Are people just going to keep reposting this misleading shit headline of a post until no one reads the article and just goes along with it?
Are the people constantly reposting this even reading the article and realizing how illiterate they look?
The click bait will never die my friend.
We should never tire of pointing it out though.
We must fight!
The year of the Linux desktop has arrived.
It should be noted that you can still use Notepad without a Microsoft account
Despite the ability to still use the software without an account
Are we not doing context anymore?
What is this? Just outrage for the sake of outrage?
Exactly. The issue is that it’s a freemium model, where they advertise a product with additional features in Notepad. But Notepad itself is still free.
That’s still bad, but so is the title.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s hard for me to contain my incredulity: have you been asleep for the last decade? Has a very obvious pattern of enshitification not been constantly proven as a rule on the tech sector? And an article is… outrage?
Not the article, I meant the comment section
Oh god, how will replace a completely basic word processor? Surely there are not numerous replacements?
After taking a look at the pictures of the article, I noticed “requires AI credits”. Credits?! What is this now? Some shitty mobile game? Really, Microsoft isn’t ashamed of anything anymore…
I mean, I don’t know about Microsoft and windows, so maybe this is different, but the name sounds crazy!
Likely you’ll have to pay for some AI service, because the executives’ children cried after watching an old sci-fi, that “we can’t have intelligent conversations with out computers in 2016 in the real world, while in 2015 in the movie adaptation of Don’t Build The Torment Nexus, there was Torment Nexus the intelligent and smart computer”.
So, let me ask you a question: How long do you think Microsoft will wait before they start charging for essential services? Would you be willing to pay for something like Notepad? Or, for example, pay to connect to the internet through their wireless interface? This seems like just the beginning, with more features eventually locked behind paywalls. They’re testing the waters to see how much they can charge. Think about it—Microsoft gave you the house, but now they want to charge you for the doors. Meanwhile, Google is watching, waiting to see what they can charge for. And like you said, Mac will surely follow suit. I was simply listing operating systems across different ecosystems, because Windows hasn’t successfully broken out of the Personal Computer space.
I’m not even willing to use Windows for free. I have it installed w/o a license, and I haven’t booted into it in… 2 years? 3? I honestly don’t remember, but I haven’t used Windows in any meaningful sense for >10 years, other than to test Windows-specific things.
Reject this nonsense. There are alternatives that could probably work for you, depending on your requirements.
Crys in simulator gamer. But agreed, hopefully this trend will be good for Linux use.
It’s okay buddy. One of these days you’ll get to eat your cake and have it too.
Sounds like everyone is going to have to upgrade to Notepad++, but honestly, why are people even using Windows anymore? Who even uses Notepad? I want to see those numbers—like, what… 5,000 active users of Notepad, and they’re probably just grandparents whose grandkids couldn’t be bothered to install anything else.
Seriously though, Android, macOS, Steam OS, Android TV, Chrome OS, Debian, heck, Ubuntu, Linux Mint—so why are people making excuses to use Windows, other than because it’s on a work computer? Microsoft is lost in the sauce, like, “Hey guys, let’s make the operating system free and have people pay for Notepad.” You know what that sounds like? A car manufacturer giving away cars and charging to use the radio. When Windows became free, the quality became identical to the price.
Notepad is useful for saving a simple piece of info to your hard drive somewhere, it’s not a daily driver for code editing or anything. If I’m on the phone with some customer service rep and they give me some reference number, I’ll pop open notepad to write it down and save it.
Seriously though, Android, macOS, Steam OS, Android TV, Chrome OS, Debian, heck, Ubuntu, Linux Mint
Some of those are not competitors to Windows. Android, Android TV, Steam OS are installed on specialty devices.
macOS is not a good OS. I wouldn’t consider it a better alternative to Windows. macOS often lags behind Windows in certain features such as tiling Windows. Apple is more hostile toward developers than Microsoft is and Apple ships their own versions of coreutils which are vastly inferior GNU coreutils and often totally out of date (Apple uses a build of bash from 2007 that was the default shell until the switch to zsh, and they STILL ship this bash binary today).
