That makes no sense even if you ignore the fact that Copilot can be easily disabled in Notepad, and it doesn't directly load with the app (as in: doesn't slow down startup or anything like that).
Notepad works just as it always had, it just has dark theme, tabs, sessions, and a Markdown viewer now.
Well, I confess I'm in no good position to say anything about Windows 11, for I've been a daily Linux-only user (Arch, by the way) for almost a decade.
However, as far as I've seen about Windows, AI (especially that spying feature designed to take screenshots and create a lookup-able timeline, "Microsoft Recall" if I recall (pun intended) correctly) seems to be so intertwined with Windows that even the Windows Explorer's Shell has now a hard dependency on AI-related and Microsoft Edge-related libraries. This way, if someone were to try and purge the Windows from AI-related crap, it will break the OS, Explorer simply won't launch.
Also, "can be easily turned off" implies something that comes enabled by default: the exact same dilemma behind Mozilla Firefox and all the crap they've been imbuing inside the browser. In the end of the day, it's a non-consented relation. The fact it can be opted-out doesn't make it less of a non-consented relationship, for the non-consented relation already happened as the user proceeds to opting-out of it. In other realms of legality, it would be considered a crime, but as it's something done by corporations (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google), they it's suddenly "a-okay".
Don't take this as an attack against yourself, but holy shit, where are you getting your news from? Do people seriously believe that everything is AI in Windows now?
Recall is not yet live (it's available as a preview feature), you have to enable it manually, and even then you can disable it easily.
Copilot barely does anything. They're basically shoving the button wherever they can to goad people into using it, but that's mostly it.
"Purging" the OS from "AI-related crap" would purge it from AI-related crap and not break anything (source: did this on my previous work laptop)
Also, “can be easily turned off” implies something that comes enabled by default
It's a button. If you click the button, a Copilot interface loads with the file you're editing pre-loaded as context. Unless you click it, it does nothing other than taking up space. You can disable the button from the Settings.
I agree about all the opt-out/opt-in stuff, but also understand why a company catering to 80% of the market defaults to opt-out - users are dumb, they have no clue how to explore features, so opt-in features remain forever disabled for 99% of them.
And then Apple does an update with an identical feature enabled by default, and everybody goes "damn, if only Microsoft thought of this!"
Do people seriously believe that everything is AI in Windows now?
Tbf, it doesn't help the fact that corps are shoving AI into everything they can and can't. I'm far from being Anti-AI, but when we live in a world where everything is being AI-fied, I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment "Windows = AI".
Recall is not yet live (it’s available as a preview feature), you have to enable it manually, and even then you can disable it easily.
As far as I read, it's partially true. Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall "to improve productivity", anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.
They’re basically shoving the button wherever they can to goad people into using it, but that’s mostly it
It’s a button. [...] Unless you click it, it does nothing other than taking up space.
Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features "summarizing", "auto-formatting text" and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.
“Purging” the OS from “AI-related crap” would purge it from AI-related crap and not break anything (source: did this on my previous work laptop)
Okay, fair point.
I agree about all the opt-out/opt-in stuff, but also understand why a company catering to 80% of the market defaults to opt-out - users are dumb, they have no clue how to explore features, so opt-in features remain forever disabled for 99% of them.
I heard the same during a discussion about Firefox here in Lemmy. "Users are dumb, so corp needs to guide them through the new features by enrolling them automatically". Whenever I hear about how "users are dumb", I can't help but wonder how the so-called "dumb users" are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph or, even worse, (it doesn't even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone's lives)!
And then Apple does an update with an identical feature enabled by default, and everybody goes “damn, if only Microsoft thought of this!”
Maybe it's because iThings aren't socially pushed as Microsoft things are. You said yourself: Microsoft is "a company catering to 80% of the market" dominating the PC market, not Apple.
what “crime” you mean
Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it's software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.
Yeah, Lemmy is weird, especially the tech-related communities for some reason. It's like: "if it's not Linux and FOSS, it's literal cancer, unless it's Microsoft's, then it's literal radioactive and aggressive cancer".
I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment “Windows = AI”.
100% agreed. However, as with any other opinion, fundamentalism is bad, m'kay. I get why people are tired of AI (I'm in the same boat!) but there has to be rationality involved.
As far as I read, it’s partially true.
That's just ordinary standard click-bait from a tech site. They themselves mention that the rollout will be "to beta users", that means Insiders. Insider builds are very different from regular builds and many features are force-enabled in them.
Which makes sense: if you're making the very conscious decision of signing up to Windows Insider, after going through the warnings about the nature of the program, you should know full well about what it comes with.
I was reinstalling my wife's Windows recently and was asked if I want to enable Recall, with a very prominent "the feature is in preview" on the screen.
Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall “to improve productivity”, anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.
Oof, there's a bit to unpack here.
If it's workplace, it's not the employee's device, it's the workplace's. Nothing the employee does is private, that's the whole point of managed devices. Nobody ever looks at what the employee does (unless their manager is completely fucking insane), because nobody has the time for that, but in case of, say, litigation, or such, the data is there. Recall isn't needed for that.
Microsoft has zero access to Recall data. It's 100% local (hence the "Copilot+ PC" requirement - these are the PCs that have CPUs with an "NPU", or "Neural Processing Unit", allowing them to run LLMs locally without killing performance).
