Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession Windows Notepad is set to be the next recipient of Microsoft's AI attentions judging by screenshots posted by a Windows Insider user. The feature is not immediately accessible in any current Windows Insider build, however, enterprising users have ways and means to delve into the operating system and haul out experiments that …
Notepad++ is always touted as an alternative to Notepad, but N++ is even more overkill and less simple than all the changes to Notepad (which at least are just out of the way). Anything that isn't just a blank window where text can be entered with a menu to save the file, plus basic text manipulation like searching and copy/paste, is more than I need. Formatting is mostly just to make it easier for me to physically see, or when I need to use large text to make a sign and just want it to look cute. The Notepad executable is 197KB on my system; I bet it could still be ported to run on an 8086 computer. Even having been open for over a day it's using less than 2MB of RAM, so make it a 286 CPU. The Notepad++ executable is 7MB, not counting all the other stuff in the portable package that makes it 20.6MB (I don't know what libraries and stuff Notepad really requires in total). Just Notepad++'s executable probably wouldn't run on a 486, and it hit 15.4MB of RAM as soon as it opened so it wouldn't even have run on my second and very expensive PC (without paging to disk).
Hopefully MS won't bother with injecting this into the Windows 10 Notepad, as a rare benefit to trying to make Win11 seem more advanced and desirable, but since Win10 and Win11 are essentially the same code they may do it just so they don't have to maintain two applications on the Store.
To be honest, even 179Kb seems excessive for a simple text editor. But then, I started in an environment with a little under 4Kb on a VIC20 buggering around with BASIC and assembler to make things faster. I could print (star dot matrix) and use a modem and dial up via US BB’s via MIDAS to access ASCII porn. What the hell do they need 179Kb for let alone 7Mb ?!
I eventually graduated to 64Kb (banked), a SID chip and Attack of the Mutant Camels by Llamasoft.. peak computing I reckon. We were even discussing/playing with pattern recognition algorithms (AI!!!). No marketing or influencers to talk it up yet though, just a BMX/skateboard, ice cold Sunnyboy or a Raz and a poster of Nicole (OEM) or Elle in the Moove commercial and the threat of don’t come home until it’s dark (mum and dad are busy).
I started saving mine regularly (so now I have like 20 old text files laying around with random bits of information). And Windows itself now has the option, which I think is on by default, to save the state of its own apps to be restored when you log out and back in, so you can just restart without being too worried about it, assuming nothing crashes.
Isn't this a perfect microcosm of the rot that's settled in deep at Microsoft tho?
Never miss an opportunity to add "features" to something that was at best already fine, and at worse a bit broken. The new features serving simply as a distraction from how broken other things are and how they're not getting better because LOOK OVER HERE WE HAVE A NEW THING!
I see this everywhere, not just with Microsoft. I envision it as an entire population of software developers that can't come up with anything truly innovative, so all they do is tweak perfectly good software in order to justify their employment. Sometimes good enough is good enough - if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
This is due to the way capitalism and the economy work at this point. Nobody can live on being innovators from the ground up, and the companies that will pay you aren't interested in risking anything on true innovation. Even one bad quarter due to taking a risk and it not working can tank a company (unless they brutally axe enough people to satisfy the shareholders and market and promise they won't try that nonsense again), and simply maintaining isn't enough, either. So things have to be ZOOM WOW without actually being risky, and are just slight modifications or renaming of something that existed already. Or as in this case, a big but meaningless change to something that is completely irrelevant; nobody is going to ditch Windows because Notepad turns to crap, and it doesn't hurt MS if people just find some other simple text editor.
I think it's a result of the SaaS mindset. They either already are charging subscription fees or probably will do in the future, and this appears to lead to a 'constant developement' mindset, where we see a perpetual trickle of 'new features' which nobody actually wants or asked for, and a lack of testing across the board meaning that everything is in perpetual beta and when a batch of updates appears (as they do on a regular basis), the system admins' first consideration is 'what have they fucked up this time'. Case in point is the Patch Tuesday batch this week, which includes patches for W10 and Server 2022 which fail to install on a large number of systems. Clearly, they were tested well...
There is (was? there is years that I don't use Windows in anger) ONE thing I would add to notepad: the ability to understand UNIX like newline. And that's it. The value of notepad is being small, simple, minimalist. This is an app to paste URLs for later, to make a 10 line document, remembering me of something or the grocery list. And that's it.
But, of course, "AI" and all that. Wankers.
You will be pleased then to learn that Unix newline support has been added to recent builds of Notepad.
You can't save a new file in Unix format, but if you open an existing file, it will tell you in the status bar that it is Unix (LF) rather than Windows (CRLF), and save in the existing format.
