Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

> The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows is actually kinda depressing.

macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org

I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.

[1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...

The ugliness is a nice feature.

I have always thought the decision to keep Notepad and Paint as they are is a nod towards the developer community. Thanks to this, there's a large market for affordable and better alternatives.

What is depressing about old tools? I love the GNU coreutils and am really passionate about them. They are old, but near perfect.

If you care about beautiful interfaces macos and linux will always be way ahead, for sure.

The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.

Apple Notes on MacOS have been crashing for me constantly since shortly after Apple Intelligence beta started rolling out. Even though I'm not even on the beta.

the lack of consistent UI experiences in windows was a thing that really bugged me and why I've never looked back after switching to MacOS

Pixelmator is over 15 years old, Preview predates OS X as it was a part of NeXTStep.

Mentioning all these programs and seeing the trouble people have I will never really understand why there are any men at all that still use Windows and Mac.

Notepad++ is an alternative to Vim, so if you are using Vim you are covering most use cases of Notepad++ already.

In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.

[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters

Off the top of my head:

- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory

- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each

- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs

- colors

- allows tail -f (the eye icon)

- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)

- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments

- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)

- lets you see and change encoding very easily

There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.

> I don't see the usecase for Notepad++ personally speaking

Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.

I dont trust notepad to edit configs, \n is no problem anymore but there is always a way to corrupt files with notepad.

Never had this issues for notepad++.

For text it's fine.

Try notepad2. It's an decent improvement from notepad while not going full notepad++. I install it on new Windows boxes and have it replace notepad.exe (there is an option to do this in setup.)

After Visual Studio 2008, they rewrote the UI in WPF and started writing large components of the program in C#. This dramatically regressed performance, especially on a cold start (it runs decently if you've had the program open for a while). I'd probably still be using Visual Studio 2008, except it limits you to C89 and C++03.

Vs2008 has the old MDI style. It is quiet good

That AI space is SO frothy right now!

It is whatever dev in the team that the team thinks is most senior and/or has the biggest mouth.

The default Windows taskbar doesn't haven't given you tabs for a very long time, has been mostly unusable if you use it as tabs recently, and only has 1 level of tabs, while keeping tabs inside the application gives you another.

That said, I'm not sure notepad benefits from it.

To answer seriously, because workflow is a tree. And the outer levels need task-specificity. Browser tabs need different display options and available actions from text editor tabs, etc.

A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).

these days, if a software doesn't use the design language of a browser, users think it's old and busted

if we were still allowed to have a vertical taksbar we could have enough tabs indeed

You can disable it. Settings > When Notepad starts > Start new session and discard unsaved changes

always the first thing i disable in Notepad++

Oddly remembers tabs for me just fine.

Notepad++ also uses Scintilla.

Umm, not sure which version of notepad.exe keeps a lock on open files. None that I've used in the last 25 years.

I believe they finally abandoned that 'pretends to understand doc' wordpad some time ago.

AI can feel more like a novelty than a truly helpful tool, especially when it comes to getting real work done. When I need a real boost, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola. It’s amazing how it instantly lifts my mood and keeps me going!

Mokie Coke! Mokie Coke!

----

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/218596/70s-or-earl... for those not in the know.

Future notepad grocery list item:

* soda pop <--- consider replacing this with Coke Zero, on sale at a Kroger's near you this week

I think there are already product placement laws so we should be warned at least

That is until you apply an AI ad blocker. No reason only the big corps should have it

I don't think this is a good reason but tabs give you the ability to keep a bunch of files open and accessible without cluttering your main taskbar since there is only 1 Notes window.

