuinely use it daily to the point that I just added it to my taskbar.
Opens in split second, lets you create a screenshot of any size and wherever you’d like, then immediately copies that image to your clipboard so you don’t even need to save it if you’re sending it somewhere online. If you so desire you can draw a bit on the image, handy for underlines, arrows, and basic censoring. And if a pesky dropdown menu only shows up when you hover over it you can set it to delay triggering and can get your mouse over there in time for a screenshot.
And that’s it, I’m pretty sure I described every single feature of the Snipping tool.
honestly it’s not even that bad, it’s notepad picture edition - I sometimes use it when I want to draw something fast to get my point across, small graphs that are easier to show than explain in text, objects I’m trying to describe but failing etc.
Together with notepad, paint gives you the “pen and a napkin” experience of the digital world.
I love Paint because when shit started hitting the fan in windows, Microsoft’s neglect actually elevated Paint to the best stock program on there. It’s the only image viewer I use on windows because it opens instantly and takes practically zero resources. Even large images can be opened faster than the crappy calculator, which is still the same calculator from Windows 8 by the way. I hope they never touch paint again.
I can understand and get behind this sentiment. At an old job we had iMacs and I would use Apple’s numbers program to make pixel art in the tables by coloring each cell.
Does anyone use notepad for anything other than looking at config files? I mean, does anyone write documents with notepad?
Edit: Thanks for all the comments. I have used notepad similarly, but doesn’t sound like anything that needs AI.
Funny enough, I use it like a notepad. Oh s***, I need to write this down real quick. I need to grab an exerpt off a website, our store serial number or make a quick list. It’s literally scrap paper in digital form for me.
It has such a distinct lack of any features whatsoever, that it makes it a perfect tool for practicing written assignments for language exams.
I use it for writing quick temporary notes for work when I don’t have a pen and paper handy.
I prefer having a bare-bones text editor over anything with formatting. Most of the time, I don’t want the formatting to carry over, I want it stripped down to just the content, just the text. Word can get annoying sometimes when you’re trying to copy and paste and it does something stupid like carrying over weird frames or tables or whatever the hell. That said, I’ll still use a “fancy” text editor like Notepad++ or Sublime Text.
I only use it to strip HTML text down to plain text. As long as it can do that, I’ll probably keep using it unless something better comes around.
I paste blocks of text or data into it, then copy it out again so I dont infect document B with document A’s weird formatting
I used to use it for taking quick notes when I had a slow computer. I didn’t want to wait for Word to load, so I’d just use Notepad. Now I use Post Its or just don’t write stuff down as much.
Been a Windows user for a really long time. A few times I tried to switch over to Linux, but it just wasn’t doable for a myriad of reasons. Windows 11, I have words with it. Many bad ones, but thankfully there are many users like me that for one reason or another did not switch and put time in to beat the badness out of it via mods.
Windows 12… I’m not so sure if I’ll even “upgrade” to it. It really depends on how much Microsoft decides to wire up the OS to their servers. Look, I wouldn’t mind at all if I could have “smart” tools with AI assistance, but the problem for me is the lack of choice. Currently, if you don’t use their crap software, what mostly travels over the wire is telemetry, and if you go offline no harm done. But make no mistake, useful AI models are too fat to run on most computers. Heck I built mine with AI in mind, but will Microsoft even give me the choice of using my own AIs? (Here’s a hint, it starts with N, has a V and ends with an R)
But what if the OS starts requiring it to be online only because of their AI features? Maybe we’ll have to start paying for Windows again in subscriptions to pay for the obligatory AI? Or what about scrubbing options away from the settings so you can’t “misuse” your own device and have to ask nicely to their AI to do it for you?
There is a road here, and I do not like it. Thank goodness Linux is better than it has ever been.
PS: As for the notepad thing, I’m completely in agreement that it should remain without AI. Such a simple tool for scribbling down notes should be kept lean, simple and fast. Things that Microsoft and their engineers have long forgotten how to do.
Not seeing anyone recommend Sublime Text here. It’s free for non commercial use and is fucking kickass and doesn’t look like it came out of the 80’s like NP++
The more I look at modern UIs, which seem to have decided the best way to use the metric crapload of screen space a modern PC has is with gratuitious whitespace, the more I like 1990s UIs.
Sure, totally get you there, but part of what I like about Sublime is that the interface is clean, no buttons everywhere, nothing obtrusive, its just a text editor that packs a punch and has a lot of community built plug-ins to do whatever you may need.
God damn. Fuck these guys. My bread and butter has been programming in the Microsoft ecosystem for 15 years. Now I’m running Linux on two different PCs and working on learning non-MS development stacks.