Support for other line endings (e.g. LF) was added a few years ago.
Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad - Windows Command Line
I use Notepad when copying and pasting to remove text formatting before pasting it into another program. I was going to mention that in the Wordpad article last week, but figured there had to be easier way to accomplish that task. A quick search indicated that Ctrl-Shift-V does that in many apps.
"It looks like you're trying to edit a configuration file. I have re-saved it as Unicode and automatically reformatted it from JSON to XML. Also, I automatically fixed any spelling errors in server names, changed all the ports to prime numbers and replaced the passwords with more secure ones. You're welcome."
Reminds me of an issue at an old job. We had a standalone server dedicated to one product line. Every night, a cron job would kick off a simple SQL query summarizing the previous day's production info. The output was piped to sendmail, which emailed the info to our customer, who slurped the CSV data into their ERP system.
That was all fine and good until we were bought by another company. The server was left alone, but our company email moved to Exchange. The same script and process ran on the server, but the next hop changed. Exchange took one look at my plain text email and decided "well that's boring, we need to HTMLify this baby!". Sure, it looked pretty, but it completely broke the input process.
Tangentially similar: My wife many years ago used to work for the largest news site in the country. They were trying to publish a regular article, and for some reason the embedded images refused to show. Eventually, after the whole editorial staff had spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why, she called me because she knows "I'm good with HTML and such" and asked if I could have a look at it. I saved the page and opened it locally (my preferred editor is EmEditor, mainly for the integration with the now sadly abandoned EmFTP, which let me edit files on a remote web server as if they were local) and noticed that all the image links had had their straight quotes replaced by "typographical quotes". Somewhere along the way, the source material for the article must have been passed through a Microsoft product with "AutoFormat as you type" turned on. This wasn't visible in the publishing tools they used - they were both rendered the same way by the built-in font. In a regular editor, though, it was immediately visible.
Please, don't. I already hate that every application now uses the Windows display settings for things like color and dark/light mode so that you can't have one app look different from others, and they're all starting to use the built-in Windows spell-checker so you can't disable it in only one app if it's an annoyance and can't customize for a single app. I don't want every app to pop up AI suggestions when I'm typing even when it's completely useless and unnecessary (not that I'd leave the global setting turned on, but they may take that option away). The operating system should not contain application features that every application uses so that there's no differentiation.
Ignore the Luddite. I say AI that bitch to the moon! Stick it in everything Microsoft! Hell, send customers AI MUGS AND STICK IT IN THEIR COFFEE! And, make it SUUUUUUPER helpful! Don't let a keystroke happen where the AI doesn't pop up, steal focus and ask if you really want something else. Click on Notepad? Wouldn't you rather check the latest fashions from Milan on Bing? I see you're sending an email, shall I open Paint so you can whip up a picture for it? I say let M$ break it to the point that CEOs can no longer play Minesweeper, and maybe we'll start seeing some large companies move elsewhere to the point that M$ starts losing their asses.
What is this thing called Microsoft Windows?
Ah Notepad. Yet more stupid Microsoft.
* We have to use \ because Unix uses /.
* We have to use drives (c:, etc) because Unix doesn't.
* We have to call them folders because Unix calls them directories. (I still call them directories; they will never be folders.)
* And we have to use \r\n because MacOS uses \r and Unix uses \n.
Scumbags. I've not used Windows for decades.
Actually, the DEC OSes that CP/M and MS-DOS were based on used / as an option character. Both / and - have about the same amount of history: - was used (I think) in at least some programs in CTSS (1960s), whereas DEC was using / only a few years later. Since MS-DOS was based upon CP/M, it's no surprise that they would use the same flag character. Apparently, when DOS 2.0 was designed, they actually wanted to support / in pathnames, but that would have been too great a change for DOS 1.0 users. I believe that DOS 2+ all silently accept / as a directory separator in pathnames.
So not “change for the sake of change” but more “we don't want to make incompatible changes”.
“I still call them directories; they will never be folders”
Oh my. The “folders” thing really annoys me. They are directories. They have always been directories and they always will be directories
As for the “\” DIRECTORY separator, OMFG!! How many millions if days (years?) of work have been lost to dealing with this particular fiasco in pretty much any normal programming language?
I HATE Microshaft - everything they touch is a complete show of shite
As for the “\” DIRECTORY separator, OMFG!! How many millions if days (years?) of work have been lost to dealing with this particular fiasco in pretty much any normal programming language?
C# is pretty much a normal programming language and for a long time it's supported the '@' string prefix for literals eg; @"This has a \ in it". C# 11 gains another version using three "s that avoids having to escape anything.