For any other Linux variant, the answer is the same as it has been for 20 years: normies don’t install their own OS, and also only use their machines to browse the internet, so it makes no difference to them.
I use Notepad on my work computer daily. I never save any documents, but it is handy for a quick copy/paste of info I need for a short period of time. We aren’t allowed to install anything on the computers, so it’s what is available.
I could live without it, but I do find it marginally useful, basically as digital “scrap paper”.
I use notepad alongside notepad++ it is fine.
Do you game? Cuz that alone is a solid reason to use windows. I know Linux is getting usable for it, but let’s be honest there is no more convenient OS when it comes to gaming and daily use than windows and you can’t tell me otherwise. I have tried to switch to Ubuntu or mint many times but it’s just not idiot proof enough for ur average how yet and I constantly found myself trying to troubleshoot issues I never ran into with windows. Yea I know Microsoft is the devil and all that, but they still provide the easiest to use OS out there!
Yeah, but have you seen the performance difference between Windows and Linux machines? SteamOS is absolutely crushing it when it comes to improving Linux, making it much more user-friendly. They’re even opening it up to other platforms, which is a huge win for everyone.
I game a ton and the only missing games these days are malware. I simply don’t play those games.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Daily use, however? Really? I have a completely ad-free easy to use experience, I actually give KDE to the elderly because it’s significantly easier to use for daily use outside of gaming.
Most peoples usecases are limited and linux is legitimately just better for that, having ads in your start menu and file manager are terrible for people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Considering most mmos don’t support Linux, as well as some games anticheat breaking seemingly randomly on updates, on top of the better performance for Nvidia gpus on windows is enough reason for a lot of people who game to stay with windows
Considering most mmos don’t support Linux
Only the ones that ship malware don’t work on linux.
as well as some games anticheat breaking seemingly randomly on updates
Yes, malware, kernel level anticheat is malware.
on top of the better performance for Nvidia gpus
This is almost completely resolved.
I understand people want their malware, but we should call it what it is.
Not denying kernal level anticheat is essentially malware but for games that require it you have no choice, even running them on virtual machines doesn’t work in some instances. The nvidia performance has improved but is still a decent difference depending on the games.
Yes, if your only or at least primary reason for using your PC is to play games, you’ll have an easier time on Windows. That’s an undeniable fact.
However, that doesn’t mean you need Windows to play games. There is a huge amount of games that work on Linux, and outside of competitive MP games w/ invasive anti-cheat, VR, and maybe a couple other niches, pretty much everything works on Linux, though some games will need a few tweaks (ProtonDB for details).
The more people that switch to Linux, the more attractive the platform is for game devs, meaning the more likely we’ll get official support for more games. Look at what has happened since the Steam Deck’s launch, we’ve gone from devs completely ignoring Linux to some games spending actual resources to support it. That’s phenomenal!
If you want an alternative to Windows without all the crap Microsoft is shoving into it, Linux is your best bet. Consider trying it out, you may be pleasantly surprised.
That said, if you’re uninterested, that’s totally cool too.
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”
“make all the dates in this CSV iso-8601”
This is a use of AI/LLM processing that I could agree with, if it could be trusted. Since it cannot, better to open in vim and regex replace, or process with Python.
That said, I’d rather store as epoch and display as ISO-8601 as the arithmetic is much less prone to error in epoch than any other format.
Yeah look I’m not an AI advocate at all. If I were confronted with this my first instinct would be to manipulate it in a spreadsheet because they can juggle data types like this pretty effortlessly.
The CSV / dates thing was just an example, but I still think it’s a good one. My assistant at work would 100% use notepad like this rather than using a spreadsheet.
