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!
I liked the tab support being added and use notepad for a bunch of basic bitch shiz, but notepad++ is going full time if they start bogging it down with crap.
There’s KDE Kate as well, but I only use that for scripting purpose.
SublimeText is a much superior alternative. Notepad++ is like being stuck in the 2000s
Sublime is not FOSS
Paying for a text editor, who doesn’t like that?
It’s free and is functional. What more could you want
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
there’s an easier tool to crop screenshots and strip them of metadata. Snipping tool! As barebones as notepad and paint, and extremely useful. I genuinely use it daily to the point that I just added it to my taskbar.
Opens in split second, lets you create a screenshot of any size and wherever you’d like, then immediately copies that image to your clipboard so you don’t even need to save it if you’re sending it somewhere online. If you so desire you can draw a bit on the image, handy for underlines, arrows, and basic censoring. And if a pesky dropdown menu only shows up when you hover over it you can set it to delay triggering and can get your mouse over there in time for a screenshot.
And that’s it, I’m pretty sure I described every single feature of the Snipping tool.
honestly it’s not even that bad, it’s notepad picture edition - I sometimes use it when I want to draw something fast to get my point across, small graphs that are easier to show than explain in text, objects I’m trying to describe but failing etc.
Together with notepad, paint gives you the “pen and a napkin” experience of the digital world.
I can understand and get behind this sentiment. At an old job we had iMacs and I would use Apple’s numbers program to make pixel art in the tables by coloring each cell.
I think it tries to be paint.net to some extent, I am absolutely fine with that, although it will never beat its clean, simple design.
I always though 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
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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?!
incredibly pro tip, I use this all the time
I use it for writing quick temporary notes for work when I don’t have a pen and paper handy.
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
Easily replaced.
No, its not easily replaced in a locked-down enterprise setting. That’s naive.
There’s portable Notepad++, it’s great
Just because it’s portable doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s allowed on the organizations allow list, but it does seem highly unlikely that the organization doesn’t have any alternative text editors allowed.
But maybe they don’t edit text files often enough to bother. And honestly, notepad was recently updated with tabs which makes it a lot more usable that it used to be.
Portable App, “open with”, “always use this app”.
edit: right, locked down, executable whitelist?
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.
It has such a distinct lack of any features whatsoever, that it makes it a perfect tool for practicing written assignments for language exams.
I only use it to strip HTML text down to plain text. As long as it can do that, I’ll probably keep using it unless something better comes around.
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.”
Fuck Notepad. All my homies use Kate.
Kate is freaking awesome. So many nice features for coding short of using a full IDE.
Is it as fast ro start up as N++?
It is in KDE, in my experience.
What are the advantages over notepad++?
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.
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He misses you!
he just needs to work on his aim
I have to use Teams for work and there are Clippy stickers!
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.
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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
I like the typical plaintext errors you get with any Linux distro, which can do stuff like syntax highlighting but are still light and fast.
Imma keep using Wordpad
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I don’t use Windows since 2018 but…
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.
Why the fuck would I ever want AI in my calculators? Even Algebra never required AI in the past
I wouldn’t mind a bit of wolfram alpha
Because now it can be done on the cloud with AI for triple the time, also subscriptions.
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.
They sure fucked up SwiftKey
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.