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.
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.
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.
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)
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…
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.
They’re 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 it’s there at all will affect performance. And even if it’s just a tiny blip in relative performance, it’s 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.
You’re free to believe that this will not bog down the program at all, and also that this isn’t just the first bad decision they’re 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.
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.
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.
It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.
I haven’t noticed any of this. Where are you seeing them?
It’s because apparently being anti Russia, anti authoritarian and pro Ukraine is…pOliTiCaL
It is. The sentence “I’m pro Ukraine/Russia” is most definitely a political statement
Bring back clippy. “I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you.”
Been a Windows user for a really long time. A few times I tried to switch over to Linux, but it just wasn’t doable for a myriad of reasons. Windows 11, I have words with it. Many bad ones, but thankfully there are many users like me that for one reason or another did not switch and put time in to beat the badness out of it via mods.
Windows 12… I’m not so sure if I’ll even “upgrade” to it. It really depends on how much Microsoft decides to wire up the OS to their servers. Look, I wouldn’t mind at all if I could have “smart” tools with AI assistance, but the problem for me is the lack of choice. Currently, if you don’t use their crap software, what mostly travels over the wire is telemetry, and if you go offline no harm done. But make no mistake, useful AI models are too fat to run on most computers. Heck I built mine with AI in mind, but will Microsoft even give me the choice of using my own AIs? (Here’s a hint, it starts with N, has a V and ends with an R)
But what if the OS starts requiring it to be online only because of their AI features? Maybe we’ll have to start paying for Windows again in subscriptions to pay for the obligatory AI? Or what about scrubbing options away from the settings so you can’t “misuse” your own device and have to ask nicely to their AI to do it for you?
There is a road here, and I do not like it. Thank goodness Linux is better than it has ever been.
PS: As for the notepad thing, I’m completely in agreement that it should remain without AI. Such a simple tool for scribbling down notes should be kept lean, simple and fast. Things that Microsoft and their engineers have long forgotten how to do.
LEAVE NOTEPAD ALONE!
seriously though. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather have be more basic than notepad. It’s entire literal existence is to open, edit and save basic text files. There’s zero need for additional features or updates.
I mean, I don’t even see their precious AI in office yet, and they’re getting hard over adding it to fucking notepad? I expected an AI powered clippy to return to office before this shit.
Throws table
Is there a LibreOffice alternative?
Now do paint. Or even more useless: calculator.
No need to “fix” notepad. It does what it has to. If you’re a power user, you can download something else. But I’ll bet it won’t have Ai in it.
They already did both of those. Paint has layers now and calculator got worse because they decided to split everything up into different modes which is a pain when you want to do hex conversions but also do non-truncated division, especially because it resets the history and storage when switching modes.
It seems to me like these apps are being redesigned by people who don’t use the features, or maybe with the primary design goal of reducing support calls from people who have no clue what they are doing.
I always thought that my local use of a plain text editor should use a lot of CPU power (and electricity) in a huge data center.
Your owners gotta know what you’re doing at all times eh. Can’t leave notepad out of the
trackingeco system
Notepad++, GET YOUR FOSS ON PEOPLE!
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
If you’re not using it, then you’re going to be extremely happy when you switch!
Not seeing anyone recommend Sublime Text here. It’s free for non commercial use and is fucking kickass and doesn’t look like it came out of the 80’s like NP++
The more I look at modern UIs, which seem to have decided the best way to use the metric crapload of screen space a modern PC has is with gratuitious whitespace, the more I like 1990s UIs.
Sure, totally get you there, but part of what I like about Sublime is that the interface is clean, no buttons everywhere, nothing obtrusive, its just a text editor that packs a punch and has a lot of community built plug-ins to do whatever you may need.
Imma keep using Wordpad
I don’t understand all the negativity. An integrated AI assistant in a text editor sounds like it could be amazing.
It sounds awful. The draw of notepad is its simplicity. I wish software companies would stop ruining their good versions of popular software.
We haven’t seen how this feature will be implemented yet, it could be done without impacting the simplicity of Notepad.
Personally, what I’d like is a button that pops open a side window where I could either ask the AI questions about the text that’s currently in Notepad or tell it to make edits to the text, and it’ll just do that. Seems like it could be perfectly straightforward if it’s something along these lines, and if you don’t want to use the feature you just don’t.
