Windows Notepad Gets Microsoft Copilot Integration

[Event Horizon]

Urgently need a new CEO for Microsoft before it's too late.

 

[remixedcat]

Next you'll need Microsoft copilot premium plus with extensions 2029 to change text size for the price of 50usd/mo

 

[Wirko]

Seriously, what would be a good third party replacement for a simple text editor?

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.

 

[ymdhis]

One more reason to not use Windows 11.

 

[DaemonForce]

Seriously, what would be a good third party replacement for a simple text editor?

In WinPE I've been using Notedpad2 as a primary integration. Sometimes I bring that into my main desktop install too.
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.

 

[AsRock]

Meh don't use it anyways, notepad++ FTW.

 

[londiste]

I am going to swim against the stream here and say that I do see the future for AI/Copilot in Notepad. It does not seem to add considerable bloat and Copilot can do some nice things with various text bits. However, I will say that its current form is useless. Rewrite/shorter/longer is a pretty idiotic approach for it in Notepad. They should make it context-sensitive for the opened file type or its contents - Copilot can comment on and help with various things that do include stuff like scripts, batch files, SQL etc. Oh, and log-in requirement sucks ass.

And I do wonder if Notepad++, Sublime etc already have AI assistant in their pipeline.

fuck Notepad. Use Notepad++ instead. It's way more powerful and it's free of charge, no ads whatsoever included.

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

 

[Timbaloo]

you can further customize windows through WinPE like no other OS out there.

Are you being serious?

 

[Kwadratowicz]

For me they destroyed notepad with tabs, I had one txt that was crashing notepad, and after opening notepad it was crashing, again and again -.- . Cause notepad and notepad ++ remembers opened tabs before which is stupid for me, I need simple text editor that has 1 open window without tabs, like it was in older instances of windows.

 

[InVasMani]

For me they destroyed notepad with tabs, I had one txt that was crashing notepad, and after opening notepad it was crashing, again and again -.- . Cause notepad and notepad ++ remembers opened tabs before which is stupid for me, I need simple text editor that has 1 open window without tabs, like it was in older instances of windows.

That's a easy enough fix have it open in a new window rather than open in a new tab in the settings. It's just like the folders options has been for like decades if you want them to open in a new windows rather than in tabs.

 

[Shou Miko]

That's a terrible idea anyway. Use Bitwarden.

Best Password Manager for Business, Enterprise & Personal | Bitwarden

Bitwarden is the most trusted password manager for passwords and passkeys at home or at work, on any browser or device. Start with a free trial.

bitwarden.com

Personally I use 1Password.

 

[WhateverAnotherFreakingID]

Downloading Linux Mint right now.

Good starting distro, very well made and being built on Ubuntu it means if any window app/driver has a linux version then this will be 99% tested for ubuntu, and that means that it will work well also in Mint.

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, https://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.

 

[Frick]

Either way, it's still worse than Notepad++ or Sublime, and this update just makes it worse than it already was.

Notepad only has one "problem", and that is it doesn't handle really large files well, but other than that Win10 Notepad is perfect. Notepad++ (or my favourite "replacement", Context) is not even the same kind of program. N++ and the likes are too bloated for what I want: taking notes.

 

[Prima.Vera]

So you can do this in Notepad, but you CANNOT do it in Word...
Got it.

 

[Vayra86]

All I ever wanted from Notepad was to just be the fastest, most basic text editor. And now it's full of stupid functions no one asked for. Like, why? Why Microsoft? Are you stupid? Even tabs in default configuration are stupid because they keep retaining text in it even though I don't need or want it to so I need to disable that BS every time I install Windows now.

Instead of making these dumb changes, how about you finally give users ability to disable idiotic recommendations in the Start menu that is taking up 12 slots for icons that I could use otherwise? And even when Recommendations are disabled, it's just eating that space for no god damn reason by showing me a message about enabling Recommended files there to see them. WHY?!

I guess I'll check out Notepad++ or Notepad2 and replace Windows one with it. Or some other text editor that isn't crammed with crap I don't need...

EDIT:
Heh, I realized legacy Notepad is still present in Windows folder. I just eradicated the new one and returned to the old one.

Not sure Notepad++ is the 'no nonsense barebones notepad' you think it is though...

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.

 

[R0H1T]

The only real notepad "alternative" I use ~

notepad4/readme.md at main · zufuliu/notepad4

Notepad4 (Notepad2⨯2, Notepad2++) is a light-weight Scintilla based text editor for Windows with syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion and API list for many programming languages and d...

github.com

Are you being serious?

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 word number for that 2.09

 

[Muser99]

They made into spyware.

 

[hurakura]

microsoft always knows what the users want

 

[Squared]

I mostly just use Notepad to remove formatting from text. I've been avoiding Windows 11 but it sounds like removing formatting from text is going to get more tedious. I might put Popos on more computers when Windows 10 support ends.

 

[cal5582]

more enshitification no one asked for.

 

[R-T-B]

So you can do this in Notepad, but you CANNOT do it in Word...
Got it.

Actually at least word ltsc does have an option to disable AI functions, unsure about retail.

 

[Frick]

Seriously, what would be a good third party replacement for a simple text editor?

Notepad++/Context, customized. You can make both of them look and behave quite close to Notepad.

 

[Timbaloo]

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 word number for that 2.09

So? You know your statement was factually wrong, now you use the current market share number (I guess that's what you're implying, you're not giving any viable source nor unit, not that I'd expect that much) to validate your lack of actual technical insight?
Which year did you get your MSCE?

 

[RejZoR]

The only real notepad "alternative" I use ~

notepad4/readme.md at main · zufuliu/notepad4

Notepad4 (Notepad2⨯2, Notepad2++) is a light-weight Scintilla based text editor for Windows with syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion and API list for many programming languages and d...

github.com

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 word number for that 2.09

Actually if it wasn't for gaming I'd use Ubuntu on all my systems. GNOME is such a nice and mature frontend (Ubuntu's interpretation anyways, the vanilla is stupid without the auto hiding dock), Snaps are finally working and updating things automatically and not getting stuck for no reason like few years ago and it just works pretty nice. Best of all, no shoehorning of dumb requirements, stupid Ai and online accounts. It's just that last thing I want is spend any amount of time fixing games and doing compatibility nonsense to play the games. A lot of them already have issues in Windows itself, all this just doubles and triples in Linux because it's all a mishmash of compatibility layers no matter how well it works on Steam Decks...

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.

 

[R-T-B]

2.09

What? You can't still be referring to the one xz incident right? Just guessing but that appears to be the wrong version.

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.