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.
And even if Notepad++ had invented it, it's not "stealing" to do the same thing. Notepad++ still has its tabs, nobody stole them. Copied them, maybe. Inspired by them, perhaps. "Stolen" is just a deliberately emotion-baiting term.
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.
More likely they are direct ports of things from the highly popular Visual Studio Code as a lot of people used to bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad for YEARS before Notepad++ was a thing.
I think you mean you discovered vs code years before you found notepad++
Notepad++ has been around since 2003 years and vs code has been around since 2015.
A lot of those features were in visual studio 6, which was released in the late 90s or early 00s. Tabbed files, syntax highlighting for their supported formats (though it was a lot more tightly bound to those languages, like there was a visual basic program and a separate visual c/c++, n++ is the first I remember with arbitrary language syntax highlighting support), pretty sure it had a plugin system, too.
And vs6 was just the first one I used, they might have been present in vs5 or earlier versions.
I suppose we could point to emacs for formatting and syntax highlighting
Plus an electric list is far superior to tabs. Tabs are too usable. I want to have to hit ctrl+X, L before I can change files.
/s just in case.
Yeah, vim also has it today, but I don't know how far back that goes. Screen splitting, too, I use that all the time in vim and GUI editors.
We didn't have color terminals at my college so if there was any highlighting I wouldn't have seen it. Probably shortly after the first dumb terminals came with color text somebody made emacs or vi do highlighting? Screen splitting goes way back. Emacs had that in the late 80s when I was using it.
Visual studio and visual studio code are not the same thing. Visual Studio is a full IDE and is expected to have those features and is clunky because of them. Or was, not sure where it is now. It’d be in the same category as netbeans, eclipsed, and intellij
Vs code is an enhanced lightweight text editor
Notepad++ is the original enhanced lightweight text editor
My point was that Notepad++ came out way before vs code and didn’t copy features from vs code.
Copied from an ide, sure? Not really a good comparison as they are solving two different problems
They were features of the text editor that was a part of the integrated development environment. My point was that even though vs code came after n++, those features were a part of the visual studio line, which vs code is a successor of, so if there was inspiration it was more likely in the direction of vs -> n++, though realistically there was probably transfer in both directions over time.
No I am saying people where coding html in plan old notepad way before notepad +
And separately with MS having popularity with VS code they likely ported the dev functions to ms notepad there is a good chance notepad++ was not the inspiration.
Then those features in VS Code were most likely heavily inspired by Notepad++ as well. Notepad++ was publicly released in 2003, which in computing terms may as well be the neolithic era.
TL;DR: There's no reason to stick with a shitty Microsoft application for this task since N++ exists and is, was, and probably forever will be superior.
bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad
You're someone who likes pain huh?
Was making HTML pages long before Notpad++ was a thing young one.
Not saying I would do it that way now.
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.
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.
And I think that 90% of the concern people have is arising out of some kind of weird anti-AI hysteria.
Look, even if Microsoft does "ruin" Notepad somehow, it's a really simple program. Github has a bunch of projects tagged "notepad-clone", I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives out there that duplicate the old Notepad as precisely as you may desire. Adding AI is extremely simple on the client side but it's not so easy to provide the LLM back-end so those replicas probably won't be able to do what Microsoft is about to do, so I want to see Microsoft try it. I think it'll be good.
I couldn’t care less that the addition in question is AI related, it’s unnecessary bloat that no one asked for! I hate bloat, that’s my thing. I didn’t like when the start menu was ruined, I didn’t like when user accounts were eschewed for microsoft accounts, and I don’t like this.
I’m completely off windows now anyways, so I don’t even have skin in the game. It just boggles my mind that anyone would defend this whacky decision. Streamlined bloat is still bloat.
Why not just clone notepad and then start adding garbage? They already announced the intention to remove word pad, just replace that with whatever this ends up being!
it’s unnecessary bloat that no one asked for!
I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth. I would be quite happy to try this feature out, and I think it could be quite handy indeed. I literally said "I want to see Microsoft try it" in the comment you're responding to.
