Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession
Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession
Power user excavates evidence of experimental 'Cowriter' feature
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You know what's free (as in beer and speech) and not being enshittified? Notepad++
Fun fact: Most of the features that people liked about the "new" Windows notepad were just stolen from Notepad++ anyway.
So you may as well just use Notepad++ and enjoy a better experience, plus about a zillion other things like numerous plugins, syntax highlighting for just about every programming language under the sun, immensely configurable color schemes, etc., etc., etc.
Hardly "stolen". Suff like tabs is very basic that n++ didn't invent.
And even if Notepad++ had invented it, it's not "stealing" to do the same thing. Notepad++ still has its tabs, nobody stole them. Copied them, maybe. Inspired by them, perhaps. "Stolen" is just a deliberately emotion-baiting term.
Explorer still can't do it though.
Wait, it does now?! Hell freezes over?
They had that in win10 as well for about a week and then they took it away hoping nobody noticed it so it could be a win11 feature instead.
More likely they are direct ports of things from the highly popular Visual Studio Code as a lot of people used to bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad for YEARS before Notepad++ was a thing.
I think you mean you discovered vs code years before you found notepad++
Notepad++ has been around since 2003 years and vs code has been around since 2015.
A lot of those features were in visual studio 6, which was released in the late 90s or early 00s. Tabbed files, syntax highlighting for their supported formats (though it was a lot more tightly bound to those languages, like there was a visual basic program and a separate visual c/c++, n++ is the first I remember with arbitrary language syntax highlighting support), pretty sure it had a plugin system, too.
And vs6 was just the first one I used, they might have been present in vs5 or earlier versions.
I suppose we could point to emacs for formatting and syntax highlighting
Yeah, vim also has it today, but I don't know how far back that goes. Screen splitting, too, I use that all the time in vim and GUI editors.
We didn't have color terminals at my college so if there was any highlighting I wouldn't have seen it. Probably shortly after the first dumb terminals came with color text somebody made emacs or vi do highlighting? Screen splitting goes way back. Emacs had that in the late 80s when I was using it.
Plus an electric list is far superior to tabs. Tabs are too usable. I want to have to hit ctrl+X, L before I can change files.
/s just in case.
Visual studio and visual studio code are not the same thing. Visual Studio is a full IDE and is expected to have those features and is clunky because of them. Or was, not sure where it is now. Itâd be in the same category as netbeans, eclipsed, and intellij
Vs code is an enhanced lightweight text editor
Notepad++ is the original enhanced lightweight text editor
My point was that Notepad++ came out way before vs code and didnât copy features from vs code.
Copied from an ide, sure? Not really a good comparison as they are solving two different problems
They were features of the text editor that was a part of the integrated development environment. My point was that even though vs code came after n++, those features were a part of the visual studio line, which vs code is a successor of, so if there was inspiration it was more likely in the direction of vs -> n++, though realistically there was probably transfer in both directions over time.
No I am saying people where coding html in plan old notepad way before notepad +
And separately with MS having popularity with VS code they likely ported the dev functions to ms notepad there is a good chance notepad++ was not the inspiration.
Then those features in VS Code were most likely heavily inspired by Notepad++ as well. Notepad++ was publicly released in 2003, which in computing terms may as well be the neolithic era.
TL;DR: There's no reason to stick with a shitty Microsoft application for this task since N++ exists and is, was, and probably forever will be superior.
bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad
You're someone who likes pain huh?
Was making HTML pages long before Notpad++ was a thing young one.
Not saying I would do it that way now.
This is not enshittification. Here's where the term came from:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification
In what way is adding an AI assistant to Notepad either "abusing their users" or "abusing their business customers?" It seems like it's just a useful new feature to me, that's still in the "be good to your users" phase.
They're sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform. The only thing notepad had going for it was its complete simplicity, reliability, and speed. Nobody wants notepad to try to rope you into this ecosystem, certainly not at the expense of those qualities.
