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!
Does anyone use notepad for anything other than looking at config files? I mean, does anyone write documents with notepad?
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 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 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.
It has such a distinct lack of any features whatsoever, that it makes it a perfect tool for practicing written assignments for language exams.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The feature is not immediately accessible in any current Windows Insider build, however, enterprising users have ways and means to delve into the operating system and haul out experiments that are not yet ready to see the light of day.
A pop-up menu titled “Cowriter” is visible, with options to tweak the format and content of the text.
Microsoft has been hard at work ruining updating Notepad in recent years.
Its GUI was updated with the introduction of Dark Mode, and tab support turned up in 2023.
Something else could have been added to Notepad instead of AI but hey gotta ride the hype train."
AI in Notepad, as shown in the screenshots, does not seem to make much sense – we’re sure the wise Register readership could think of something more appropriate for the editor.
The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
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.
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
I always though 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
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.
They already did both of those. Paint has layers now and calculator got worse because they decided to split everything up into different modes which is a pain when you want to do hex conversions but also do non-truncated division, especially because it resets the history and storage when switching modes.
It seems to me like these apps are being redesigned by people who don’t use the features, or maybe with the primary design goal of reducing support calls from people who have no clue what they are doing.
They sure fucked up SwiftKey
Notepads gang, rise up!
I don’t understand all the negativity. An integrated AI assistant in a text editor sounds like it could be amazing.
Sometimes, programs just need to be simple.
Put that AI shit in Word, notepad is supposed to be a plain text editor and it did so quite well.
“Do one thing and do it very well” - Unix philosophy
Windows has never even slightly pretended to follow that guideline
And that’s why it’s awful
It sounds awful. The draw of notepad is its simplicity. I wish software companies would stop ruining their good versions of popular software.
We haven’t seen how this feature will be implemented yet, it could be done without impacting the simplicity of Notepad.
Personally, what I’d like is a button that pops open a side window where I could either ask the AI questions about the text that’s currently in Notepad or tell it to make edits to the text, and it’ll just do that. Seems like it could be perfectly straightforward if it’s something along these lines, and if you don’t want to use the feature you just don’t.
That’s near impossible. It will bloat notepad, at the very least. Longer loading, more chances of crashing, creating unnecessary data-traffic… literally no one using notepad in the last 25 years needed any of this, they used it for it’s simplicity, speed, reliability, all of which it becomes less with features like these. Put that shit in word and o365, where it belongs.
The technology hasn’t existed until this year, so Notepad’s last 25 years of usage patterns don’t really mean much to it.
If you don’t want it creating data traffic, don’t use the feature.
And don’t put words in my mouth. I would love to try out something like this and could well find it quite useful, depending on the details of how it works. So “literally no one” falls flat right there, I’m a counterexample.
Technology for rich text formatting has existed for many many decades. It was not a part of Notepad. People using it were well aware of this limitation, and used notepad because that technology was not a part of it.
A non-used feature will still cause unnecessary data-traffic. At the very least to install it and update it periodically, more likely constantly because it will become part of the microsoft telemetry / advertisement profiling / tracking package that is called windows.
You want the feature. I’m interested, too. But I don’t want the feature in notepad. I want notepad to stay as freaking basic as possible, because the main thing I (and I think other people too) like about notepad is the incredible speeeeeeed at which it opens on any device because it’s “show text” and nothing else.
Notepad.exe is a 356 kilobyte file. You’re really so concerned about the data traffic that will come from occasionally updating a 356 kilobyte application that you’re spending your time arguing about it at length on the Internet? Do you realize how many bytes it takes to download and display this discussion here on the Fediverse is? Here on Kbin.social it takes 712 kilobytes for me to view it. When you click on the notification that this response is going to give you you’re going to be downloading the equivalent of several notepad.exes all at once. If you respond, you’ll likely re-download the whole page again for your browser to display it to you.
Complaining about the bandwidth usage that would come from downloading an update to notepad.exe is ridiculous.
It’s a 356 kilobyte file for now.
I’m mainly complaining it’s a stupid ass way of microsoft making their bloatware tracking operating system complete. There is no good reason for them to put this stuff in notepad instead of, again, where it belongs and where 99.000 other features to juggle your texts around have been put before: Word, O365.
Here on Kbin.social it takes 712 kilobytes for me to view it.
And that is fine for a social networking app like lemmy/kbin. When I am using notepad I just want speed to view some text on a standalone machine, not a bunch of crappy bloat. Same for all of the other notepad users who outnumber people reading this by 1 million to 1.
They’re still going to ruin a supposedly no frills text editor with this.
What they could’ve dove to showcase it instead is revamping Wordpad, instead of removing it, and integrate the AI stuff there, since it’s supposed to be one of Microsoft’s example apps
If notepad makes a connection to the internet and waits for a connection and response then it is enshitified. If MS wants to do that they need for fork the code and offer the enshitified version under a different name “Notepad AI”
I don’t use Windows since 2018 but…
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.
Fuck Notepad. All my homies use Kate.
What are the advantages over notepad++?
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.
Imma keep using Wordpad
I’ve got some bad news for you…
Removed by mod
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 errors you get with any Linux distro, which can do stuff like syntax highlighting but are still light and fast.