I’m completely off windows now anyways, so I don’t even have skin in the game.
So what's your problem? Don't insist that everyone has to share your values and run their computers the way you would want to run them.
I just linked to a whole pile of notepad clone projects. I'm sure some of them will satisfy whatever preferences any particular person has. "Why not just clone notepad" applies just as much to the people complaining about this features, and it's already been done. If you want to stick with the unchanging bare minimum text editor, there they are.
You’re acting like I’m crazy for taking issue with this, I’m just explaining my perspective. You’re free to enjoy whatever gizmos and gadgets microsoft bundles into the next windows release, just as much as I’m free to say it’s a piss-poor decision on their part to do so.
It shouldn’t be the user’s responsibility to seek out replacement programs for shit that has been baked into the OS since 1983. I genuinely haven’t seen a single person ANYWHERE EVER say “boy howdy I sure do wish notepad had more features, maybe an AI cowriter!”. If that’s something you really actually wanted before you heard about this, then I’m sorry for putting words in your mouth.
As it stands though, you’re just dying on a stupid hill for semantics.
No, I'm annoyed that you're assuming that your view of this matter is the only one, and are insisting that Notepad should exclude any features that you don't want even though it likely wouldn't harm you if they were included.
I'm perfectly fine with people not using AI. I'm not perfectly fine with people jumping in and telling me "and you don't get to use it either!"
The fact that Notepad is really old shouldn't be an argument that it should never change.
I genuinely haven’t seen a single person ANYWHERE EVER say “boy howdy I sure do wish notepad had more features, maybe an AI cowriter!”.
I'm saying it right now. I've said it repeatedly in the course of this thread, in comments that you are posting direct responses to. I explicitly said in the previous comment, and the comment before it, that I wanted this. How are you not understanding this?
If that’s something you really actually wanted before you heard about this,
Ah, I see where you're trying to weasel out a technical "I was right all along" - you're going to say that because I hadn't specifically said "in Notepad" about this before seeing that Windows was planning on adding this to Notepad, my interest in this new feature is somehow invalid and my previous comments are lies or something. Not "genuine." You'll imagine that I hadn't thought about how nice it would be to have an AI cowriter in some kind of text editor before now, and that even now I'm... I don't know, why do you think I'm arguing that this would be beneficial if I don't actually want to use it? I can't think of why you might imagine I'm arguing this, maybe I'm some kind of shill for Big AI?
And then you accuse me of "dying on a stupid hill for semantics."
God, I should’ve seen you take this out and followed suit. Instead I engaged, and now unbeknownst to me I’m afraid of AI and putting words in people’s mouths, gotta love internet discourse
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
Perfection.
That one and "FAFO" in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
Shockingly, I don’t know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.
“Fuck around and find out” for everyone else who didn’t know.
Ahhhh THAT overused phrase. Of course we’d have to acronym/initiaism it.
At least we don’t (yet) have PSGWSP. Ugh it felt gross typing that.
I do too, considering it never needed a new term to begin with. This isn't a new concept, and we already have a name for it: rent seeking
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.
There is no need to coin a new term, when "rent seeking" has done just fine for hundreds of years now.
This is not a new concept.
I completely forgot about that term. That may be more accurate. In fact, it describes what has Windows has become.
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...
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.
Leaks of company secrets will increase.
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)
Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again?
You're making some pretty big assumptions about what this feature will be like.
Unfff pump my veins full of Notepad++. I wanna feel the autosaving tabs course through me. I need that tabbed indenting experience. AAAAAAAAAAA
And it's great that it exists, but the average Windows user has no idea that exists and probably no idea how to download and install it because the average Windows user, like the average computer user, is only nominally computer literate.
Those are the people Microsoft constantly fucks over, not people here who tend to know what they're doing. A large percentage of people here don't even use Windows except maybe through an emulator.
LiteXL is also pretty good.
And Metapad (was named before Facebook became Meta) and Notepad 2/3 and and and.