Imma keep using Wordpad
Removed by mod
You know what’s free (as in beer and speech) and not being enshittified? Notepad++
Fun fact: Most of the features that people liked about the “new” Windows notepad were just stolen from Notepad++ anyway.
So you may as well just use Notepad++ and enjoy a better experience, plus about a zillion other things like numerous plugins, syntax highlighting for just about every programming language under the sun, immensely configurable color schemes, etc., etc., etc.
Hardly “stolen”. Suff like tabs is very basic that n++ didn’t invent.
Explorer still can’t do it though.
Wait, it does now?! Hell freezes over?
They had that in win10 as well for about a week and then they took it away hoping nobody noticed it so it could be a win11 feature instead.
It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.
I haven’t noticed any of this. Where are you seeing them?
It’s because apparently being anti Russia, anti authoritarian and pro Ukraine is…pOliTiCaL
It is. The sentence “I’m pro Ukraine/Russia” is most definitely a political statement
This is not enshittification. Here’s where the term came from:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification
In what way is adding an AI assistant to Notepad either “abusing their users” or “abusing their business customers?” It seems like it’s just a useful new feature to me, that’s still in the “be good to your users” phase.
What about privacy and bloat? Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again? There’s a reason they got rid of that annoying little bugger 20-ish years ago. Even killed Cortana. How many failed experiments more do we need?
If you need AI writing, you have it in Edge or on the ChatGPT site. Will they add AI to settings to help you turn on all the bloat and tracking for you?
Like just give me my damn control panel which has a working search feature (unlike, say, Settings)
They’re sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform. The only thing notepad had going for it was its complete simplicity, reliability, and speed. Nobody wants notepad to try to rope you into this ecosystem, certainly not at the expense of those qualities.
Even with the recent updates, I’m over it. Notepad has crashed on me at least twice. Notepad. Crashed. There is no longer any reason to use it.
They’re sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform.
You don’t know that. You have no idea how this “cowriter” will be integrated. It could be just a little button off on the side, maybe with a setting in the configuration to hide it entirely, and you can ignore it completely.
Any additional functionality added to an already feature-complete program is bloat, no two ways about it. If notepad+AI was a separate program, this would be a different discussion. Even if you can hide it completely, the fact that it’s there at all will affect performance. And even if it’s just a tiny blip in relative performance, it’s still the first step on the road to enshittification.
I think you may be overestimating how much code is required for a program to simply use an AI, as in just calling an AI’s API with a string of text and getting some text back in return. I’ve written code that does this and it’s just a few lines.
The code for whatever UI Notepad wraps around it might be a few hundred more lines, that depends very much on the UI framework and what they want it to look like. But the AI part is trivial. The hard work of actually executing the AI’s code is done on a remote server. Your home computer won’t have to do any of that work.
You’re free to believe that this will not bog down the program at all, and also that this isn’t just the first bad decision they’re making with notepad. I really would like to impress upon you that that is wishful thinking, and not at all the most likely outcome here.
I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.
- Why is it limited to platforms? Can’t enshittification apply to other things like applications?
- Are business customers really required or can that step be skipped?
- The platforms dying thing isn’t what we are seeing. For example, Amazon is absolutely enshittified. They’re not dead. More like undead, continuing to shamble on consuming everything.
I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.
AI assistants usually need to upload the data to process it. So it’s potential enshitification via adding data upload/harvesting features to a trusted offline text editor. Usually companies have ways to generate revenue streams based on the data from these “free and useful features”. Adverts based on what text files you open might be the long term end goal.
If you’re concerned then don’t use the feature. It’s really simple.
That would be fine, but a lot of these features are added in an update, with complicated setups or mods to turn them off. Start bar local app search now gets sent to bing search by default, thats almost never what people want. Most people wont know how to disable it or care. But I guess thats fine as long as Microsoft gets to increase its bing usage stats and collect more user data.
To be clear, my problem is with these features getting pushed as default enabled.
Adding an AI seems OK but per the article it will do it similar to Paint Co-creator. I can already see those types of “features” will get promoted more and more in updates and take more part of the screen.
Microsoft will want revenue trickling in from Notepad of all places…
Now do paint. Or even more useless: calculator.
No need to “fix” notepad. It does what it has to. If you’re a power user, you can download something else. But I’ll bet it won’t have Ai in it.
I don’t use Windows since 2018 but…
Bring back clippy. “I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you.”
Notepad++, GET YOUR FOSS ON PEOPLE!
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
If you’re not using it, then you’re going to be extremely happy when you switch!
