Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator Microsoft has confirmed that Copilot is on its way into Notepad, with a release of the application being rolled out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels on Windows 11. Screenshots of the application began floating around last month but this week's release – almost drowned out by sudo making an appearance in …
You think you're joking, but Microsoft Purview (their Data Leap Protection -DLP- tool) can do exactly that.
No, seriously, I'm not kidding. If trade unions really want to start a political fight, the surveillance everyone is under when using a Microsoft environment ought to make for an interesting spat.
Op here. No idea why 'Leak' became 'Leap' but it somehow fits as your corporate data leaps over the barriers that you erect and heads straight for Redmond.
There's a lot more to it, but everything that ends in ..microsoft.com means that Microsoft controls it, and you're just along for the (expensive) ride.
Along with their "UX" tweaks on Windows, and keyboards on laptops now having Function keys shared with navigation keys which make life difficult for programmers who need those keys frequently, I think Microsoft don't like programmers - especially if they are not employed by Microsoft
And it's not just Microsoft, either. There's a progressive building-up of explicitly anti-user changes in UI/functionality across most of the software development culture. "Make a change! Impress my peers!" rather than "solve a problem/improve a task/consider the use-case/consider the human".
The default operation of the F keys on this work supplied laptop is to operate the laptop functions rather than the F keys. One can change this behaviour in the BIOS; however, for security reasons we have been locked out of it.
As Excel is more or less my day job, I routinely use various keyboard shortcuts to get around. F2 and F4, Ctrl-up/Ctrl-down probably the most heavily re-used ones. On said laptop, that means I have developed something of a muscle memory to do Fn-F2, Ctrl-Fn-up, etc. Ergonomics was clearly not the first thought of those that decided to hide the options.
I would plug in a proper keyboard though I don't have the desk space at home.
The Fn key behaviour can be changed after booting though there is no feedback on what is mode is in operation (hardware or software). As such keys are that ubiquitous now it's perhaps a little surprising that they aren't handled OS-side in a standardised manner.
I despise laptop keyboards, so I *made* room on my desk for a real one. Monitor on lifted platform, lappie shoved umder platform (with lid propped up for cooling airflow -- guess how I found *that* one out?) and a giant USB breakout dongle for camera, KB, token, etc.
KB sits in front of lappie, there's now plenty of room for it and a mouse to the side (mouse USB dongle is in the massive USB breakout, along with its "wiggler" to prevent 5 minute passworded sleep, not needed for wfh)
"Either hitting Ctrl + E or selecting "Explain with Copilot" will ignite Microsoft's assistant and provide an explanation for the highlighted text."
Is that ALL it does? If so, it's probably going to be the least used "feature" even written.
The days of hand writing HTML in notepad are long gone, and I doubt anyone uses it for significant programming - there are many much better code editors around.
Notepad is a quick, simple text twiddling tool, and is very good at being that. I can't see anyone ever needing it to explain stuff to them.
If you want a fully-featured code editor, Microsoft have VSCode. Other editors obviously exist as well. Install one of them.
The whole point of Notepad is that it is supposed to be a lightweight part of the default install which does the basics, and only the basics.
Introducing support for Unix-style line endings was good, everything else is just bloat.
It's time for the Microsoft shotgun of functionality. We've created something but have no idea what use it could have or whether it even works, so we will throw it at everything and see if any of itsticksdoesn't suck (too much...). [...]
There, FTFY
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