I usually like having just one window because having to alt-tab 5 times to get to chrome or something is kinda annoying imo

(im not sure if you can do that on windows actually)

tabs and autosave are pretty essential features. they make notepad a single window app (no need to fiddle with a bunch of windows) and easy to open and close while keeping all tabs/files open (no need to save every file on exit, no need to reopen every file).

it improves the usefulness of previous notepad, which was clunky to use for lack of those features and prone to data loss (no autosave, duh), which would actually make the old notepad almost useless. it improves it so much, it's probably the easiest way to quicky note something, and be sure that it won't go anywhere.

it's just the right amount of actually useful features that makes it so much more usable. and lack of those features would just immediately prompt one to look elsewhere for something that has those (like notepads, which is pretty good as well). some other editors might not be as quick and not even as good at autosaving and actually keeping stuff. (like sublime, which would lose sessions and data in them with absurd regularity, which hasn't happened once in a year of use of notepad (sure, not saving manually is bad, but having functionality just not work and fail with regularity is worse)

I know what you mean.

I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs in different places and it wastes more time for me having tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the monitors instead.

In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest time.

It still works like that but combined with autosave you really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not already open in another instance or different tab lots of times.

Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open Notepad days or weeks later.

Even though for like 40 years when you opened a new instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a blank text window.

And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file to open without having some other text on some other tab that came from somewhere else you might not remember that well.

So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you type now by default.

No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that, nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.

I guess that's why they're going to call the next level Rewrite.

I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but what can you expect anyway?

It's all of the above plus the faint hope that people will actually use the AI features and come to depend on them for some reason!

It's as if it's the company's mission.

There is a hoard of people who "work in tech" that don't work in tech.

These are people who are missing valuable business insights or who are working on novel solutions and include many developers. Those are the ones who will struggle with relevance going forward.

Equally, large corporations are at significant risk if the productivity of a single person increases further. If you look at the game industry, indie games are running circles around the AAA games, but this is limited to exceptional individuals or teams. Make more people individually exceptional and it's going to be real hard for big companies to eat.

>If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe?

We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the trough of disillusionment where people are running around saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people like me are working with corporations to completely change how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our world is going to look very different in a decade.

>It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted

Most software developers spend very little of their time actually "coding", and most of their time investigating, understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.

>Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product

They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI" as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound terrible.

>As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it

Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or different. Most people don't. If every major company is busy trying to get in front of AI, maybe it isn't quite the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is, no?

100%. Notepad has always been just a simple ASCII text tool, with Wordpad being the discount word processor. Microsoft's insistence in shoving word processing features into Notepad has never made sense.

It’s pretty obvious after their data grab with the new Outlook. They destroyed the built-in app which I used all the time just to try to get all of my emails.

Also traffic could be encrypted

Visual Studio unfortunately still heavily uses legacy .NET Framework, only some parts of instrumentation specifically for C# were moved out of process and run on top of modern runtime. It's a pretty good IDE, much better than the kind of experience you get elsewhere, but I've moved to VSC + Rider since and only use VS occasionally on my "gaming pc" because it has a convenient community-made extension for getting quick .NET's compiler output.

'Hallucinating Notepad' feels like a band name.

Glorified Markov Chain Text Generator.

I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto people used to say when it was very new.

It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are.

I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc.

Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".

Manga Library Z, a manga archiving site that distributed old and out-of-print manga for free has been forced to close down due to all major credit card companies refusing to provide payment services. If some hypothetical widespread decentralized payment system can prevent scenarios like this one from happening, then it would be worth the "enormous waste of resources". These days, you're essentially relegated to a non-person if card companies stop allowing you to use their services.

For Microsoft's credit, Windows has systems in place to install your updates when you're powered by more renewables than fossil fuels [0].

[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-i...

[flagged]

It's unfortunate that Apple Notes doesn't handle plain text. I'd use it like this if possible.

Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete, autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers…

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194047/microsoft-notepad...

I used Notes to edit a text file once and learned a very important lesson; It changes all your double-quotes to fancy Unicode double-quotes. They may look prettier, but they completely break the code you are working on.

