Stop it! I was using Notepad the other day and it's keeps doing "helpful" things for me. Like when I say "Restart it with systemd", it get autocorrected to "Restart it with system" *every damned time*.
You can turn autocorrect off from the settings gear on the right of notepad window. I like not having to download third party apps and use notepad to getaway from autocorrect as well. Hope they don't change it any further
Nah, Notepad++ is one of my immediate downloads for a fresh install. That's a hill I'll die on, I don't want Microsoft telling me what they think I need.
Edit: some have mentioned Ninite - also a fantastic tool, and yes I utilize it.
Then you finally look and you have a million notepad++ tabs open and you have to go through and systematically close them while making sure you actually saved them somewhere.
But hey, I found my DnD notes.
I have about 300 tabs by now, the oldest is prob dating back to 3-4 years. I refuse to close them as non of them are safe and what if one of them have something useful!
It's my archive of not interesting thoughts and practical/productive stuff!
Oh yeah, disable it and lose all the stuff that 'I'll save later'. You're just trying to get me to lose my stuff! Next you'll be telling me I shouldn't hoard every consumable in a game 'just in case'.
Just switched from using NP++ for years to sublime, I found I *hate* the interface for NP++, and constantly having to close old tabs out. I’m sure there’s settings blah blah. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by sublime, super fast to open and looks modern, literally all I need is to edit some yaml files or change code quickly, anything more goes into neovim. It’s been great for my basic needs.
I use VSCode a lot, but know it very poorly. Does it have macros? Is there support for notepad++ style macros in an extension? Does it support multi-line editing/is there an extension for that?
This is the killer for me on notepad++, I use it to bridge a gap between notepad and low skill text manipulation automation tools (like how some people use excel). Basically use it for anything throwaway I don't want to write a script for.
Notepad++ likes to autocorrect as well - maybe they fixed that, but it was annoying enough I just moved to vscode.
The only thing it can do that vscode can't is text column editing.
Autocorrect is probably the most frustrating thing you can add on a machine that has a keyboard. I get that phones need it, because phone typing is awful and has no haptic feedback, but if you have a real keyboard, the odds that you're intentionally just typing something not in their dictionary is much higher, and we already have an interaction model for dealing with that, with the red underline. This also is just infuriating because Notepad was supposed to be the bare bones app with none of that shit, while Wordpad was the one with a few basic features, for someone who didn't need Word. Now that they've killed Wordpad, the normal thing would be to leave that gap to encourage you to pay for Word, but they're actually doing the worse thing and shoving new shit in the "basic" app where it's unwanted by the few people who use it.
When i make a mistake I want it to be my mistake. Im ok with sending an email with a typo in it. Oops.
When the computer makes a mistake for me i become irrationally angry about it. When i send an email with a word i typed correctly but outlook changed the word, i become irate.
Doubly so if i already disabled autocorrect and it somehow decides to enable itself again.
You can turn it off, but Windows is used in the corporate world, where countless of instances are running in the datacentre or the cloud, and now you either have to turn it off individually whenever you happen to edit a file, or the sysadmins have to put more work into disable it centrally through group policy or whatever method is available for Azure or Amazon instances.
> You can turn autocorrect off from the settings
Given Microsoft’s general form, that setting will last until the next patch Tuesday when it “miraculously” returns to its default setting.
And Edge is now your default browser/PDF/image viewer/CAD software too.
I completely hate how Chromium and derived browsers removed "open pdf in external app" silently, not just from default.
Though you can run Linux with X inside Edge or even Slack (with debug console), so now everything is OS all the way down
>I like not having to download third party apps and use notepad to ~~getaway~~ get away from autocorrect as well.
You shall not escape, not under my watch!
*Getaway* is a noun, *get away* is the verb/adverb combo you wanted.
Yup, the reason they are doing this is because they want to add their shitty predictive text to it im sure of it.
If you use word, go to 'advanced' and turn off 'predictive text' or whatever its called. I do a lot of medical writing, and let me tell you, predictive text is dangerous as hell.
Basically, it starts writing for you by subtly cueing your brain.
The writing it generates is awful if you start using its suggestions. In short, it's like having someone whispering into your ear, the way it constantly appears where you are watching on the screen while you type.
**Get it off, it's not good**
Same with paint, they've added layers and by default the first layer is transparent so when I copy and paste from paint, the white background is actually transparent... So frustrating when trying to share quick sketches
Snipping Tool copy and paste. That's what I do most of the time when I just want to quickly share something in a program that has layers.
But not that laggy as hell Snip & Sketch app that Windows added recently. The good, old Snipping Tool. Dang, what is it with Windows just making every app worse?
Reminds me of the time I spent an hour wondering why my AWS Api calls were not working. It turns out that MS Teams helpfully somehow changed "...1+2..." to "...1 + 2..." in the API key when copy-pasting *from* the correct string inside teams.
There is a good reason that we want some of our tools to not be so automagically helpful, And having auto"correct" enabled by default in notepad is a perfect example of something I do not want. Autocorrect in Word I can understand the logic of - in Notepad, just no.
