This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
TLDR: they didn't do anything except remove the copilot branding
idk why but the AI integration into Notepad makes me always laugh. Its a perfectly fine pre-installed text editor which just does its job to occasionally open a textfile or to eg quickly edit two lines in an .ini. Its biggest new feature in 20 or 30 years was the addition of tabs with Win11. But beyond that its almost useless. If you want to do anything more involved you better download one of the many alternatives with actual features to get shit done.
Its just so nonsensical to me to add AI to this class of product. Why? Same with paint. Paint is fine for what it is. But what the fuck am i supposed to do with AI in such a simplistic program? Its so stupid.
They are so so desperate to find a use case to this trash tech they dump billions into and ruined all their other software offerings for, with no outlook for profit yet.
Actually, they have 2 Outlooks, and neither of them are working.
I believe there are three products called Outlook, actually
Wait, what's the third?
There is what used to be the "Mail App" that was introduced with Win10. That was renamed to Outlook. A new Outlook was then installed automatically that was called Outlook (new). At some point, Outlook was renamed "Outlook (classic) and Outlook (new) was renamed "Outlook". On top of that there is the Outlook that is part of the MS Office suite, if you have that installed.
I'm not entirely sure how accurate my memory of this desaster is, though. I don't use Windows on my personal machines, I noticed this on a friend's computer I was fixing.
I rage installed obsidian at work because of notepad. I wouldn't call it "perfectly fine" by any means.
Notepad is extremely slow and bloated. Obsidian loads faster and never loses scratch pad sessions (probably because they don't exist and are stored)
Obsidian is some massive electron app and runs better than notepad.
Fair, maybe i should have worded it notepad was perfectly fine. Havent touched the win11 version for 2 years now.
Obsidian loads faster then notepad? Thats surprising, considering its a full blown markdown editor with plugins and tons of features.
But yeah, Microsoft stopped caring about windows speed and quality long time ago.
It's completely shocking to me, something is fatally wrong with native windows applications
I went to Settings > Apps > Advanced app settings > App execution aliases and turned Notepad off so I can start the old one with win+r "notepad".
I only use it as a clipboard, my .txt, .log and .csv are all bound to open with notepad++.
Are you aware of the "Multiple Clipboard" feature? Which is a deceptively simple productivity boost, a game-changer, a hidden gem in a sea of dark Windows patterns?
Rofl Microslop.
Users: We just want OS wide dark mode, AI not rammed down our throats, and non stop ads, and hopefully updates that don't break everything repeatedly.
MS: We hear you loud and clear! We're implementing AI into every single thing and the ADs will now be targeted based on information we've stol.....collected from you!
MS: I don't get it, why does everyone hate us?
I'm using Notepad++ on Windows
Just move to Linux at this point
To be fair, Notepad++ is an excellent piece of software, and I still miss it on Linux. Specifically, I miss the feature that can highlight the same text strings in different colors throughout a document. It's valuable when going through logs while troubleshooting something.
Can't this be done with Kate?
I feel like almost everything can be done with Kate if you find the right setting. I think you can get it to knit you a sweater!
Aside from the 3 top right icons (probably) not showing correctly it seems to run. But I never used it, so I don't know what to test in there.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2983
I would love to, but I need to use solidworks for my job.
I could virtualize it, but I also need to use MS apps like Teams, and at that point I'd just be in the windows vm 100% of the time anyway.
But this doesn't prevent me from learning Linux at home!
That's Notepad in the screenshot? I haven't used Windows in years, but I remember Notepad being the one that didn't do rich text. Did they just fold Wordpad into Notepad and add Copilot?
Basically yes
So now notepad is the worst of both worlds. It doesn't do rich text formatting but it does support some random markdown features. But only some, not all. So it's useless as a markdown editor.
Oh and it has tabs now and saves on exit, which fortunately you can turn off.
What they did to notepad was the final straw for me.
Yep.
They paywalled basic-ass Wordpad a few years ago. Yet another reason why I started using LibreOffice.
It doesn't do rtf. You can change the typeface but it applies to the whole document.
Wordpad is still available free, it's just not a default install.
As soon as marketing people say things like 'focussing on experiences' you realise they do not know how people use Windows.
I do recommend against things that suck, however
which is just about everything microslop touches
Thank god Kate has a Windows port.
Yeah, but that's using Linux with extra steps
Most of the KDE apps on Windows are broken in one way or another. Kate is the only one that works well in my experience. That being said, yes Linux is better.
It was possible to replace Windows Task Bar with KDE Panel at one point (could be around KDE 4 times) and it was actually hilarious to use Windows with KDE (Dolphin and all). Certainly made Windows less terrible.
I have to use Shitdows 11 for work and honestly, I want to perform a lobotomy on myself because each fucking time I want to close the Notepad, Shitdows doesn't allow me because "It have to sync", why the fuck should a notepad sync???
"See, we got rid of copilot"