They seem to be pro-Ukraine (or at least anti-Russian invasion) and anti-Chinese authoritarianism. I can't bring myself to have any beef with either of those positions, really.
No you didn't, the links at the bottom still work - you can get it in both old and new logo.
Go ahead, live the dream!
They had some messages regarding a free Ukraine a few updates back. It’s a free app so if he wants to include that in his update message that’s fine to me.
Every few updates the read me, description or something contains some kind of statement on various world issues going on.
Search the hit hub issues for notepad++ for the word political. People complain each time.
I don’t care if he is on the rights side of the issue or note, just don’t like it popping up in software.
I thought my installer was infected the one time by to giant wall of default text when I opened it.
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
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 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.
I think it tries to be paint.net to some extent, I am absolutely fine with that, although it will never beat its clean, simple design.
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.
If you're not using it, then you're going to be extremely happy when you switch!
I liked the tab support being added and use notepad for a bunch of basic bitch shiz, but notepad++ is going full time if they start bogging it down with crap.
People should use Vim. It's tons better and very user friendly.
A modern Neovim configuration with full battery for Python, Lua, C++, Markdown, LaTeX, and more...
This is enough to get the intellisense and linters up and running. Only takes ~5 minutes to configure by installing prerequisites, it's worth it though.
No one getting this joke is hilarious to me
Its not that people have missed the joke, it's that the joke is poorly formed and not hyperbolic enough to be funny, instead it's rather a half joke and brings up a larger issue (intentional or not), that undermines the attempt at absurdist humor.
I find Dunning-Kruger to be funny.
Nah, it's just going over most peoples heads.
But how do you exit?
Simple: You pull the plug on your PC.
VIM is for people who need crutches - Vi is where it's at. Or maybe LaTex I don't know.
But I do heartily endorse Notepad++.
There's KDE Kate as well, but I only use that for scripting purpose.
SublimeText is a much superior alternative. Notepad++ is like being stuck in the 2000s
Sublime is not FOSS
It's free and is functional. What more could you want
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 tracking eco system
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.
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
Ctrl+Shift+V pastes without formatting.
It doesn't fix artificial line break issues though. Simple text editors are perfect for stopping some text from looking unnecessarily like poetry.
I am 46 how am I just learning this now?!
incredibly pro tip, I use this all the time
I use it for writing quick temporary notes for work when I don't have a pen and paper handy.
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.
i use it constantly because it's the only text editor that comes with windows 10
Easily replaced.
No, its not easily replaced in a locked-down enterprise setting. That's naive.
There's portable Notepad++, it's great
Just because it's portable doesn't necessarily mean that it's allowed on the organizations allow list, but it does seem highly unlikely that the organization doesn't have any alternative text editors allowed.
But maybe they don't edit text files often enough to bother. And honestly, notepad was recently updated with tabs which makes it a lot more usable that it used to be.
Portable App, "open with", "always use this app".
edit: right, locked down, executable whitelist?
That's not at all practical in a large corporate IT setting.
On a large scale, you're the guy having the rights setting things up. Obviously the Portable Apps hack is for personal use.
I suppose one might believe things were that simple if they lacked actual experience in enterprise IT.
Or perhaps you're just not arguing in good-faith because you only care about being "right" and not about actually understanding the use case.
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 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 use it all the time for quick notes at work, with its very simple interface, and the tabs feature was a game changer. Especially useful for phone calls in my case, although my typing speed far exceeds my writing speed so maybe I'm the exception because of that.
I don't use it to program though, usually that's delegated to Visual Studio.
I use it as a cache for chunks of text I want to move around. I use Textpad a lot for code and config files where I don't need all the lookup and predictive stuff.
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.
Bring back clippy. "I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you."
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.
deleted
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.
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.
Why the fuck would I ever want AI in my calculators? Even Algebra never required AI in the past
Because AI is obviously better at solving math than the code programmers wrote. Duh. /S
In all seriousness, if you show Bing Chat an equation, it will go through the steps and solve it clearly, it's actually really helpful. I really don't understand all this hate for AI just because it's AI. New technology is cool and useful, and I'd understand hating it because it's made by Microsoft, I try to use free software including free AI, but AI in itself is not bad or useless.