Even with the recent updates, I'm over it. Notepad has crashed on me at least twice. Notepad. Crashed. There is no longer any reason to use it.
Theyâre sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform.
You don't know that. You have no idea how this "cowriter" will be integrated. It could be just a little button off on the side, maybe with a setting in the configuration to hide it entirely, and you can ignore it completely.
Any additional functionality added to an already feature-complete program is bloat, no two ways about it. If notepad+AI was a separate program, this would be a different discussion. Even if you can hide it completely, the fact that itâs there at all will affect performance. And even if itâs just a tiny blip in relative performance, itâs still the first step on the road to enshittification.
I think you may be overestimating how much code is required for a program to simply use an AI, as in just calling an AI's API with a string of text and getting some text back in return. I've written code that does this and it's just a few lines.
The code for whatever UI Notepad wraps around it might be a few hundred more lines, that depends very much on the UI framework and what they want it to look like. But the AI part is trivial. The hard work of actually executing the AI's code is done on a remote server. Your home computer won't have to do any of that work.
Youâre free to believe that this will not bog down the program at all, and also that this isnât just the first bad decision theyâre making with notepad. I really would like to impress upon you that that is wishful thinking, and not at all the most likely outcome here.
And I think that 90% of the concern people have is arising out of some kind of weird anti-AI hysteria.
Look, even if Microsoft does "ruin" Notepad somehow, it's a really simple program. Github has a bunch of projects tagged "notepad-clone", I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives out there that duplicate the old Notepad as precisely as you may desire. Adding AI is extremely simple on the client side but it's not so easy to provide the LLM back-end so those replicas probably won't be able to do what Microsoft is about to do, so I want to see Microsoft try it. I think it'll be good.
I couldnât care less that the addition in question is AI related, itâs unnecessary bloat that no one asked for! I hate bloat, thatâs my thing. I didnât like when the start menu was ruined, I didnât like when user accounts were eschewed for microsoft accounts, and I donât like this.
Iâm completely off windows now anyways, so I donât even have skin in the game. It just boggles my mind that anyone would defend this whacky decision. Streamlined bloat is still bloat.
Why not just clone notepad and then start adding garbage? They already announced the intention to remove word pad, just replace that with whatever this ends up being!
itâs unnecessary bloat that no one asked for!
I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth. I would be quite happy to try this feature out, and I think it could be quite handy indeed. I literally said "I want to see Microsoft try it" in the comment you're responding to.
Iâm completely off windows now anyways, so I donât even have skin in the game.
So what's your problem? Don't insist that everyone has to share your values and run their computers the way you would want to run them.
I just linked to a whole pile of notepad clone projects. I'm sure some of them will satisfy whatever preferences any particular person has. "Why not just clone notepad" applies just as much to the people complaining about this features, and it's already been done. If you want to stick with the unchanging bare minimum text editor, there they are.
Youâre acting like Iâm crazy for taking issue with this, Iâm just explaining my perspective. Youâre free to enjoy whatever gizmos and gadgets microsoft bundles into the next windows release, just as much as Iâm free to say itâs a piss-poor decision on their part to do so.
It shouldnât be the userâs responsibility to seek out replacement programs for shit that has been baked into the OS since 1983. I genuinely havenât seen a single person ANYWHERE EVER say âboy howdy I sure do wish notepad had more features, maybe an AI cowriter!â. If thatâs something you really actually wanted before you heard about this, then Iâm sorry for putting words in your mouth.
As it stands though, youâre just dying on a stupid hill for semantics.
OK.
God, I shouldâve seen you take this out and followed suit. Instead I engaged, and now unbeknownst to me Iâm afraid of AI and putting words in peopleâs mouths, gotta love internet discourse
I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.
- Why is it limited to platforms? Can't enshittification apply to other things like applications?
- Are business customers really required or can that step be skipped?
