This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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!
Bring back clippy. "I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you."
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 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 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
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.
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.
I don't understand all the negativity. An integrated AI assistant in a text editor sounds like it could be amazing.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Is there a LibreOffice alternative?
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
