Sunday, March 30th 2025

Windows Notepad Gets Microsoft Copilot Integration
Everybody's favorite plaintext editor, Notepad, has been gathering features in the last couple of years. For over three decades, the Windows accessory could do little more than just input and save plaintext files, but Microsoft has been adding features to it. It began with the 2022 addition of tabs—the ability to have multiple text files open as tabs. This was roughly when Microsoft changed Notepad from a Win32 application to a UWP app. Then in 2024, as part of a larger care package to all Windows accessories, Microsoft added spelling and grammar checks; and now the company brought Copilot integration directly into Notepad. A dedicated Copilot button in the Notepad toolbar now shows up. It spawns a menu that lets you use Copilot to proof the text, such as rewriting it, making it longer/shorter, changing the tone of the text, or even formatting it.
75 Comments on Windows Notepad Gets Microsoft Copilot Integration
I mean, Notepad++ does not make Notepad redundant, and likewise, Word does not make Wordpad redundant. A simple to use, lightweight text editor is often the most convenient for quick notes, to-do lists, scratchpads and the like, and it can be associated with the .txt extension only.
Not only have there been forks, turns out there have been successors like Notepad3/4 and Notepads for many years.
I'm checking them out now. I've been in situations where I've needed Notepad2 simply to open gigantic VR logs.
Notepad bogs opening anything a few MB but these are usually ~20MB, so it's a minute of unnecessary hurry up and WAIT.
I see comments where Notepad3 seems to have problems with some large files but nothing under Notepad4.
And I do wonder if Notepad++, Sublime etc already have AI assistant in their pipeline. This is quite a strange argument in the context of this thread. Notepad is free, has no ads and keeps getting more powerful - which this thread is complaining about :D
Unless you're an avid online gamer or photoshop user won't notice the change much, except for the lack of BS being thrown at you by your OS.
If you want more bleeding edge (just a tad less stable) experience, take a look also into some arch based distro like EndeavourOS or Garuda, which UXv quality anyway won't differ much from Mint, being very very user friendly.
Memes aside regardless your linux distro arch has the most emeffing neat wiki pages on linux if you need any headache saving tip, wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page, in my experience at least 70% of the help threads I crawled after googling the issue ended up with a solution in a link to an arch wiki article.
Got it.
That's the silliest thing of all really. Notepad's whole unique selling point is the fact its almost nothing, its a white field stripped down to 'use your keyboard here to type'. That's FINE, MS. You're reinventing a wheel here and nobody likes it.
Its the exact same trend you see in Office, in Windows... etc. Busywork, change for the sake of change.
github.com/zufuliu/notepad4/blob/main/readme.md Why do think it's facetious? Outside of core services, Windows provides you the most options out of any major/commercial OS there! And yeah if you wanna toot Linux's horn I just have one
wordnumber for that 2.09 :ohwell:Which year did you get your MSCE? ;)
But outside of requirement for gaming, I'm already running all the other systems on Linux for years now. Basically when Microsoft started with all that accounts nonsense and restricting bypasses and I just couldn't be bothered to deal with all that dumb nonsense.
EDIT: yeah, marketshare lol. Who the hell cares if it works and runs most windows shit fine these days? My business is certainly not going to be using windows much longer if I can help it.