- The platforms dying thing isn't what we are seeing. For example, Amazon is absolutely enshittified. They're not dead. More like undead, continuing to shamble on consuming everything.
I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.
There is no need to coin a new term, when "rent seeking" has done just fine for hundreds of years now.
This is not a new concept.
I completely forgot about that term. That may be more accurate. In fact, it describes what has Windows has become.
But⌠MUH BUZZWORDS!
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
Perfection.
That one and "FAFO" in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
Shockingly, I donât know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.
âFuck around and find outâ for everyone else who didnât know.
Ahhhh THAT overused phrase. Of course weâd have to acronym/initiaism it.
At least we donât (yet) have PSGWSP. Ugh it felt gross typing that.
I do too, considering it never needed a new term to begin with. This isn't a new concept, and we already have a name for it: rent seeking
Adding an AI seems OK but per the article it will do it similar to Paint Co-creator. I can already see those types of "features" will get promoted more and more in updates and take more part of the screen.
Microsoft will want revenue trickling in from Notepad of all places...
AI assistants usually need to upload the data to process it. So it's potential enshitification via adding data upload/harvesting features to a trusted offline text editor. Usually companies have ways to generate revenue streams based on the data from these "free and useful features". Adverts based on what text files you open might be the long term end goal.
If you're concerned then don't use the feature. It's really simple.
That would be fine, but a lot of these features are added in an update, with complicated setups or mods to turn them off. Start bar local app search now gets sent to bing search by default, thats almost never what people want. Most people wont know how to disable it or care. But I guess thats fine as long as Microsoft gets to increase its bing usage stats and collect more user data.
To be clear, my problem is with these features getting pushed as default enabled.
Leaks of company secrets will increase.
What about privacy and bloat? Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again? There's a reason they got rid of that annoying little bugger 20-ish years ago. Even killed Cortana. How many failed experiments more do we need?
If you need AI writing, you have it in Edge or on the ChatGPT site. Will they add AI to settings to help you turn on all the bloat and tracking for you?
Like just give me my damn control panel which has a working search feature (unlike, say, Settings)
Do you really need an integrated big-brother Clippy again?
You're making some pretty big assumptions about what this feature will be like.
Unfff pump my veins full of Notepad++. I wanna feel the autosaving tabs course through me. I need that tabbed indenting experience. AAAAAAAAAAA
And it's great that it exists, but the average Windows user has no idea that exists and probably no idea how to download and install it because the average Windows user, like the average computer user, is only nominally computer literate.
Those are the people Microsoft constantly fucks over, not people here who tend to know what they're doing. A large percentage of people here don't even use Windows except maybe through an emulator.
It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.
I haven't noticed any of this. Where are you seeing them?
So far the author seems to have been on the right side of history. You can see some of them in the N++ update news:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/
They seem to be pro-Ukraine (or at least anti-Russian invasion) and anti-Chinese authoritarianism. I can't bring myself to have any beef with either of those positions, really.
At one point they also sold a thong.
Damn, I just missed on the thong
No you didn't, the links at the bottom still work - you can get it in both old and new logo.
Go ahead, live the dream!
They had some messages regarding a free Ukraine a few updates back. Itâs a free app so if he wants to include that in his update message thatâs fine to me.
Every few updates the read me, description or something contains some kind of statement on various world issues going on.
Search the hit hub issues for notepad++ for the word political. People complain each time.
I donât care if he is on the rights side of the issue or note, just donât like it popping up in software.
I thought my installer was infected the one time by to giant wall of default text when I opened it.
It's because apparently being anti Russia, anti authoritarian and pro Ukraine is.....pOliTiCaL
It is. The sentence âIâm pro Ukraine/Russiaâ is most definitely a political statement
LiteXL is also pretty good.
And Metapad (was named before Facebook became Meta) and Notepad 2/3 and and and.
Neat, TIL of another app. Unfortunately, it looks like development has been abandoned. The last update was from 13 years ago.
SublimeText is a much better alternative
Not open source