For hackers to get to this data, they'd need to break the network security measures, the account security measures, anti-virus security measures AND BitLocker. Which is to say: a hacker getting access to Recall is the least of a workplace's worries, because it means they're effectively wide open to the Internet.
There's not much in Recall that you can't extract from the browser's cache. Many of these things are actually less useful, because even if you steal someone's password by scraping Recall data (and that's assuming something goes wrong and Recall doesn't redact it), you won't be able to sign in from a different device due to MFA. However, if you have such deep-level access to the device, you can, instead, steal the token used for logging in - that one usually already comes with the MFA token, so you can sign in anywhere.
Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features “summarizing”, “auto-formatting text” and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.
Those features - to my knowledge - only work on the devices with the NPU, which is to say: they run locally. I haven't really looked into it, though. Either way: they are fully optional and dormant until the user clicks them.
Whenever I hear about how “users are dumb”, I can’t help but wonder how the so-called “dumb users” are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph
Check any news source for the road accident numbers. You start to see a trend now?
or, even worse, (it doesn’t even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone’s lives)!
Did you not notice who won in the US last year?
Maybe it’s because iThings aren’t socially pushed as Microsoft things are
How do you mean? The only difference I can think of is that Apple users are generally more enthusiastic towards Apple products than MS users. That being said, we've seen countless times that whatever Apple does is called "revolutionary", whereas when MS does, people don't care. First touch-screen phones: Microsoft. Best digital assistant: Microsoft. Best optimised mobile OS: Microsoft. Etc., etc.
And we've already seen that recently with Recall - Microsoft announced it, and people lost their shit, talking about how dangerous that is, how security is 100% compromised right now, and how everybody has to switch to MacOS or Linux.
Then, two weeks later, Apple announced it's identical but less secure version of Recall, and there was nothing overtly negative in the media about it. Some sceptical articles here and there.
Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it’s software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.
That's, unfortunately, not how it works. I agree that dark patters suck and people who use them should be banned from making any executive decisions regarding software ever, but most of the time when people are complaining about dark patterns these days, it's completely benign shit.
Like, come on, a button showing up with a new feature is now a "dark pattern"? Let's be real here.
(Don't get me wrong - I hate that they shoved a fucking LLM front-end into Notepad, but let's not be silly and pretend like it's all shit now. It still does the exact same job it always did)
Custom hotkey to trigger simple plaintext clipboard script, couldn’t live without it.
(“Script“ is a scary word for many of us but you probably only ever see the code once or instead use some free open source clipboard manager that has “replace clipboard with plain text“ built-in.)
—
Anyway you’re right, I probably still use a similar workaround once a week!
Neither.
I juat don't really care as I'll use the start menu to strip it.
Amd (at least ony machine at home and work, the default behavior is to strip the format and write plain text
So… they removed Wordpad to push people into using Word… and now they removed Notepad to push people into… this monstrosity? Why does Notepad support hyperlinks now?
Back when I used Notepad, it was to strip out rich text formatting and reliably get consistently distinct text, especially if I configured it to use a monospace font. Now I have to worry about embedded hyperlinks sending me to God-knows-where?
if you click a link to file:///123.45.67.89:69420/files-download/virus.exe it will download and run virus.exe from that IP address
it still works, but now there is a "Dangerous Link Location: This is not a web link and may lead to the execution of malicious code" warning, but previously it would silently run the file.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn't un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
To be fair it's one of the most popular text editors so it's not surprising nation states would target them, and it's hard to block someone with those kinds of resources.
This was my first thought. I hadn't bothered installing it in a while, then one day that fucking copilot icon appeared, and back I went. There's something to be said for a tool that does the thing it needs to do well and only that.
Tabs were a welcome addition, but that's where the good idea train swiftly leaves the rails.
What we needed was a built-in hex editor, and maybe some better tools for working with unicode that you can't just type in on whatever keyboard you have.
Instead, they turned it into WordPad, which we already have.
True, but IMO it makes a lot more sense to support markdown under Wordpad than Notepad since the controls and doc-style layout/rendering support is already there.
it only exists so they could easily shove copilot into it.
I get the saltiness about Copilot but this is getting ridiculous.
It got dark mode, sessions, tabs, and a Markdown viewer. How are these bad changes? How do these "only exist so they could easily shove Copilot into" them?
(btw, you can disable Copilot from Notepad with three clicks)
Well I'm not on Windows anymore so I can't test it out. Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of **bold**
I wouldn't want it to do anything other than show the literal text, and anything in that direction is a loss via added friction.
Huh. That write up seems pretty useful. It's so weird that the redesigned app is just an alias to the old and untouched app that's still sitting in system32
Whomever was involved with the creation of the "new" printer settings menu should be killed by dumping a whole nest of fire ants high on bath salts into their rectum and then stapling it shut.
Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.
However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.
I hated wordpad. New notepad is so much better than the old. An undo on old notepad would undo the last 1-7 sentences randomly, and wouldn't redo. Remembering notes is also good, and I love markdown.
I don't use the ai and it never was in the way of what I needed, so whatever.
The last time I used notepad the undo option worked both as undo and redo, since it only kept the latest change and undoing was also a change that could be undone.
I sometimes put together long bash commands to pull docker image updates. I would take five minutes building up a command, make a typo, pressed undo by muscle memory and most of what I typed out would be gone with no way to undo.
