this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I usually use my work laptop for personal bits and bobs which is Ubuntu but I turned on my personal Microsoft PC recently to do some stuff and couldn't believe all the pop-ups and noise! I promptly moved all my data onto a external drive and did a fresh install of Ubuntu.
People at Microsoft doesn't understand what people use Notepad for.
If they wanted to add AI features, they should have added it to WordPad, and make it more modern / add some useful functions.
They killed wordpad.
Yeah but no one uses wordpad. They put it in notepad for the exact reason you're saying: because people use it.
So... who wants to bet that the new version of Notepad is not constantly scraping anything you type into it and feeding it into the AI, regardless of whether you're paying for this feature or not?
Tbf, they already control the os itself. They already have access to all of the keystrokes. Implementing it just in notepad feels like a rube goldbergy way of scraping user data.
Sublime text ftw
Notepad++ on windows is kind of the GOAT IMO.
The search and replace UX is 10 years behind. The sole reason I use sublime text instead
I'm a happy sublime user myself but the search UI is one thing I particularly don't like about it.
Npp has normal, with special characters and regex, does sublime has something better there?
They said UI, so I don't think they meant features. But honestly I've never been unhappy with their UI, aside from one day with multiple replaces across a few files where the autofill from clipboard kept deleting the expression I wanted to be in there as I navigated through what I needed to do.
But that was fine, anyway, it got through it and I'm just happy with the "apply to all open documents" setting. Saved me at least an hour.
The regex engine was not full featured last time I tried. Done know which implementation they use, but it was lacking basic features like end of line matching (if I remember correctly).
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The title is quite sensational compared to the content. They only added an AI Rewrite feature for notepad that requires a Microsoft 365 subscription. Considering the cost of AI, and the fact that it will very probably run in the cloud, it is very reasonable that it isn't free. Everything else about notepad remains free / included with the price you paid for the OS.
I agree, but the idea of adding AI to notepad is quite insane in its own right
Adding layers to paint was what surprised me
That's actually very nice, one of the few Microsoft programs that I genuinely miss - layers are a quality of life feature that is actually really nice to have 👍
I think the idea is that you can use it for reformatting small sets of data I guess.
"make all the dates in this CSV iso-8601"
Genuinely very useful, however I feel that can be achieved without a login and paid AI subscription.
Heck, it probably can be done with a regex. (Yeah, I know)
There's no need to kill three forests just to do the exact same work you could have done by opening your dataset in Excel.
Ragebait. Notepad is still free. If you want to use Rewrite, then you pay for that.
I can understand separating a new paid-only feature, especially if you don't much need that part. The new features are reportedly accessible from the GUI of Notepad so I wouldn't blame anyone else who thought "NOTEPAD" asked them to sign up and pay a subscription to use "NOTEPAD" features.
I used to rage when reading bad changes to Windows, even after I'd stopped using it. Now I just feel bad that my friends are still in that a bad relationship with their computer.
[obligatory linux boast] I really prefer Kate to Notepad because KDE makes superior, non AI encrusted software that actually works for it's users. And it's FREE!
I like Kate as a program but man KDE need to change how some of their app names appear in Plasma.
A new user looking through their start menu and seeing "Kate" will have no idea it's a text editor/notepad. The same is true for multiple other programs.
Okular, Dolphin, Cantata... ask someone who's never tried Plasma before what those programs do and I'd wager you'd get an incorrect answer for each one.
What does "Excel" do? What does "Steam" do? What does "Balena" do? What does "Conky" do?
Programs that we think of as being part of the OS, such as the included text editor, is a very different thing to something like Steam, imo.
Steam isn't preinstalled on your PC, it's not a core part of your desktop OS. You download Steam yourself, so you'd only do it once you already know what it is.
Third party apps kinda need unique names and branding like that to distinguish themselves.
A newbie won't know what "Kate" or "Okular" do. They might know what "Dolphin" does because it has a folder as the app icon (although users of screen readers won't see that). They will probably know what "Notepad" or "Text Editor" does, though.
There is actually an option to do that iirc. You can have it show entry descriptions.
Indeed. That's what I do on my Plasma system, it's a good option.
But a new user or someone who isn't technical won't see that, they don't go digging through settings in each app, they just use the defaults.
I guess a solid compromise would be to enable this by default, and anybody who doesn't like that short descriptor can disable it.
But IMO nothing will beat the no-nonsense straightforwardness of calling OS apps immediately intuitive names. This is something I believe Gnome gets right. Go onto their GitHub and their file manager is called Nautilus, but on your system it will default to being called "Files", because they know everyone will understand what "Files" is but a lot of people would ask "Wtf is Nautilus??", same goes for other apps, e.g. "Loupe" appearing as "Image Viewer".
personally i find kate struggles with large files. KWrite is a better analog to notepad IMO
Even though it's typically associated with KDE and Linux, it's also available on Windows. Good for people who haven't made up their mind yet. It's a great text editor with a feature-set similar to other advanced notepads.
I'll be real though, if I hadn't jumped ship 3 years ago, I'd be cutting my losses with Windows here.
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!linux@programming.dev could use more folks!
the news is more that they are trying to shoehorn AI in effing Notepad to make sure even those little snippets of text can be used for training
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