It’s also worth pointing out that notepad + LLM would be a lot more flexible than a spreadsheet. Just paste whatever there and explain what you want in plain english. You don’t need to parse your request into regex or spreadsheet formulas. For you and I, we might have spent years interacting with regex and other things such that it’s a pleasant challenge when it arises. For 20 year old me it would have been a tedious impediment to whatever I was trying to achieve.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. The general inaccuracy/untrustworthiness of LLMs makes me very uncomfortable in their use for data processing and transformations. I’d rather take a while to get it right than to potentially hand off a CSV with glaring problems due to use of an LLM.
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.
You’re right of course.
Like the other commenter said for this specific problem you’d use a spreadsheet.
It’s just an example though and there are others, like maybe removing url encoding from a string or something.
Again this can be done in some other tool without much fuss, but the versatility offered by notepad will be useful for a lot of people.
Why? I mean, one of the main features of generative AI systems is to generate text (the quality of which I won’t get into), why not add this to something like Notepad. I agree that Notepad should be thought of as a lightweight, well, notepad, but still might be useful as a quicker alternative to Word.
The fact that Microsoft is trying to shove Copilot down our throats at every possible step is idiotic, I agree, but having an AI as part of a notes app doesn’t seem too weird.
They give Copilot out for free so it’s weird that they’re charging for the Notepad AI feature.
Hell, just copy and paste the content into Copilot and ask it to rewrite it, I bet it’ll just be doing the same thing but for free.
This is misinformation. They added the login requirement for their Generative AI and the actual notepad doesn’t require a login. But I guess we’re ragebaiting today.
I turned off that AI stuff as soon as I saw it. Click the gear icon in Notepad in the upper right to open settings and turn it off.
Oh, one of the first things I did was group policy edit anything to do with tracking, ads, or AI.
Yeah. Like, I get AI can be useful, but it’s fucking everywhere! Even a god damn fridge got AI! And I hate it to be so forced on me, like, I just wanna write text or code without Copilot annoying me all of the time.
Upvoted for visibility.
I recommend Notepad++.
I use Kate on the windows work pc
I love Kate, but I’ve only been using it since last August. Been using npp for a decade before that, even as my IDE, and I felt like it was stronger than Kate.
Kate has a lot of features that are not well documented or that you have to tape together to make something functional, while npp just works out of the box or with one of its many addons. Additionally the Kate documentation website is atrocious, lacking even basic search functionality. I had to join their IRC channel to get help figuring out something (path to some obscure config file that the latest version actually reads from), and while they were most helpful, I really shouldn’t have had to go through all that trouble.
Maybe my approach to trying to solve a problem was wrong, coming from Windows + npp.
Maybe I’ll give npp a test again. But I’ve been using kate because I’ve been using it on my linux system and found out I can install it at work on windows as well
I use Kate on the windows work pc
Having this LLM bullshit in Notepad should be the real news
They really do seem to be on a mission to cram it into everything
Can’t wait to see in 5 years while all of the LLM nonsense quietly gets shuffled further and further to the back until it’s gone like Cortana or Paint3D
Meanwhile has anyone noticed Microsoft has unhidden some genuinely useful older menus like Control Panel? Earlier in the windows 10 lifespan you couldn’t search for control panel and had to instead use constantly changing shortcuts and tooltips to gain access to it, but now you can just search for Control Panel and pull it right up. I’m not thrilled that I have to dig for the network adapter properties still but I’ll take the improvements I get
I hate
the information superhighwaythe world wide webthe blogospheresocial mediaweb2.0mobilethe cloudIOTblockchainar/vrgenerative AI
Yeah. This is why I’ve disabled copilot and Gemini on my devices altogether. It’s not worth it to have this nonsense filling up everything you use or rely on on a daily basis.
Is the Genevieve AI enabled by default?
After opening the notepad app does it ask you for that login?
Is your access to notepad restricted by the login?
“But it turns out that, while this screenshot is indeed real, those eagle-eyed enough should already be able to tell that something isn’t quite lining up here. In fact, nearly any Windows 11 user could open up the fully updated Notepad without getting this pop-up at all, even if they aren’t already signed into a Microsoft account. So, what’s the deal here?”