Nah I don't hate AI but an AI cannot do math faster than the hardware designed to do it. It's like saying an emulator is faster than the bare hardware. The AI would have to find a revolutionary new way of solving the equation to make it faster than the hardware.
Of course, they're different types of things. You give hard equations with lots of x and y to a chatbot, or ask it about a method you don't understand, so it can explain it to you.
AI would have to find a revolutionary new way of solving the equation to make it faster than the hardware.
This doesn't sound impossible. It reminded me of how AlphaGo, and how AlphaGo Zero became "the world's top player" of Go by letting it train itself by trial-and-error instead of by watching human players using existing Go strategies:
During the games, AlphaGo played several inventive winning moves. In game two, it played Move 37 — a move that had a 1 in 10,000 chance of being used.
AlphaGo and its successors use a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to find its moves based on knowledge previously acquired by machine learning, specifically by an artificial neural network (a deep learning method) by extensive training, both from human and computer play. A neural network is trained to identify the best moves and the winning percentages of these moves. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in stronger move selection in the next iteration.
Training artificial intelligence (AI) without datasets derived from human experts has significant implications for the development of AI with superhuman skills because expert data is "often expensive, unreliable or simply unavailable." Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, said that AlphaGo Zero was so powerful because it was "no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge".
Following this way of thinking, why let a human figure out how to solve equations most efficiently if the machine can find some way of calculating/computing that we had never even been able to think of?
Note, I'm investigating this with curiosity, and I'm no expert in the field.
You don't want reasonably written, believable, factually dubious answers from your calculator?
I wouldn't mind a bit of wolfram alpha
Because now it can be done on the cloud with AI for triple the time, also subscriptions.
It bills you each time you make a spelling error.
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
Well, MS has been supporting paint.net for a while now. It's kinda like MS Paint but not completely terrible.
I don't use Windows since 2018 but.....
(Psst: get as far away from microsoft as you can, and don’t look back!)
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!
The irony of this comment on this post is striking!
The bot's actually not AI powered, but uses Sumy to algorithmically create a summary.
What people are calling AI are just algorithms with multiple input sources.
Is there a LibreOffice alternative?
Vim
A good one.
Nobody needs to learn hieroglyphics to save a file.
Yeah, just press this button with a picture of a floppy disk on it.
"What's a floppy disk?"
nano
disgusting
org-mode?
orgymode?
Could use Wordpad (outdated word that’s free)
Linuxes come with text editors (almost always vim, and usually a GUI one like Gedit). But they aren't part of LibreOffice, just as Notepad isn't part of MS Office.
WPS Office, is from a chinese company but it works pretty good with Microsoft Office files
riddled with ads.
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.
Personally I could never use a text editor that is free and not open source (Aside from built-in editors).
For simpler stuff like config files etc I use Kate which looks nice, has syntax highlighting and is cross platform. For more complicated stuff I like VSCodium. Both are well maintained, and work great.
We all have our preferences, I just happen to love Sublime
Hey! Don't bash things that lol like they come out of the eighties!
Cries middle ages tears
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.
Notepads gang, rise up!
I want my notepad to open in split second so I can jot down my thoughts when I'm in a rush so I don't forget things. or so I can copy multiple things, edit them slightly and paste them where I want them to be. or so I can pre-write a paragraph to send shortly without appearing as "this user is typing" to everyone as I rewrite a sentence for the 5th time, and to not fear accidentally hitting enter mid said paragraph.
I do not need my notepad to have AI. It's not broken, stop trying to fix things that aren't broken
Why not?
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.
The amount of code required client-side for interacting with an AI's API is a few hundred lines at most. I've done it myself, with actual real software projects, so I know how this works. There's no reason to expect that AI integration would cause Notepad to become significantly larger.
Microsoft might make other changes, sure, but that's a separate issue.
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"
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.