To say nothing of the Path helper class which good programmers use to avoid this entire problem in an OS agnostic way.
And a knowledgeable Windows developer will know that '/' is an acceptable path separator to API calls. Some applications don't accept it but that's due to the ignorance of some software developers. You can prove that it's a valid separator by opening the run dialog and typing (without quotes) 'c:/windows' then click okay or press [enter]. It'll open the directory in Explorer just fine.
"And a knowledgeable Windows developer will know that '/' is an acceptable path separator to API calls."
MSDOS (at least v3.x) system calls (int 0x21) also grokked '/' and had a syscall int 0x21h, ah=0x37, al=1, dl='-' to set the switch character (and other things like \dev\ semantics.:)
Not every MSDOS or MS app honoured the altered switch char (probably most didn't.)
I recall back then writing enough of posix/unix compatibility layer for DOS 3.2 to get Unix open source apps to build and run. Removing the translation from '/' to '\\' was mostly unneeded and confusing. Joining all the "drives" to directories under C: (with a "mount" wrapper) meant you could forget about drive letters and multiple working directories. The main show stopper I recall was often the 64kb segmentation and the required far pointer stuffing about. While a hobby for me a friend actually used some the library to port a usenet news reader to DOS although I imagine the networking part would have been a real trial.
The best thing about Notepad is that it has always launched instantaneously -- it allows you to write something down before you forget it.
The second-best thing about Notepad is that it just recorded what you type, not what Microsoft thinks you meant to type.
How many minutes will we have to wait for this new version to launch? And how will it improve all the phone numbers and so forth that I type?
Did you mean to type "911" [or 999 in the UK] instead of 555-1212? Would you like to dial 911 now? BUTTONS: (Yes / Continue)
We noticed you typed 555-1212. Cowriter Copilot OpenAI Bing Search has located 555-1212 associated with 73 accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and Zoophilia.org and followed them on your accounts on these sites. Your searches will help us provide more relevant advertising and search results in the future you goatfucker.
Bloody Hell... some things are supposed to be "plain text" and sometimes you want a plain editor. For example editing INI style configuration files.
If they want to improve notepad, they should be thinking about things like detecting known text encodings and handling them correctly (and preserving them). Make sure it can handle at least hundreds of megabyte file sizes (rewrite application to use memory correctly). Text search functions like find and replace.
You're going to want a better editor than Windows Notepad for writing code, and it's not meant to be a word processor, so keep it a simple program for what it's designed for.
Find and replace works just fine in Notepad. But they won't be able to make it open 100MB+ files. All that memory will already be used up running the executable and associated code for the AI features.
It's almost enough to make me keep a paper pad on my desk to write notes, but it's hard to copy and paste a URL that way. Maybe shit like this will be the thing that finally makes me attempt learning to code again 25+ years after the first time, just so I can write a 250KB shareware notes app that doesn't connect to the Microsoft Store and doesn't send my notes anywhere outside my computer.
Interesting, and I might do it, but they could easily break the ability to do that, and even make it so just copying executables didn't work. (Really weird that they still include the old version as an Optional Feature, but it doesn't actually work if you install it. I guess they just crippled it enough and then didn't want to put in the effort to really remove it, since that would be invisible and make no profit.) If I coded my own I could make it do exactly what I wanted without having to work around MS's breakages, which is why I wanted to try to learn to code decades ago just to make things for myself and throw them to the wind for anybody else that found them useful. But coding was confusing.
"If I coded my own I could make it do exactly what I wanted without having to work around MS's breakages"
Interesting that you should say this, I've had just such a thing in mind for months, for exactly the same reasons.
Basic, simple, classic Notepad, plus one or two menu items that automate things I do a lot but probably wouldn't be of much interest to most people. Tabs would probably be handy, since I often end up with several notepads open, but not essential. And the ability to stay on top of other windows when needed.
I'm not too bothered about huge files, but a small, fast, portable single exe that runs on any Windows from XP onwards would be nice. Easy enough to knock up in Lazarus, but that probably wouldn't be all that small. Hmmm, I might have just talked myself into a new hobby project :)
I don't even like tabs in browsers or any other applications, and use them very sparingly now that it's become completely impossible to disable them and everything defaults to opening in tabs. I have a taskbar for that already, didn't need every app to have its own taskbar, and I don't need to keep 72 websites open at all times, I have bookmarks to handle quick access to them later, and I hate grouped apps on the taskbar. I'm fine with the taskbar filling up and making an additional row with a scroll arrow. I guess always-on-top could be useful, something that many utilities type apps ought to have, but I have two screens if I want to watch one thing while typing in another app, and even when I don't I'm very proficient with alt-tab (which Microsoft co-opted in Edge to work the way ctrl-tab works for tabs in other apps). I won't even tile windows. Huge file capability becomes important when you're trying to read system logs, and the current Notepad considers 5MB to be "too big to open quickly with an SSD and a 4GHz 12-core CPU" but the log files might be 50MB or more which Notepad just hangs on.