“The key is in the exact wording, identifiable within the first sentence: “Sign in with your Microsoft account to use Rewrite and its features in Notepad.” This is a prompt that exists, yes, but one that’s exclusive to Copilot+ PCs and explicitly requires the user to trigger it by clicking the Rewrite button, as confirmed by our own testing.”
Please read the article. No. My access to notepad is not restricted. I also don’t run any copilot features of any kind on windows 11. Yes, I believe Generative AI Copilot is enabled by default, but in this case the only time you get prompted to login is when you use a feature in notepad that directly needs copilot in order to work and you the user have to select that feature. Meaning you can use notepad without it entirely and never even see this prompt at all.
Microsoft is a tech giant with all the bad crap that implies. They do enough terrible things that we don’t need to lie to make them look bad.
No, only in so far as the button to use it existing passively
No
And no
Fine. Notepad++ is better anyway
It’s a lot more feature filled and frankly not very nice looking if all you want is a simple replacement for Notepad. Notepads (with an s) is much better imo.
Thanks for mentioning Notepads, never heard of it but it looks interesting. I already use quite a few different note taking apps, but still often start with Notepad when I don’t know where the info will eventually end up…
I prefer Sublime
Is it though? I still always open notepad for random text stuff. What is better in ++?
- Keeps your progress if you exit without saving
- Supports tabs so you don’t have 5 separate notepad windows open
- syntax highlighting for programming languages and markdown format
- plugin support
- can handle extremely large text files (I’ve opened 50gb text files and used ctrl+f to find terms and it worked fine)
- superb tools for manipulating text (e.g., use reg expressions). Super easy and flexible in making mass edits.
- dark mode support. That alone makes it superior lol
If you just need a quick window open to make a note you might actually prefer Sticky Notes over Notepad!
A few of those features are available on Notepad as well, just FYI.
Out if curiosity, which ones? Because I don’t see any of those features and am on W11…
On my W11 work machine I got dark mode, saving unsaved drafts and tabs
Ahh interesting. Is that a Windows 11 thing? I haven’t taken the plunge
+10000 for notepad++, its he swiss army knife of file editing tools. Adding:
-
Plugins: CSV being read as a small dB table you can query is a game changer. Or have a JSON plugin that auto formats and queries as well as opens the JSON in a clickable nested window.
-
Pinned tabs: pin important tabs, I use one as a todo list.
-
Search for text within files in a folder: need to find a specific bit of text in one of dozens/hundreds/thousands/millions of files somewhere? Its lightning fast and works a treat
-
Search and replace with regex: amazing feature, use regex patterns to find complex parts of your files and replace them with something else Bulk operations: remove newline, replace line breaks etc
-
Multi format support: see line breaks from different OSs like Unix and windows and amend them Portable install: you dont have to install it, you can use a portable version
So much more, get it and you won’t look back.
-
Your first two points are part of Notepad now too. Everything else you’ve said is true though, including the find and replace function supporting regex. It’s amazingly powerful for editing.
It also supports line numbering, which seems like a small thing but is really helpful.
Ah thanks for the first proper answer. Sounds good, I will give it a try.
A lot of those are features of notepad.
Specifically: tabs, dark mode, and retention of unsaved documents. They’re apps for very different purposes, but Notepad has had some nice little updates over recent years.
Just to point out that on Win11, Notepad also:
- Keeps progress without saving
- Supports tabs
I use a bunch of text editors / note taking apps regularly (or semi-regularly) and Notepad is one of them (among others also Notepad++, VSC, Obsidian, Geany, Notion…).
Notepad++ isn’t trying to shoehorn in AI for starters. It’s clear Microsoft is praying the current gimmicky narrative of AI will let the masses not realize this is a privacy nightmare.
Notepad does that neither for me and has not for >20 years. So is there something that is actually better or not?
Yes, it objectively is. And so are various other text editor options that are out there.
But just speaking about Notepad++, you can scale it down to a very simple text editor (like Notepad), it you can easily ramp it up to a much more feature rich one. And for me, the ability to have a vertical list of files is a big plus. As is its ability to optionally show line numbers.