And even if Notepad++ had invented it, it's not "stealing" to do the same thing. Notepad++ still has its tabs, nobody stole them. Copied them, maybe. Inspired by them, perhaps. "Stolen" is just a deliberately emotion-baiting term.
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.
More likely they are direct ports of things from the highly popular Visual Studio Code as a lot of people used to bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad for YEARS before Notepad++ was a thing.
I think you mean you discovered vs code years before you found notepad++
Notepad++ has been around since 2003 years and vs code has been around since 2015.
A lot of those features were in visual studio 6, which was released in the late 90s or early 00s. Tabbed files, syntax highlighting for their supported formats (though it was a lot more tightly bound to those languages, like there was a visual basic program and a separate visual c/c++, n++ is the first I remember with arbitrary language syntax highlighting support), pretty sure it had a plugin system, too.
And vs6 was just the first one I used, they might have been present in vs5 or earlier versions.
I suppose we could point to emacs for formatting and syntax highlighting
Plus an electric list is far superior to tabs. Tabs are too usable. I want to have to hit ctrl+X, L before I can change files.
/s just in case.
Yeah, vim also has it today, but I don't know how far back that goes. Screen splitting, too, I use that all the time in vim and GUI editors.
We didn't have color terminals at my college so if there was any highlighting I wouldn't have seen it. Probably shortly after the first dumb terminals came with color text somebody made emacs or vi do highlighting? Screen splitting goes way back. Emacs had that in the late 80s when I was using it.
Visual studio and visual studio code are not the same thing. Visual Studio is a full IDE and is expected to have those features and is clunky because of them. Or was, not sure where it is now. It’d be in the same category as netbeans, eclipsed, and intellij
Vs code is an enhanced lightweight text editor
Notepad++ is the original enhanced lightweight text editor
My point was that Notepad++ came out way before vs code and didn’t copy features from vs code.
Copied from an ide, sure? Not really a good comparison as they are solving two different problems
They were features of the text editor that was a part of the integrated development environment. My point was that even though vs code came after n++, those features were a part of the visual studio line, which vs code is a successor of, so if there was inspiration it was more likely in the direction of vs -> n++, though realistically there was probably transfer in both directions over time.
No I am saying people where coding html in plan old notepad way before notepad +
And separately with MS having popularity with VS code they likely ported the dev functions to ms notepad there is a good chance notepad++ was not the inspiration.
Then those features in VS Code were most likely heavily inspired by Notepad++ as well. Notepad++ was publicly released in 2003, which in computing terms may as well be the neolithic era.
TL;DR: There's no reason to stick with a shitty Microsoft application for this task since N++ exists and is, was, and probably forever will be superior.
You're someone who likes pain huh?
Was making HTML pages long before Notpad++ was a thing young one.
Not saying I would do it that way now.
This is not enshittification. Here's where the term came from:
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.
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.
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.
And I think that 90% of the concern people have is arising out of some kind of weird anti-AI hysteria.
Look, even if Microsoft does "ruin" Notepad somehow, it's a really simple program. Github has a bunch of projects tagged "notepad-clone", I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives out there that duplicate the old Notepad as precisely as you may desire. Adding AI is extremely simple on the client side but it's not so easy to provide the LLM back-end so those replicas probably won't be able to do what Microsoft is about to do, so I want to see Microsoft try it. I think it'll be good.
I couldn’t care less that the addition in question is AI related, it’s unnecessary bloat that no one asked for! I hate bloat, that’s my thing. I didn’t like when the start menu was ruined, I didn’t like when user accounts were eschewed for microsoft accounts, and I don’t like this.
I’m completely off windows now anyways, so I don’t even have skin in the game. It just boggles my mind that anyone would defend this whacky decision. Streamlined bloat is still bloat.
Why not just clone notepad and then start adding garbage? They already announced the intention to remove word pad, just replace that with whatever this ends up being!
I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth. I would be quite happy to try this feature out, and I think it could be quite handy indeed. I literally said "I want to see Microsoft try it" in the comment you're responding to.
So what's your problem? Don't insist that everyone has to share your values and run their computers the way you would want to run them.