This was no one time occurrence, because I'm too lazy to pull up vscode or something else, it would be a weekly occurrence.
I cried when that old piece of junk updated to the new notepad. Never had that issue since.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn't un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
Additionally, for those Notepad Purists™ who are offended by any features being added… Tabs are handy. And having it auto-save drafts and auto-open them is also handy - for me. Maybe you don't like that, but you can disable the auto-save in settings. Can't turn off tabs, but you can set it to open in new windows, so pretty close to disabling that.
If this is what drives you over the edge to use Linux........ okay, bud, have it your way - and I'm a Linux enthusiast, so I'm all for it. But being pissed off by something you have to specifically enable seems a bit silly to me. It's the hallmark of fascism - "Other people have the right to exist! FUCK THAT!" - a little hyperbolic, but the principle is vaguely the same. :P (And what's the internet without hyperbole? :) )
Not embracing every bullshit data mining change tech companies shove down our throats is fascism, got it. An intelligent, well reasoned, not at all fucked up thing to say
Yes, you have accurately characterized what I said and didn't miss any of it in the slightest. Well done, you. Congrats on not completely missing the entire point. I am honestly impressed by the complete lack of comprehension. Nicely done.
GNU EMACS is RIGHT THERE in WINDOWS
You can INSTALL IT (Well you can't install it, you kinda just dump it in Program Files)
PEOPLE have been EXTENDING it for DECADES SAFELY
WHAT are you WAITING FOR
I mean you're right, but also look at what emacs or vim are doing on the linux side. Overloading your notepad application is hardly a concept birthed on Windows.
I'm not so sure about that. Vim has syntax highlighting, programming language support (assisted via ctags), two terminal emulators, a window manager, two (arguably three) programming languages, transparent remote file editing...
So anyway, I use an editor that doesn't waste my time: Ed, man! !man ed.
They also introduced a critical security vulnerability into notepad where they just had the markdown links shell execute open link which allowed just installing arbitrary software as long as the link was valid instead of just opening a browser.
If you managed to get the file onto a person's you could execute it by having the person click on the link.
Its really a shame. Every OS needs a simple text editor, possibly without formatting support of any kind. You're not supposed to use it, it just makes it possible to edit basic configurations on the fly and things like that. Instead they support half of word pad and cram in copilot for some reason.
Although I do admit, I haven't seen the need to move away from kwrite for a long time. Basic text editor that does what it should and does it right!
Then just types into and don’t do any formatting. I use it daily at work for pasting text I want to keep. That’s it I type or paste I never save, I never click any menus etc.
What's the equivalent in Linux? I'm using an Arch-based distro with KDE, the only editor I can see is Kate, but I might be missing something due to the Linux naming conventions.
I think kwrite on kde. Arch may come more barebones though.
It's hard to point to one because linux isn't an operating system per se.. and many distros come with different software packages with different DE's. That's where a GUI text editor's home is, so it depends on that, the distro.
Kwrite supports Markdown just fine, actually better than Notepad (it does syntax colouring and formatting as you type), although I'm not sure if it can display the formatted file.
Wasn't there a lurking edit.exe or edit.cmd somewhere inside C:\WINDOWS\system32? Would make an interesting replacement to the enshittified "Not-e-pad". But, then, I haven't used Windows since Windows 10 was still a novelty (and what definitely pushed me to Linux... Arch Linux btw), so maybe I'm very old ("I'm old, Dean, very old") to recall of a MS-DOS relic.
Oh, I misremembered the file extension. Yeah, that's right, it was edit.com, there was likely no .exe because it was a relic from before Windows NT.
And, BASIC... Such great times. Although the BASIC flavor I dealt the most with was Visual Basic (VB5 and VB6), I also did some tinkering with terminal-based BASIC flavors (specifically, Linux ports of BASIC interpreters) as well.
Good question. I'm not sure. I guess no, because, as far as I know, ed is a GNU editor which allows for composing and editing files in a REPL-like environment (whose specific commands, apart from "q" to quit, I'm yet to learn)
The "edit" I'm referring to was a spiritual antecessor or cousin of vim, emacs and nano. It was a TUI, full with a functional menubar accessible through keyboard arrow keys. I remember it having a blue background with gray/white text.
I remember with quite a certainty it was a thing for Windows XP. Was invokeable by using "edit filename.txt" in cmd.
However, I also remember having manually copied some executables across diferent Windows versions in order to test and see whether these old executables would work. I remember having successfully ran Windows XP's calc.exe in some later Windows version, relying on the compatibility layer ("ntvdm", I guess?). I remember doing the same for 16-bit, MS-DOS programs, but I don't remember whether "edit" MS-DOS programs was included in post-XP Windows versions, or if I manually copied it from XP.
Maybe it's edit I'm remembering. It was a long time ago, and I stopped using windows seriously around 3.11, so I never paid much attention to what was on that partition. It was only there to run steam (and a few other games).
I suppose I should have switched to a console, but it never even occurred to me at the time.
Win 11 has been a privacy/anonymity/usability nightmare. Thanks in no small part to MS enshittifying absolutely every corner of it with AI. Right down to grabbing it by the notepad.
Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.
However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.
Notepad is still fine. You can disable markdown and the AI stuff.
I use Macs at home, but use Windows 11 at work. I actually use a combination of Notepad and Sticky Notes daily (well, not on the weekends). It’s fine.