I wouldn't even mind if a replacement program WAS a couple of MB in size due to use of current coding methods or whatever, rather than being written in assembler so it actually results in negative disk space used, if it was just a standalone program, maybe even a standalone executable, that could be dropped in any folder and have a shortcut point to it, with no requirement for any DLLs or anything else in another folder, and the only thing it put in the Windows registry was its own application folder that held the simplest information like maybe recently used files, default save location, display font settings, default printer options, that sort of thing. A quick option to associate common text file types to it would be nice, but not required as it's pretty simple to associate file types by browsing to the executable from the properties of one file. (I think the program has to register itself somehow as an installed application to be listed as an option when you change associations that way, too, or in the Default Programs list.) But most importantly is that is opens quickly.
All it needs to do is... Edit... Text.
I used to be a typesetter in the print industry, read one or two books a week and have a vocabulary at least twice that of any widget Micro$oft developer.
The day I need some $hit piece of software to correct my spelling/grammar you may as well bury me in a pine box.
Was someone bored one day... "We've screwed, added AI, to everything - what's left?"
"Hold on, what about Notepad?"
I find spell checkers very useful - not because I cannot spell but because I am a poor typist. But only in a word processor, not in Notepad.
Spell checkers are also useful for OCR text or text that has been dictated or transcribed. Or indeed text from many other people.
Absolutely, if you want/need a spell checker then you use a word processor. If I'm writing something important then I'll probably double-check in case I missed something.
But Notepad isn't the place for it.
Personally I use Libre Office when I need a formatted document.
I always wanted a facility to reduce text to basic ascii characters only: replace curly quotes with straight ascii quotes; replace en-dash, m-dash, and arithmetic minus with a plain hyphen; replace any other fancy character with a question mark.
I can use a full word processor to restore the fancy characters if I need to.
That's exactly how I use it most of the time. If I copy something from a web page to paste into an email, doing it directly will usually bring a load of unwanted formatting with it.
Pasting it into Notepad first, thereby removing the formatting, then cut and pasting it to the mail results in plain text.
It's that "sanitizing" of text I find most useful.
There are "copy as plain text" extensions, but I usually have a Notepad window open already anyway and don't copy from browsers to other apps that support formatting so I don't use them now, but I did for some years. Of course those extensions require using the context menu to copy instead of just Ctrl-C.
The only formatting I ever need is a new paragraph every x number of words. I have my Linux editor's spell check turned on because it's really handy. I don't even bother using the menu system because keyboard shortcuts are so much faster.
Almost 10 years of not using Windows and I definitely do not miss it. I kinda feel sorry for people having to put up with Microsoft's garbage.
...line numbering, sane line wrapping, allow the app to load large files w.o. shitting itself, actually good search and replace, whitespace display capabilities and basic syntax highlighting?
You know, the kind of features a text editor out of every hobbyist project has?
But nooo, that would probably make too much sense. So windows will continue to not even provide what most people consider basics in its basic text editor , but lo and behold, it gets "AI" that noone asked for, probably because that's what some "Analysts" said is where the most money can be made.
It wouldn't even matter if Linux was still as hard to install as 10 years ago, given what Windows has become, Linux would still have a better user experience if I had to compile the kernel myself.
To my knowledge we don't have any intelligence in the building and I am quite sure we wouldn't want any artificial intelligence upsetting that rather happy arrangement. I don't think it would be very humane to expose any intelligence artificial or otherwise to the unplumbed depths of the intellectual abyss that characterizes this organisation.
I can imagine the notepad nightmare if you tried to save your edited file over the original or exit without saving.
Fortunately these days I only do windows with Windex.
I do, or did, a lot of reading on a couple of sites for many years, and frequently had ten or more pages open as tabs in my browser. I found it much easier to simply copy and paste into NotePad, until I discovered NoteTab 20 some years ago. I could have all my documents in separate open tabs instead of multiple NotePad windows, and I found it infinitely easier. I could easily strip out text formatting from Word and WordPerfect docs, and easily paste back into whatever program or email I wished. So I haven't used NotePad in over 20 years, and I know for a fact that I don't want AI infused into anything thats supposed to be a simple text editor.
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