I just linked to a whole pile of notepad clone projects. I'm sure some of them will satisfy whatever preferences any particular person has. "Why not just clone notepad" applies just as much to the people complaining about this features, and it's already been done. If you want to stick with the unchanging bare minimum text editor, there they are.
You’re acting like I’m crazy for taking issue with this, I’m just explaining my perspective. You’re free to enjoy whatever gizmos and gadgets microsoft bundles into the next windows release, just as much as I’m free to say it’s a piss-poor decision on their part to do so.
It shouldn’t be the user’s responsibility to seek out replacement programs for shit that has been baked into the OS since 1983. I genuinely haven’t seen a single person ANYWHERE EVER say “boy howdy I sure do wish notepad had more features, maybe an AI cowriter!”. If that’s something you really actually wanted before you heard about this, then I’m sorry for putting words in your mouth.
As it stands though, you’re just dying on a stupid hill for semantics.
No, I'm annoyed that you're assuming that your view of this matter is the only one, and are insisting that Notepad should exclude any features that you don't want even though it likely wouldn't harm you if they were included.
I'm perfectly fine with people not using AI. I'm not perfectly fine with people jumping in and telling me "and you don't get to use it either!"
The fact that Notepad is really old shouldn't be an argument that it should never change.
I'm saying it right now. I've said it repeatedly in the course of this thread, in comments that you are posting direct responses to. I explicitly said in the previous comment, and the comment before it, that I wanted this. How are you not understanding this?
Ah, I see where you're trying to weasel out a technical "I was right all along" - you're going to say that because I hadn't specifically said "in Notepad" about this before seeing that Windows was planning on adding this to Notepad, my interest in this new feature is somehow invalid and my previous comments are lies or something. Not "genuine." You'll imagine that I hadn't thought about how nice it would be to have an AI cowriter in some kind of text editor before now, and that even now I'm... I don't know, why do you think I'm arguing that this would be beneficial if I don't actually want to use it? I can't think of why you might imagine I'm arguing this, maybe I'm some kind of shill for Big AI?
And then you accuse me of "dying on a stupid hill for semantics."
OK.
God, I should’ve seen you take this out and followed suit. Instead I engaged, and now unbeknownst to me I’m afraid of AI and putting words in people’s mouths, gotta love internet discourse
But… MUH BUZZWORDS!
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
Perfection.
That one and "FAFO" in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
Shockingly, I don’t know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.
“Fuck around and find out” for everyone else who didn’t know.
Ahhhh THAT overused phrase. Of course we’d have to acronym/initiaism it.
At least we don’t (yet) have PSGWSP. Ugh it felt gross typing that.
I do too, considering it never needed a new term to begin with. This isn't a new concept, and we already have a name for it: rent seeking
I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.
I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.
There is no need to coin a new term, when "rent seeking" has done just fine for hundreds of years now.
This is not a new concept.
I completely forgot about that term. That may be more accurate. In fact, it describes what has Windows has become.
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...
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.
Leaks of company secrets will increase.
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)
You're making some pretty big assumptions about what this feature will be like.
Unfff pump my veins full of Notepad++. I wanna feel the autosaving tabs course through me. I need that tabbed indenting experience. AAAAAAAAAAA
And it's great that it exists, but the average Windows user has no idea that exists and probably no idea how to download and install it because the average Windows user, like the average computer user, is only nominally computer literate.
Those are the people Microsoft constantly fucks over, not people here who tend to know what they're doing. A large percentage of people here don't even use Windows except maybe through an emulator.
LiteXL is also pretty good.
And Metapad (was named before Facebook became Meta) and Notepad 2/3 and and and.
Neat, TIL of another app. Unfortunately, it looks like development has been abandoned. The last update was from 13 years ago.
It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.
I haven't noticed any of this. Where are you seeing them?
So far the author seems to have been on the right side of history. You can see some of them in the N++ update news:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/
They seem to be pro-Ukraine (or at least anti-Russian invasion) and anti-Chinese authoritarianism. I can't bring myself to have any beef with either of those positions, really.