One thing I want it to do is stop telling me a file is not saved if I change something and then change it back. The unsaved indicator (the dot) annoys me.
This is a bad rant. Nvim has markdown format rendering too, does that make it worse? I’d say the markdown rendering was a good update, because now my tech illiterate coworkers can open the .md files I sprinkle everywhere and see them as their meant.
No, the true madness is the advent of tabs that stay open until explicitly closed, even if the program is terminated, and come back when you open the app from scratch.
At least Nvim allows me to turn that shit off, select a plugin that matches my preferences, or program a keyboard shortcut to toggle rendering on and off. The MS Editor just unilaterally decides that your file should now end in .md, because it contains what MS considers markdown formatting, as if there's no way a plain text file could contain lines beginning with # (although, granted, you have to press one of the formatting buttons first, before the editor switches to "markdown mode" and starts behaving that way).
I hate this person. It makes me want to scream. One of the dumbest stupidest things about Windows is a fucking useless programs go on with it that haven't been updated in 20 years. Please update them. You want to update notepad? Go look at Notepad+. Please please please update all the shitty little programs that exist around Windows that no one uses cause they're so goddamn shitty.
Holy fuck update Windows programs. For the love of God update ALL the Windows programs. Make the goddamn search tool work. Make the goddamn voice to text work. Make the image viewer not suck. Please don't listen to the people who are resistant to change. Leave an old shitty version on there just for them, but please please make Windows programs better because they suck right now!!
What a bad take. Notepad was never meant to have formatting, as the post states. Notepad's purpose was to open war text files as raw text. For formatted text, there was WordPad. What made notepad great is that it was the fastest and easiest way to just know what is in the damn file.
Yes! Leave notepad alone. I don't need to load fucking Word when I just want to quickly type out some bullshit that I'm going to reference a few minutes later and then not bother to save. Notepad has always been the fastest, most responsive and reliable tool in windows that I (and probably a lot of people) use every fucking day.
Isn't notepad an LLM client now?
Feels like everything is. Might as well describe every app by it‘s (now) secondary function.
Some apps just have it as primary function now...
Waiting for the rename to copad AI.
CopePad
@[email protected] @[email protected]
@[email protected]
I'd say LLM is a notepad client now.
That makes no sense even if you ignore the fact that Copilot can be easily disabled in Notepad, and it doesn't directly load with the app (as in: doesn't slow down startup or anything like that).
Notepad works just as it always had, it just has dark theme, tabs, sessions, and a Markdown viewer now.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Well, I confess I'm in no good position to say anything about Windows 11, for I've been a daily Linux-only user (Arch, by the way) for almost a decade.
However, as far as I've seen about Windows, AI (especially that spying feature designed to take screenshots and create a lookup-able timeline, "Microsoft Recall" if I recall (pun intended) correctly) seems to be so intertwined with Windows that even the Windows Explorer's Shell has now a hard dependency on AI-related and Microsoft Edge-related libraries. This way, if someone were to try and purge the Windows from AI-related crap, it will break the OS, Explorer simply won't launch.
Also, "can be easily turned off" implies something that comes enabled by default: the exact same dilemma behind Mozilla Firefox and all the crap they've been imbuing inside the browser. In the end of the day, it's a non-consented relation. The fact it can be opted-out doesn't make it less of a non-consented relationship, for the non-consented relation already happened as the user proceeds to opting-out of it. In other realms of legality, it would be considered a crime, but as it's something done by corporations (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google), they it's suddenly "a-okay".
Don't take this as an attack against yourself, but holy shit, where are you getting your news from? Do people seriously believe that everything is AI in Windows now?
Recall is not yet live (it's available as a preview feature), you have to enable it manually, and even then you can disable it easily.
Copilot barely does anything. They're basically shoving the button wherever they can to goad people into using it, but that's mostly it.
"Purging" the OS from "AI-related crap" would purge it from AI-related crap and not break anything (source: did this on my previous work laptop)
It's a button. If you click the button, a Copilot interface loads with the file you're editing pre-loaded as context. Unless you click it, it does nothing other than taking up space. You can disable the button from the Settings.
I agree about all the opt-out/opt-in stuff, but also understand why a company catering to 80% of the market defaults to opt-out - users are dumb, they have no clue how to explore features, so opt-in features remain forever disabled for 99% of them.
And then Apple does an update with an identical feature enabled by default, and everybody goes "damn, if only Microsoft thought of this!"
I don't understand what "crime" you mean.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
It's okay, no offense taken.
Mostly from Lemmy, but also from Gizmodo.
Tbf, it doesn't help the fact that corps are shoving AI into everything they can and can't. I'm far from being Anti-AI, but when we live in a world where everything is being AI-fied, I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment "Windows = AI".
As far as I read, it's partially true. Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall "to improve productivity", anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.
Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features "summarizing", "auto-formatting text" and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.
Okay, fair point.
I heard the same during a discussion about Firefox here in Lemmy. "Users are dumb, so corp needs to guide them through the new features by enrolling them automatically". Whenever I hear about how "users are dumb", I can't help but wonder how the so-called "dumb users" are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph or, even worse, (it doesn't even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone's lives)!
Maybe it's because iThings aren't socially pushed as Microsoft things are. You said yourself: Microsoft is "a company catering to 80% of the market" dominating the PC market, not Apple.
Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it's software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.
Yeah, Lemmy is weird, especially the tech-related communities for some reason. It's like: "if it's not Linux and FOSS, it's literal cancer, unless it's Microsoft's, then it's literal radioactive and aggressive cancer".
100% agreed. However, as with any other opinion, fundamentalism is bad, m'kay. I get why people are tired of AI (I'm in the same boat!) but there has to be rationality involved.
That's just ordinary standard click-bait from a tech site. They themselves mention that the rollout will be "to beta users", that means Insiders. Insider builds are very different from regular builds and many features are force-enabled in them.
Which makes sense: if you're making the very conscious decision of signing up to Windows Insider, after going through the warnings about the nature of the program, you should know full well about what it comes with.
I was reinstalling my wife's Windows recently and was asked if I want to enable Recall, with a very prominent "the feature is in preview" on the screen.
Oof, there's a bit to unpack here.
If it's workplace, it's not the employee's device, it's the workplace's. Nothing the employee does is private, that's the whole point of managed devices. Nobody ever looks at what the employee does (unless their manager is completely fucking insane), because nobody has the time for that, but in case of, say, litigation, or such, the data is there. Recall isn't needed for that.
Microsoft has zero access to Recall data. It's 100% local (hence the "Copilot+ PC" requirement - these are the PCs that have CPUs with an "NPU", or "Neural Processing Unit", allowing them to run LLMs locally without killing performance).
For hackers to get to this data, they'd need to break the network security measures, the account security measures, anti-virus security measures AND BitLocker. Which is to say: a hacker getting access to Recall is the least of a workplace's worries, because it means they're effectively wide open to the Internet.
There's not much in Recall that you can't extract from the browser's cache. Many of these things are actually less useful, because even if you steal someone's password by scraping Recall data (and that's assuming something goes wrong and Recall doesn't redact it), you won't be able to sign in from a different device due to MFA. However, if you have such deep-level access to the device, you can, instead, steal the token used for logging in - that one usually already comes with the MFA token, so you can sign in anywhere.
Those features - to my knowledge - only work on the devices with the NPU, which is to say: they run locally. I haven't really looked into it, though. Either way: they are fully optional and dormant until the user clicks them.
Check any news source for the road accident numbers. You start to see a trend now?
Did you not notice who won in the US last year?
How do you mean? The only difference I can think of is that Apple users are generally more enthusiastic towards Apple products than MS users. That being said, we've seen countless times that whatever Apple does is called "revolutionary", whereas when MS does, people don't care. First touch-screen phones: Microsoft. Best digital assistant: Microsoft. Best optimised mobile OS: Microsoft. Etc., etc.
And we've already seen that recently with Recall - Microsoft announced it, and people lost their shit, talking about how dangerous that is, how security is 100% compromised right now, and how everybody has to switch to MacOS or Linux.
Then, two weeks later, Apple announced it's identical but less secure version of Recall, and there was nothing overtly negative in the media about it. Some sceptical articles here and there.
That's, unfortunately, not how it works. I agree that dark patters suck and people who use them should be banned from making any executive decisions regarding software ever, but most of the time when people are complaining about dark patterns these days, it's completely benign shit.
Like, come on, a button showing up with a new feature is now a "dark pattern"? Let's be real here.
See Copilot logo in top right
Disable the Copilot logo with three clicks.
(Don't get me wrong - I hate that they shoved a fucking LLM front-end into Notepad, but let's not be silly and pretend like it's all shit now. It still does the exact same job it always did)
Notepad's sole purpose is to remove formatting from copied text.
ctrl+shift+v is your friend
Doesn't work everywhere...
Unsurprisingly Microsoft products are the least consistent with it
But but but that’s unacceptable!
Custom hotkey to trigger simple plaintext clipboard script, couldn’t live without it.
(“Script“ is a scary word for many of us but you probably only ever see the code once or instead use some free open source clipboard manager that has “replace clipboard with plain text“ built-in.)
—
Anyway you’re right, I probably still use a similar workaround once a week!
Not always (looking angrily at you Outlook, meanwhile your brother Excel excels (ha!) at doing this while inputting data).
Fuck excel. The default should be to leave whatever the fuck I paste in there alone. If I want you to reformat shit I'll tell you to reformat it.
??
Everytime I paste something it there, the formatting (for better or for worse) stays on whatever the source was.
But at least you can use the CTRL + Shift + V to paste it unformatted (Unlike Outlook)
Try doing upc codes and see how you feel about it.
Oh yeah...Data type pasting is...Interesting :p
Is it annoying enough you’d actually want to try fixing it or is the Notepad workaround good enough?
Neither.
I juat don't really care as I'll use the start menu to strip it.
Amd (at least ony machine at home and work, the default behavior is to strip the format and write plain text
That command gives me a bunch of more hoops to jump through
that doesn't usually work when copying between different Microsoft products. it always fucks it up somehow or simply doesn't let you
You can use Neovim (or any CLI text editor) for that
It still does that job perfectly fine.
So… they removed Wordpad to push people into using Word… and now they removed Notepad to push people into… this monstrosity? Why does Notepad support hyperlinks now?
Back when I used Notepad, it was to strip out rich text formatting and reliably get consistently distinct text, especially if I configured it to use a monospace font. Now I have to worry about embedded hyperlinks sending me to God-knows-where?