If notepad makes a connection to the internet and waits for a connection and response then it is enshitified. If MS wants to do that they need for fork the code and offer the enshitified version under a different name “Notepad AI”
That’s near impossible. It will bloat notepad, at the very least. Longer loading, more chances of crashing, creating unnecessary data-traffic… literally no one using notepad in the last 25 years needed any of this, they used it for it’s simplicity, speed, reliability, all of which it becomes less with features like these. Put that shit in word and o365, where it belongs.
The technology hasn’t existed until this year, so Notepad’s last 25 years of usage patterns don’t really mean much to it.
If you don’t want it creating data traffic, don’t use the feature.
And don’t put words in my mouth. I would love to try out something like this and could well find it quite useful, depending on the details of how it works. So “literally no one” falls flat right there, I’m a counterexample.
Technology for rich text formatting has existed for many many decades. It was not a part of Notepad. People using it were well aware of this limitation, and used notepad because that technology was not a part of it.
A non-used feature will still cause unnecessary data-traffic. At the very least to install it and update it periodically, more likely constantly because it will become part of the microsoft telemetry / advertisement profiling / tracking package that is called windows.
You want the feature. I’m interested, too. But I don’t want the feature in notepad. I want notepad to stay as freaking basic as possible, because the main thing I (and I think other people too) like about notepad is the incredible speeeeeeed at which it opens on any device because it’s “show text” and nothing else.
Notepad.exe is a 356 kilobyte file. You’re really so concerned about the data traffic that will come from occasionally updating a 356 kilobyte application that you’re spending your time arguing about it at length on the Internet? Do you realize how many bytes it takes to download and display this discussion here on the Fediverse is? Here on Kbin.social it takes 712 kilobytes for me to view it. When you click on the notification that this response is going to give you you’re going to be downloading the equivalent of several notepad.exes all at once. If you respond, you’ll likely re-download the whole page again for your browser to display it to you.
Complaining about the bandwidth usage that would come from downloading an update to notepad.exe is ridiculous.
It’s a 356 kilobyte file for now.
I’m mainly complaining it’s a stupid ass way of microsoft making their bloatware tracking operating system complete. There is no good reason for them to put this stuff in notepad instead of, again, where it belongs and where 99.000 other features to juggle your texts around have been put before: Word, O365.
Here on Kbin.social it takes 712 kilobytes for me to view it.
And that is fine for a social networking app like lemmy/kbin. When I am using notepad I just want speed to view some text on a standalone machine, not a bunch of crappy bloat. Same for all of the other notepad users who outnumber people reading this by 1 million to 1.
They’re still going to ruin a supposedly no frills text editor with this.
What they could’ve dove to showcase it instead is revamping Wordpad, instead of removing it, and integrate the AI stuff there, since it’s supposed to be one of Microsoft’s example apps
Sometimes, programs just need to be simple.
Put that AI shit in Word, notepad is supposed to be a plain text editor and it did so quite well.
“Do one thing and do it very well” - Unix philosophy
Windows has never even slightly pretended to follow that guideline
And that’s why it’s awful
Does anyone use notepad for anything other than looking at config files? I mean, does anyone write documents with notepad?
Edit: Thanks for all the comments. I have used notepad similarly, but doesn’t sound like anything that needs AI.
I paste blocks of text or data into it, then copy it out again so I dont infect document B with document A’s weird formatting
I used to use it for taking quick notes when I had a slow computer. I didn’t want to wait for Word to load, so I’d just use Notepad. Now I use Post Its or just don’t write stuff down as much.
I know it’s dumb but I was always a bit disappointed that Microsoft overhauled Paint in Windows 11 with layers and polish. To me, paint is always that terrible pre-packaged program that makes bad art. There was a community around making things in paint, which was noticeably impressive because making decent art in paint is a nightmare.
Now that it’s actually fairly good… I don’t know, it’s lost its charm.
Its not actually good, and many actually good art programs far outshine it.
So its lost what made it unique, by being comedically bad, and become the death knell of most things in a capital focused system; mundane.
My primary use case for MS Paint is its almost non-existent system usage, to quickly crop screenshots or strip metadata from files. Paint.net handles almost every other use. Same rationale for Notepad and stripping formatting from copied text. Bloat the program with ‘value added USP features’ to compete with actual image editing software, and I’m out.
Microsoft saw how the Apple ecosystem lock-in has benefited them long term, and made big pushes to ‘improve’ their first party software and close the ecosystem to the Microsoft store. Vanilla Windows fresh off an install throws all kind of “You sure? Like for real sure?” UAC warnings popups at any executable, while seamlessly processing their App Store use. Zero-low literacy users want that kind of UI/UX and Microsoft sees money to be made funneling them towards first-party and ‘partner’ software