At one point they also sold a thong.
Damn, I just missed on the thong
No you didn't, the links at the bottom still work - you can get it in both old and new logo.
Go ahead, live the dream!
They had some messages regarding a free Ukraine a few updates back. It’s a free app so if he wants to include that in his update message that’s fine to me.
Every few updates the read me, description or something contains some kind of statement on various world issues going on.
Search the hit hub issues for notepad++ for the word political. People complain each time.
I don’t care if he is on the rights side of the issue or note, just don’t like it popping up in software.
I thought my installer was infected the one time by to giant wall of default text when I opened it.
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
SublimeText is a much better alternative
Not 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.
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 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.
I think it tries to be paint.net to some extent, I am absolutely fine with that, although it will never beat its clean, simple design.
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.
Watch them adding AI to paint at some point.
They already have...
paint.js - browser-based classic ms paint clone
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!
I liked the tab support being added and use notepad for a bunch of basic bitch shiz, but notepad++ is going full time if they start bogging it down with crap.
People should use Vim. It's tons better and very user friendly.
https://neovim.io/
https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config#features
Highly recommend this.
This is enough to get the intellisense and linters up and running. Only takes ~5 minutes to configure by installing prerequisites, it's worth it though.
No one getting this joke is hilarious to me
Its not that people have missed the joke, it's that the joke is poorly formed and not hyperbolic enough to be funny, instead it's rather a half joke and brings up a larger issue (intentional or not), that undermines the attempt at absurdist humor.
I find Dunning-Kruger to be funny.
Nah, it's just going over most peoples heads.
But how do you exit?
Simple: You pull the plug on your PC.
VIM is for people who need crutches - Vi is where it's at. Or maybe LaTex I don't know.
But I do heartily endorse Notepad++.
There's KDE Kate as well, but I only use that for scripting purpose.
SublimeText is a much superior alternative. Notepad++ is like being stuck in the 2000s
Sublime is not FOSS
It's free and is functional. What more could you want
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 systemDoes 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.
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
Ctrl+Shift+V pastes without formatting.
It doesn't fix artificial line break issues though. Simple text editors are perfect for stopping some text from looking unnecessarily like poetry.
I am 46 how am I just learning this now?!
incredibly pro tip, I use this all the time
I use it for writing quick temporary notes for work when I don't have a pen and paper handy.
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.
i use it constantly because it's the only text editor that comes with windows 10
Easily replaced.
No, its not easily replaced in a locked-down enterprise setting. That's naive.
There's portable Notepad++, it's great
Just because it's portable doesn't necessarily mean that it's allowed on the organizations allow list, but it does seem highly unlikely that the organization doesn't have any alternative text editors allowed.
But maybe they don't edit text files often enough to bother. And honestly, notepad was recently updated with tabs which makes it a lot more usable that it used to be.
Portable App, "open with", "always use this app".
edit: right, locked down, executable whitelist?
That's not at all practical in a large corporate IT setting.
On a large scale, you're the guy having the rights setting things up. Obviously the Portable Apps hack is for personal use.
I suppose one might believe things were that simple if they lacked actual experience in enterprise IT.
Or perhaps you're just not arguing in good-faith because you only care about being "right" and not about actually understanding the use case.
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 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 use it all the time for quick notes at work, with its very simple interface, and the tabs feature was a game changer. Especially useful for phone calls in my case, although my typing speed far exceeds my writing speed so maybe I'm the exception because of that.
I don't use it to program though, usually that's delegated to Visual Studio.
I use it as a cache for chunks of text I want to move around. I use Textpad a lot for code and config files where I don't need all the lookup and predictive stuff.
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.
Fuck Notepad. All my homies use Kate.
Kate is freaking awesome. So many nice features for coding short of using a full IDE.
Is it as fast ro start up as N++?
Yes
It is in KDE, in my experience.
What are the advantages over notepad++?
Native to Linux I'd say. Probably a few more but I'm more of a mousepad guy myself.
Personally, I'm boycotting Microsoft until they bring back Clippy.
