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.
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. It’d 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 didn’t 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.
Unfff pump my veins full of Notepad++. I wanna feel the autosaving tabs course through me. I need that tabbed indenting experience. AAAAAAAAAAA
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. It’s a free app so if he wants to include that in his update message that’s 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 don’t care if he is on the rights side of the issue or note, just don’t 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.
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.
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!
People should use Vim. It’s tons better and very user friendly.
https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config#features
Highly recommend this.
A modern Neovim configuration with full battery for Python, Lua, C++, Markdown, LaTeX, and more…
This is enough to get the intellisense and linters up and running. Only takes ~5 minutes to configure by installing prerequisites, it’s worth it though.
No one getting this joke is hilarious to me
Its not that people have missed the joke, it’s that the joke is poorly formed and not hyperbolic enough to be funny, instead it’s rather a half joke and brings up a larger issue (intentional or not), that undermines the attempt at absurdist humor.
I find Dunning-Kruger to be funny.
Nah, it’s just going over most peoples heads.
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
Ctrl+Shift+V pastes without formatting.
It doesn’t fix artificial line break issues though. Simple text editors are perfect for stopping some text from looking unnecessarily like poetry.
I am 46 how am I just learning this now?!
I use it for writing quick temporary notes for work when I don’t have a pen and paper handy.
Funny enough, I use it like a notepad. Oh s***, I need to write this down real quick. I need to grab an exerpt off a website, our store serial number or make a quick list. It’s literally scrap paper in digital form for me.
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 use it constantly because it’s the only text editor that comes with windows 10
I use it all the time for quick notes at work, with its very simple interface, and the tabs feature was a game changer. Especially useful for phone calls in my case, although my typing speed far exceeds my writing speed so maybe I’m the exception because of that.
I don’t use it to program though, usually that’s delegated to Visual Studio.
I prefer having a bare-bones text editor over anything with formatting. Most of the time, I don’t want the formatting to carry over, I want it stripped down to just the content, just the text. Word can get annoying sometimes when you’re trying to copy and paste and it does something stupid like carrying over weird frames or tables or whatever the hell. That said, I’ll still use a “fancy” text editor like Notepad++ or Sublime Text.
I use it as a cache for chunks of text I want to move around. I use Textpad a lot for code and config files where I don’t need all the lookup and predictive stuff.
Bring back clippy. “I see you want a barebones, simple text editor. Let me ruin that for you.”
Personally, I’m boycotting Microsoft until they bring back Clippy.
I saw clippy the first time when I was a kid. To be honest I remember my interactions with it quite fondly.
I’m afraid adults weren’t as fond.
I have to use Teams for work and there are Clippy stickers!
Microsoft is not a creative company!
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
(Psst: get as far away from microsoft as you can, and don’t look back!)
Is there a LibreOffice alternative?
God damn. Fuck these guys. My bread and butter has been programming in the Microsoft ecosystem for 15 years. Now I’m running Linux on two different PCs and working on learning non-MS development stacks.
I want my notepad to open in split second so I can jot down my thoughts when I’m in a rush so I don’t forget things. or so I can copy multiple things, edit them slightly and paste them where I want them to be. or so I can pre-write a paragraph to send shortly without appearing as “this user is typing” to everyone as I rewrite a sentence for the 5th time, and to not fear accidentally hitting enter mid said paragraph.
I do not need my notepad to have AI. It’s not broken, stop trying to fix things that aren’t broken
Why not?