If you are stuck in Windows, use Notepad++.
Control + Shift + V pastes as plain text.
*sometimes
I always thought the default font used by notepad, courier, is monospace. But I mostly stopped using windows years ago so maybe that changed
notepad has formatting now? o_O
does it produce markdown or something?
Yep it’s markdown, and yep they had a CVE with second highest grade cause of it
heh, ofc. Apparently something to do with file:// and such uri handling, apparently executing local files? Yikes.
not just local files
if you click a link to file:///123.45.67.89:69420/files-download/virus.exe it will download and run virus.exe from that IP address
it still works, but now there is a "Dangerous Link Location: This is not a web link and may lead to the execution of malicious code" warning, but previously it would silently run the file.
kinda wild a file-link ever went straight to executing it after download - which on it's own could be dangerous as well.
I guess the "the s in IOT stands for security" also applies to notepad: "the s in vibecoding stands for security"
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841
Neat
Aren't CVE grades meaningless anyway with how they are declared in real world?
We run CVEs through our software inventory and configuration and come up with a new score that measures how bad it is for us.
It's a UWP (i think? they renamed the platform twice already) vibecoded app now, notepad.exe still around.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn't un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
Notepad++ gang, rise, claim your kingdom.
Well.. As long as you don't use their automatic updater.
Well it's a 23y old application that had one issue where the dev's machine got infected, and it was handled ~instantly.
What's the actual problem here?
This isn't the first time that application has had problems either, the CIA hacked it because it was loading unsigned DLLs: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v733-fix-cia-hacking-npp-issue/
To be fair it's one of the most popular text editors so it's not surprising nation states would target them, and it's hard to block someone with those kinds of resources.
We're talking geologic timescales here. Did you miss the memo?
Didn't it got patched?
Kate FTW!
Metapad still strong.
This was my first thought. I hadn't bothered installing it in a while, then one day that fucking copilot icon appeared, and back I went. There's something to be said for a tool that does the thing it needs to do well and only that.
But disable automatic updates...
No? That's already been long-fixed?
I'm talking about this incident, fixed in February 2026
Probably prudent anyways. What agent they broken recently?
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/
What’s an update?
I really hope that's sarcasm considering latest news xd
the point and strength of notepad was that it opened immediately, no bullshit, you can write text and that's all.
I suspect that's not the case anymore.
Nope, now (by default) it opens all the files you had open the last time you used Notepad. You can turn it off, but it's annoying.
If for some reason you're stuck on windows, might I recommend notepad++ ?
Kate is great and available for Windows, too!
But also beware as notepad++ has had a security breach recently.
So has everything.
A text editor shouldn't be having security breaches.
Technically it was the server for updates that got breached, not the editor itself.
Neither should Windows itself. But here we are. And have been for some time.
It didn't. The server for updates did.
Tabs were a welcome addition, but that's where the good idea train swiftly leaves the rails.
What we needed was a built-in hex editor, and maybe some better tools for working with unicode that you can't just type in on whatever keyboard you have.
Instead, they turned it into WordPad, which we already have.
Its not even wordpad. It only supports markdown not rtf... it only exists so they could easily shove copilot into it.
True, but IMO it makes a lot more sense to support markdown under Wordpad than Notepad since the controls and doc-style layout/rendering support is already there.
I get the saltiness about Copilot but this is getting ridiculous.
It got dark mode, sessions, tabs, and a Markdown viewer. How are these bad changes? How do these "only exist so they could easily shove Copilot into" them?
(btw, you can disable Copilot from Notepad with three clicks)
Notepad was supposed to be the simplest lightest weight text editor. It didn't need to change.
Let's try from a different angle: which functionalities of Notepad have been lost?
Well I'm not on Windows anymore so I can't test it out. Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of
**bold**I wouldn't want it to do anything other than show the literal text, and anything in that direction is a loss via added friction.
.mdfiles.Does windows power toys have one?
No idea. I want to say 'yes', but the last time I installed Power Toys was under Win2k.
I’ve totally fallen for markdown. I want more normies to know about it.
All the nice things about rich text with none of the Word.
Sad RTF noises.
RTF requires special software, whereas you can easily read Markdown in a console. It's superior in every way.
The Notepad getting junk added is a Microsoft Store app. The old notepad.exe is still usable.
Huh. That write up seems pretty useful. It's so weird that the redesigned app is just an alias to the old and untouched app that's still sitting in system32
Probably as usual: Legacy reasons.
Same way the rest of the OS is built.
All those fucked up snapins and apps and pretty pretty nonfunctional interfaces (try changing an ip) are utterly negated by start-run-"control"
Not all of them anymore. Some control panel icons just throw you into the new settings app.
Whomever was involved with the creation of the "new" printer settings menu should be killed by dumping a whole nest of fire ants high on bath salts into their rectum and then stapling it shut.
Well, as far as you consider the bugs usable.
The junk being: tab support, dark mode, sessions, and Markdown support. Oh, the horror!
Unfortunately it has a use. Microsoft discontinued WordPad
I was devasted when I heard this
What am I supposed to use when ms-word breaks itself while I'm offline now
notepad
Images don't work very well, but I guess you don't need those if you have an imagination
Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.
However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.