I saw clippy the first time when I was a kid. To be honest I remember my interactions with it quite fondly.
I'm afraid adults weren't as fond.
I have to use Teams for work and there are Clippy stickers!
Bring back clippy. "I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you."
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.
deleted
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.
Microsoft is not a creative company!
Imma keep using Wordpad
I've got some bad news for you...
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.
Why the fuck would I ever want AI in my calculators? Even Algebra never required AI in the past
Because AI is obviously better at solving math than the code programmers wrote. Duh. /S
In all seriousness, if you show Bing Chat an equation, it will go through the steps and solve it clearly, it's actually really helpful. I really don't understand all this hate for AI just because it's AI. New technology is cool and useful, and I'd understand hating it because it's made by Microsoft, I try to use free software including free AI, but AI in itself is not bad or useless.
Nah I don't hate AI but an AI cannot do math faster than the hardware designed to do it. It's like saying an emulator is faster than the bare hardware. The AI would have to find a revolutionary new way of solving the equation to make it faster than the hardware.
Of course, they're different types of things. You give hard equations with lots of x and y to a chatbot, or ask it about a method you don't understand, so it can explain it to you.
This doesn't sound impossible. It reminded me of how AlphaGo, and how AlphaGo Zero became "the world's top player" of Go by letting it train itself by trial-and-error instead of by watching human players using existing Go strategies:
Source: AlphaGo | Google DeepMind
Source: AlphaGo | Wikipedia
Source: AlphaGo Zero | Wikipedia
Following this way of thinking, why let a human figure out how to solve equations most efficiently if the machine can find some way of calculating/computing that we had never even been able to think of?
Note, I'm investigating this with curiosity, and I'm no expert in the field.
You don't want reasonably written, believable, factually dubious answers from your calculator?
I wouldn't mind a bit of wolfram alpha
Because now it can be done on the cloud with AI for triple the time, also subscriptions.
It bills you each time you make a spelling error.
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
Well, MS has been supporting paint.net for a while now. It's kinda like MS Paint but not completely terrible.
I don't use Windows since 2018 but.....
(Psst: get as far away from microsoft as you can, and don’t look back!)
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!
The irony of this comment on this post is striking!
The bot's actually not AI powered, but uses Sumy to algorithmically create a summary.
What people are calling AI are just algorithms with multiple input sources.
Is there a LibreOffice alternative?
Vim
A good one.
Nobody needs to learn hieroglyphics to save a file.
Yeah, just press this button with a picture of a floppy disk on it.
"What's a floppy disk?"
nano
disgusting
org-mode?Could use Wordpad (outdated word that’s free)
Linuxes come with text editors (almost always vim, and usually a GUI one like Gedit). But they aren't part of LibreOffice, just as Notepad isn't part of MS Office.
WPS Office, is from a chinese company but it works pretty good with Microsoft Office files
riddled with ads.
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.
Personally I could never use a text editor that is free and not open source (Aside from built-in editors). For simpler stuff like config files etc I use Kate which looks nice, has syntax highlighting and is cross platform. For more complicated stuff I like VSCodium. Both are well maintained, and work great.
We all have our preferences, I just happen to love Sublime
Hey! Don't bash things that lol like they come out of the eighties!
Cries middle ages tears
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.
Notepads gang, rise up!
I want my notepad to open in split second so I can jot down my thoughts when I'm in a rush so I don't forget things. or so I can copy multiple things, edit them slightly and paste them where I want them to be. or so I can pre-write a paragraph to send shortly without appearing as "this user is typing" to everyone as I rewrite a sentence for the 5th time, and to not fear accidentally hitting enter mid said paragraph.
I do not need my notepad to have AI. It's not broken, stop trying to fix things that aren't broken
Why not?
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.
The amount of code required client-side for interacting with an AI's API is a few hundred lines at most. I've done it myself, with actual real software projects, so I know how this works. There's no reason to expect that AI integration would cause Notepad to become significantly larger.
Microsoft might make other changes, sure, but that's a separate issue.
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"