I think it would be much easier and faster to just give the users one option. That way, they don't need to think about what they want and can focus on their work. (satire)

With "maybe later" prompting to enable every few minutes, of course only "accidentally". :-)

More like "Enable" and "Enable in 8 hours"

But you can still open multiple windows?

"My PC" renamed to "This PC" awhile ago, afterall.

As a counterpoint, I'm on macOS where their latest AI writing tools are now implemented system wide. I also use TextEdit (approximately equivalent to Windows Notepad) and the Stickies app for similar text dumping ground behavior and yet, having the AI writing tools available on those two apps is incredibly useful. I often don't use it at all, but there are things I want to run through it and not having to move the text yet again to another app is nice.

It's _also_ useful in my apps dedicated to writing and even the text areas of browsers. I think it's all about implementation though, Apple's writing tools are quietly buried in the context menu for most text inputs. Microsoft has a tendency to be pushy and in your face about their latest AI offerings like shoving it into the Start Menu, or making it a prominent and visible element of their UI (Copilot in VSCode, even when you're not a subscriber) and the Verge's screenshot isn't enough for me to judge this by.

So many people aren't even aware that other tools exist, can't install them for corporate policy reasons etc.

In these cases, the best tool is the one you've already got.

It recently gained a spellcheck (4 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40907284

An LLM can technically fix spelling

Apple's AI Writing Tools is available in TextEdit.

One note is a shitshow. The idea is good, the implementation is a disaster.

OneNote has some predictive text gubbins now.

A scary version of this is driven home to me when I go to Washington DC and see all of the very expensive billboards at commuter stations near the Pentagon advertising fighter jets and other military equipment.

It scares me every time because they wouldn't be splashing out the big bucks for those billboards if they weren't effective, and I absolutely don't want the military (or any other entity engaging in major expenditures) to be making those decisions based on billboards.

> I worked in a place where the owners were very susceptible to airport billboard ads.

This explains why airports are entirely covered in ads that seem to be aimed at C-level execs only (nobody else gives a shit).

This is why I shudder whenever I see a Workday ad during a football game.

Work is for work stuff. It's someone else computer, someone else wants and needs. I don't mind if they want to feed all their data to Big Tech (On my previous work computer the only truly personal piece of data I had was my profile picture and ssh keys for my GitHub account). I don't even do web searches on work computers. If Windows is slow, I'd just bring it up to my manager and the IT dept.

On my personal computers, that's a different story.

I suspect we'll start to see people asking for more raw bullet-points for certain communications, because all the text they used to use to guess engagement/thought/investment/care is debased from easy counterfeiting.

In some cases that'll remove something that was always a questionable waste of time, and in other cases it'll represent a real loss of information.

While it's possible they meant something nefarious, I think the goal was probably just to prevent confusion around shared computers. Such confusion might seem unlikely, but when your market is as big as Microsoft's even unlikely things happen all the time.

"Our PC"

> You've got it reversed. AI PCs are just SPAs.

Microsoft's "CoPilot PCs" scheme places a lot of emphasis on the hardware being powerful enough for locally-processed "AI" features and isn't about offloading everything (I suspect because they're starting to acknowledge that not everyone has a highly-reliable multi-megabit Internet connection).

Dumb terminals, like the 60's.

According to Wikipedia [0], the development of the car concept went from 1649 to 1881. That's not exactly throwing random things and seeing what sticks. It may have not been systematic, but with the wealth of information and resources we have today, we can and should do better.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile

I think the basic text widget of all the toolkit support text attributes (color, styles,…) and as the solutions for syntax highlighting and other stuff existed already, it was not a big stretch to add them instead of having two editors (the first user was the programmer)

You seem to mostly be listing ways in which using windows is an active liability rather than anything consumers asked for.

Granted, the drivers point is a good one.

> Ubuntu isn't connected to a multi-billion dollar corporation

Technically correct but misleading. It's connected to Canonical, a multi-billion dollar private company limited by shares.