I hated wordpad. New notepad is so much better than the old. An undo on old notepad would undo the last 1-7 sentences randomly, and wouldn't redo. Remembering notes is also good, and I love markdown.
I don't use the ai and it never was in the way of what I needed, so whatever.
The last time I used notepad the undo option worked both as undo and redo, since it only kept the latest change and undoing was also a change that could be undone.
I sometimes put together long bash commands to pull docker image updates. I would take five minutes building up a command, make a typo, pressed undo by muscle memory and most of what I typed out would be gone with no way to undo.
This was no one time occurrence, because I'm too lazy to pull up vscode or something else, it would be a weekly occurrence.
I cried when that old piece of junk updated to the new notepad. Never had that issue since.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn't un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
Additionally, for those Notepad Purists™ who are offended by any features being added… Tabs are handy. And having it auto-save drafts and auto-open them is also handy - for me. Maybe you don't like that, but you can disable the auto-save in settings. Can't turn off tabs, but you can set it to open in new windows, so pretty close to disabling that.
If this is what drives you over the edge to use Linux........ okay, bud, have it your way - and I'm a Linux enthusiast, so I'm all for it. But being pissed off by something you have to specifically enable seems a bit silly to me. It's the hallmark of fascism - "Other people have the right to exist! FUCK THAT!" - a little hyperbolic, but the principle is vaguely the same. :P (And what's the internet without hyperbole? :) )
This, but he's yelling "plain text" instead of drainage.
Markdown support is actual nice and useful.
STOP DOING "STOP DOING MATH" BUT ACTUALLY WANTING TO STOP THE DOING
LOOK at what Memers have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the imgurs & reddits we built for them:
STOP DOING 'STOP DOING "STOP DOING MATH" BUT ACTUALLY WANTING TO STOP THE DOING' SINCE IT WANTS TO STOP THE DOING
They have played us for absolute fools
wut
Not embracing every bullshit data mining change tech companies shove down our throats is fascism, got it. An intelligent, well reasoned, not at all fucked up thing to say
Yes, you have accurately characterized what I said and didn't miss any of it in the slightest. Well done, you. Congrats on not completely missing the entire point. I am honestly impressed by the complete lack of comprehension. Nicely done.
GNU EMACS is RIGHT THERE in WINDOWS
You can INSTALL IT
(Well you can't install it, you kinda just dump it in Program Files)
PEOPLE have been EXTENDING it for DECADES SAFELY
WHAT are you WAITING FOR
Well, since you asked... I'm waiting for guile-emacs to make a breakout like neovim did.
My week as a windows forced office worker just peaked having seen this meme.
Notepad, the app I literally only ever use accidentally, or to edit a PC's hosts file.. Ah yes, this definitely needs CoPilot and markdown formatting.
All it needed was a dark mode to match modern Windows light/dark theming, done.
The additional shit (markdown, CoPilot?!) is just noise, intrusions, and vulnerabilities.
Yes, it’s not made by Microsoft.
Geany is pretty similar.
It probably runs on Wine/Proton.
I’ve been enjoying Kate as my Linux alt
There's notepadqq which appears to be a clone of notepad++, but it's not maintained anymore.
https://github.com/microsoft/edit
I mean you're right, but also look at what emacs or vim are doing on the linux side. Overloading your notepad application is hardly a concept birthed on Windows.
I'd argue the Linux equivalent is more something like nano, and I wouldn't say nano is overloaded
Are you saying that extensibility is the same thing as bloat? Weird take if so.
Vim has kept to simple sanity.
We don't talk about LazyVim.
Edit: I heard Emacs might be getting a text editor added soon.
I'm not so sure about that. Vim has syntax highlighting, programming language support (assisted via ctags), two terminal emulators, a window manager, two (arguably three) programming languages, transparent remote file editing...
So anyway, I use an editor that doesn't waste my time: Ed, man! !man ed.
Makes perfect sense. It is the standard editor.
They also introduced a critical security vulnerability into notepad where they just had the markdown links shell execute
open linkwhich allowed just installing arbitrary software as long as the link was valid instead of just opening a browser.If you managed to get the file onto a person's you could execute it by having the person click on the link.
Its really a shame. Every OS needs a simple text editor, possibly without formatting support of any kind. You're not supposed to use it, it just makes it possible to edit basic configurations on the fly and things like that. Instead they support half of word pad and cram in copilot for some reason.
Although I do admit, I haven't seen the need to move away from kwrite for a long time. Basic text editor that does what it should and does it right!
Then just types into and don’t do any formatting. I use it daily at work for pasting text I want to keep. That’s it I type or paste I never save, I never click any menus etc.
What's the equivalent in Linux? I'm using an Arch-based distro with KDE, the only editor I can see is Kate, but I might be missing something due to the Linux naming conventions.
I think kwrite on kde. Arch may come more barebones though.
It's hard to point to one because linux isn't an operating system per se.. and many distros come with different software packages with different DE's. That's where a GUI text editor's home is, so it depends on that, the distro.
Kwrite supports Markdown just fine, actually better than Notepad (it does syntax colouring and formatting as you type), although I'm not sure if it can display the formatted file.
Org Mode shall set you free
Oh god, nobody look at org-mode 😳
As much as I liked old notepad, it is a pretty decent markdown editor.
I love most of the changes they made, but Copilot can fuck right off my Notepad. It's supposed to be fast and offline.