So it is better because it can do more, but I assume not too too much? Because then we can also use word?
They have different use cases. Notepad++ is for manipulating text, strings, and code. It’s got very powerful tools for it.
Word is for making things look pretty. You can change typefaces, fonts, size. You can add pictures and diagrams and arrange them on the page.
the only thing I need it for is to select text vertically (by holding left alt). there are a few similar ones for linux but some crash and the rest don’t have a dark theme, so I still use it with wine.
Holy moly, that works? I needed precisely that feature earlier! Nice.
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.
All the Linux posts and Linux loving Lemmy users are what keep me away from Linux.
They’re like the Rick and Morty fans of PC software
Not our fault you won’t listen to common sense and reason. Enjoy your bloated fascist spyware just because you think Linux users are creepy or whatever the fuck you think.
Great example of what I’m talking about
Guess that’s what happens when Windows drives me insane
If you must use windows, Notepad++ is the way to go.
GNU Emacs is the same everywhere you go (if you don’t mind the TUI)
Vi
Clay tablets
ed is better
VSCode is better than np++ in every way
Startup time. RAM consumption. Privacy.
vscodium fixes the privacy anyway. It’s always open so startup times are no issue for me.
I still prefer to keep a stripped down, basic text editor though. Ah well, I’m not on windows so no big deal.
vscodium fixes the privacy anyway
At the cost of some features not working (e.g. Pylance, which is the default Python extension, as well as others by MS).
What do you use instead? Sublime?
For plain text, either nano on CLI or whatever built in basic text editor comes with LMDE.
Windows I used notepad, from now on I’ll add ++ :)
I guess you’re doing it wrong then? Stop parroting memes
I heavily use both and this is objectively untrue.
Those are 2 different use case pieces of software . NP++ is an editor while vscode is an IDE
Clearly this is a controversial statement. I’m team “use what’s available and preference tools that get the job done quickly.”
I work in several different languages. VSCode has TreeSitter and a bevy of slick plug-ins. NP++ does not. I can use VSCode on both Windows and Linux. If I’ve got a desktop environment, I will hands down pick VSCode over NP++ every time.
Otherwise, let’s be real, NeoVim is king.
NP++ was good 20 years ago during a time with much weaker competition and it’s been coasting on that good will ever since
It’s OK for a text editor (compared to something totally basic like notepad) but other text editors have caught up in every single category
like you said, VS Code is now the default go to code editor for a lot of people. if you don’t use VS Code, you use vim.
for non-coding uses, I don’t see the functional difference between NP++ or something basic like Gnome’s text editor
Completely agreed. At one point, maybe 12 years ago, I remember trying to learn NP++'s macro system. It was better than whatever we had at the time, but I’m glad I didn’t spend more time than I had to. Just a couple months ago, a coworker was raving about how great NP++ macros are … to do a task handily solved by some light regular expressions and/or column edit mode. Both REs and CEM are far more ubiquitous concepts than some bespoke, domain-specific language for defining repetitive tasks.
Install time? Startup time? Useless bloat?
Fucking click bait garbage article, but thankfully the article has a tldr at the top that basically contradicts the headline and saves you minutes of time to realize you’ve been baited;
TL;DR: Microsoft has introduced a paywall for Notepad, requiring a Microsoft 365 subscription to access new features like the AI-powered Rewrite tool.
Better headline: Microsoft forces you to pay to suffer through using their AI tool that no one asked for, application otherwise unchanged.
This seems like something that should be kept local. What’s the point of all these NPUs otherwise
LLMs in general is a tool no in one asked for
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
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.
They achtually said UX which is User Experience.
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).
I’m a happy sublime user myself but the search UI is one thing I particularly don’t like about it.
deleted by creator
Case in point: Windows 11 “Light” (LTSC) from Microsoft has the classic and advertisement-free version of Notepad.
Well it’s a good thing there’s no shortage of free replacements.
