The developers of Notepad++ will be salivating

MS, please continue shooting yourself in the feet. Eventually enough of your customers (you know, the ones who pay you money) will get the hint that you as a company don't care two hoots about you and only want to slurp our data and sell it. That is clearly more profitable that licensing.

The *developer*.

It's a one man band behind the excellent Notepad++. If you use it, have you donated to the author?

...it just appeared to launch Notepad with no apparent difference.

Yet, strangely, the next time I ran Notepad itself it appeared to be slightly improved. As was Notepad++.

And then I noticed that every time I ran Notepad++, it caused improvements to both versions. Strange, but a positive development to be sure.

Unfortunately, it appears that an even greater number of people have been running its evil counterpart, Notepad--....

Anyway, that's why Notepad sucks now.

Try using --Notepad++. You'll never see any improvements.

It is a basic text editor, you make quick notes in it and not much else FFS

I'd use one note, but I cannot get that bastard to run in just plain text mode, wants me to hand write into it (I can't read my hand writing), and fucks text on the apps by putting it where your finger pressed... No just add everything I write under the damn text above

Trying to make things too clever when more basic if the way to go

They could have added a side bar with search (they could hire external company that can actually code search properly) and maybe markdown support. Nothing else would be needed.

But marketing w⚓ want A-f***ing-I.

Imagine writing your diary and not being sure if you are hallucinating or the notepad...

Would you like me to help you with that? Do you have a rope, a gun, poison?

" Do you have a rope, a gun, poison?"

Helium! although Nitrogen is cheaper but they don't sell that at the local store.

I am led to believe that Argon doesn't trigger a cough reflex, and is heavier than air, which might be handy.

> Nitrogen is cheaper but they don't sell that at the local store.

Shoot, you can get N2 or even LN2 at the local welding supply by the cubic foot or gallon. When I was a spotty college nerd LN2 was cheap... it was the dewar that was expensive. We used it for the high-temperature superconductor & floating magnet tricks.

These shops don't advertise or make themselves known because everybody that needs them knows who they are and where they are.

See heading

So much for me getting it to help me rewrite my porn novel.

So they've decided that this is a feature people want. I don't, but surely someone will, so why not throw it in. As demonstrated, my opinions are not important. However, why do they think the people who are likely to use this are using Notepad? It's not a very popular application. I know very few people who use it often. The nontechnical mostly use actual word processors that had such features as spell check*. Technical people often use a text editor that displays line numbers, uses the chosen characters for indentation, doesn't automatically stick .txt on the end of file names which you have to remove later, or can handle multiple kinds of line endings*. They and I sometimes use Notepad if it's someone else's computer and a small edit is needed, but that's still not very often. So who is going to use Notepad enough that this feature is going to sell many AI credits?

* Notepad actually can do the things with asterisks, but as of about three years ago. Most users decided what to run more than three years ago when it couldn't do them.

I'm not sure that the key here is that Notepad alone will cause you to need to buy more AI credits.

The goal will be to get as many ways into the ecosystem to burn credits that it becomes impossible to control in any sensible manner. This shifts them to having stable revenues via subscriptions and then nice, high margin additional spend that procurement and management can't easily constrain.

> So they've decided that this is a feature people want.

No, this is what *Microsoft* want.

Or rather, what they want people to use for MS's own self-serving benefit. Even if that means shoving it down their throat.

And if that fails, they'll just move on- as MS always does- to the next thing and start shoving *that* down their throats instead.

Remember, unless you're a *very* large corporate customer, MS doesn't care- or *need* to care- about what you want. You'll take what you're given.

What on earth has happened that a text editor on a modern computer takes enough time to load that anyone could ask for it to be quicker??

Seriously, how can that be possible?

A text editor 20 years ago took about a second. How can it be possible that with all the improvements in both I/O bandwidth and processing power that it's not able to do this faster than you can blink?

> Seriously, how can that be possible?

Because they're shoving endless bloat and crap like- to pick an example *purely* at random- generative AI into it.

That's how.

Answer : Telemetry... and software bloat...

I use TextEdit on the Mac often which is equivalent and Notepad on the PC from time to time. The reason I use them is because they are simple and very uncomplicated. If I need to grab some text, strip out the formatting so I can copy/paste it someplace else, those are great tools for that. There's no need for AI, auto-formatting and all that jazz. I have other tools for that.

Somebody please tell me there's going to be a bloody off switch for that.

"criteria that reflect Microsoft's values and standards"

As bad as that?

I think I'll just stick with Kate and/or KWrite.

Oh dear, they've done the FOSS thing of giving you a choice while being very largely the same thing under the hood.

My feeling of smugness about using Linux increases exponentially whenever I read about the latest stupid shit that Microsoft are shovelling out the door.