I use Neovim (and Kate sometimes)
I use Helix.
I use
cat << EOFWordpad? I'll stick to Word Perfect 5.1, thank you very much.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Wasn't there a lurking
edit.exeoredit.cmdsomewhere insideC:\WINDOWS\system32? Would make an interesting replacement to the enshittified "Not-e-pad". But, then, I haven't used Windows since Windows 10 was still a novelty (and what definitely pushed me to Linux... Arch Linux btw), so maybe I'm very old ("I'm old, Dean, very old") to recall of a MS-DOS relic.Yes, DOS had edit.com, all the BASIC stuff I learned was done in it
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Oh, I misremembered the file extension. Yeah, that's right, it was edit.com, there was likely no .exe because it was a relic from before Windows NT.
And, BASIC... Such great times. Although the BASIC flavor I dealt the most with was Visual Basic (VB5 and VB6), I also did some tinkering with terminal-based BASIC flavors (specifically, Linux ports of BASIC interpreters) as well.
Really all I remember was finding gorillas.bas and playing like the spiritual source of the old scorched earth game...
Wasn't there a version of ed in DOS at one point? Or am I mis remembering?
That could still lurk somewhere in windows' maze of directories somewhere...
A 64-bit version of edit seems to be in the works. You can cli install it for now, but MS is promising to include it eventually.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Good question. I'm not sure. I guess no, because, as far as I know,
edis a GNU editor which allows for composing and editing files in a REPL-like environment (whose specific commands, apart from "q" to quit, I'm yet to learn)The "edit" I'm referring to was a spiritual antecessor or cousin of vim, emacs and nano. It was a TUI, full with a functional menubar accessible through keyboard arrow keys. I remember it having a blue background with gray/white text.
I remember with quite a certainty it was a thing for Windows XP. Was invokeable by using "edit filename.txt" in cmd.
However, I also remember having manually copied some executables across diferent Windows versions in order to test and see whether these old executables would work. I remember having successfully ran Windows XP's calc.exe in some later Windows version, relying on the compatibility layer ("ntvdm", I guess?). I remember doing the same for 16-bit, MS-DOS programs, but I don't remember whether "edit" MS-DOS programs was included in post-XP Windows versions, or if I manually copied it from XP.
Maybe it's edit I'm remembering. It was a long time ago, and I stopped using windows seriously around 3.11, so I never paid much attention to what was on that partition. It was only there to run steam (and a few other games).
I suppose I should have switched to a console, but it never even occurred to me at the time.
Since Microslop Windooze 11:Enshittified Edition.
Win 11 has been a privacy/anonymity/usability nightmare. Thanks in no small part to MS enshittifying absolutely every corner of it with AI. Right down to grabbing it by the notepad.
Since last year.
So this is like Kate but for plebs?
Sublime ftw
Unironically the last straw in getting me to switch to Linux. Then a week later was the copilot vulnerability news
Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.
However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.
Notepad is still fine. You can disable markdown and the AI stuff.
I use Macs at home, but use Windows 11 at work. I actually use a combination of Notepad and Sticky Notes daily (well, not on the weekends). It’s fine.
One thing I want it to do is stop telling me a file is not saved if I change something and then change it back. The unsaved indicator (the dot) annoys me.
None of what you describe here is fine.
They're actually acknowledging this in their latest blogpost
They updated the screenshot tool. Now its like paint.
I still remember WordPad. It was Sooo fancy.
so it's minime word now?
Notepad went from simple to having an identity crisis.
This is a bad rant. Nvim has markdown format rendering too, does that make it worse? I’d say the markdown rendering was a good update, because now my tech illiterate coworkers can open the .md files I sprinkle everywhere and see them as their meant.
No, the true madness is the advent of tabs that stay open until explicitly closed, even if the program is terminated, and come back when you open the app from scratch.
At least Nvim allows me to turn that shit off, select a plugin that matches my preferences, or program a keyboard shortcut to toggle rendering on and off. The MS Editor just unilaterally decides that your file should now end in .md, because it contains what MS considers markdown formatting, as if there's no way a plain text file could contain lines beginning with # (although, granted, you have to press one of the formatting buttons first, before the editor switches to "markdown mode" and starts behaving that way).
microsoft write.exe or nothing
Ed is the standard text editor.
I hate this person. It makes me want to scream. One of the dumbest stupidest things about Windows is a fucking useless programs go on with it that haven't been updated in 20 years. Please update them. You want to update notepad? Go look at Notepad+. Please please please update all the shitty little programs that exist around Windows that no one uses cause they're so goddamn shitty.
Holy fuck update Windows programs. For the love of God update ALL the Windows programs. Make the goddamn search tool work. Make the goddamn voice to text work. Make the image viewer not suck. Please don't listen to the people who are resistant to change. Leave an old shitty version on there just for them, but please please make Windows programs better because they suck right now!!
What a bad take. Notepad was never meant to have formatting, as the post states. Notepad's purpose was to open war text files as raw text. For formatted text, there was WordPad. What made notepad great is that it was the fastest and easiest way to just know what is in the damn file.
Yes! Leave notepad alone. I don't need to load fucking Word when I just want to quickly type out some bullshit that I'm going to reference a few minutes later and then not bother to save. Notepad has always been the fastest, most responsive and reliable tool in windows that I (and probably a lot of people) use every fucking day.