I'm a programmer, and I also happen to be at least a decent speller. 80% of the time I see a red squiggly line, it's something that's spelled correctly. Lots of times it's something like a class name from some code I'm sharing. PersonController (there's the red squiggly) is not misspelled.
And, I know, not all places can be aware of words being squished together. This textbox on Reddit honestly shouldn't behave like my Visual Studio IDE.
And that's only half of my beef with it. We need better tools to manage spellcheck dictionaries. When I add a new word to the dictionary on my web browser, then I go to discord (which is just an Electron app, so it's still technically a web browser input box), that same word is still being marked as misspelled.
I uninstalled the "new" notepad. That gives you the old notepad. I actually use Editpad Pro for "real" text editing, so I only use notepad for, well, notes, and the way the new notepad worked was annoying.
This. What users want is an **undo button** that actually works, we don't want you to change the text that's written.
Imagine trying to type a password into here, not noticing that autocomplete helpfully made one of your letters lower-case.
>Imagine trying to type a password into here, not noticing that autocomplete helpfully made one of your letters lower-case.
Exactly, I use notepad when I want a text editor, not a word processor.
There are not many things on earth I hate as much as an app that automatically changes what I wrote because it thinks it knows better.
Underlining is okay, although I wouldn’t really need this in Notepad. I mainly use it when I actually just need a no-frills plain text app.
Word 2065: AI will read your brain and turn your half formed thought into the greatest novel you have ever known.
Notepad 2065: You might get auto save in another 41 years.
since MS Word is the “advanced” version, this might just be called [MS Letter](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/19i3pa/write_letterz_n_shit_yo/)
Most applications fall over or have their functions severely impaired when opening anything approaching 1GB. That includes a super lean text editor like `vi`. It's actually surprising because 1GB isn't really a lot nowadays.
I usually have to resort to some combination of `grep` and `less` instead.
For a text file, without imbedded images... 1GB is a LOT. The entire Lord of the Rings books are less than 20MB.
1GB+ generally means your logging has hit an infinite loop, and you just want to `tail` the file to see what it's repeating.
1GB is still a fucking lot for a text file. If you have that much text, it's computer generated and it's doing that because there's a bug or your logging settings are horrible.
Or you're doing big data analysis with a CSV and should have moved to a different solution.
I suspect they don't actually want people abusing a plaintext editor as a note taking app, but are forced into supporting it on a basic level one way or another due to user expectation. Probably won't ever go as far as formatting features, but you never know.
But I would guess that something like 90% of people using Notepad are tech savvy or programmers where it can be used to view simple text encoded data. What programmer expects autocorrect for this? Why would anyone else use such a basic editor?
My workplace use notepad for every customer interaction for the past 15 years. We've only just started to move onto oneNote as it has password features and rich formatting which syncs nicely for quick interactions. I will miss notepad
> But I would guess that something like 90% of people using Notepad are tech savvy or programmers
It's probably more like a 60% / 40% split across the world, though. The branding of notepad signifies it as a note-taking app, which it can never live up to. So we are always stuck with something that is bad for general use and bad for power users / coding.
Nah, they just got tired of other OSes having basic text editors that make Notepad look like it's from the fucking stone age.
Like GNOME's gedit is practically an IDE by comparison to Notepad.
Its notepad. I don’t expect it to have features. I just want it to write and store text without it trying to correct or reformat anything.
*When* I need additional features, I then use Notepad++.
I maintain my stance that Notepad's charm comes from the fact that it's a dumb text editor with no extra features.
Would not be surprised to see Notepad get integrated ads to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 plan sometime in the future.
Seriously. Everyone recommends Notepad++ as a must-have install, but I've always *liked* the fact that Notepad is the dumbest text program you could ever have. I use it as a notepad, which means what I write is always just for me so I can remember whatever bullshit I needed in that moment.
The last thing I want is for it to start trying to predict what I *really* meant to write or to save shit without me saying so.
There is probably a better way, but I find myself using notepad the most when I want to strip something that I copied from like a webpage or something of all it's styles/font so I can paste it somewhere else without that stuff. Otherwise I tend to use notepad++.
I just discovered this the other day. There a Microsoft tool called "power toys". It has a bunch of features you can toggle on and off. One of them is you can define a shortcut for universally pasting without formatting. Game changer for me.
They still kind of feel like they're for entirely different purposes. VS code for programming/scripting languages and Notepad for just writing regular text
I thought it was the entire point!
It’s plain text, black on white, what you type is what you get.
You have Word if you need editing and layout. You have Sticky Notes if you need simple text with nice presentation. You can get Notepad++ if you’re a sweaty nerd who thinks “regex find-and-replace” is not only necessary, but cool.
The only thing notepad has going for it is that it’s quick and dumb.
As a teacher, I use notepad when I show grammar mistakes specifically because it's dumb and lets me write the mistakes my students make without giving away where the mistakes are 👀
Your not wrong. Their in my opinion are trying loop people into subscription software anyway they can, even using something like that. Notepad didn't need spell check, we'd use Word for that. (sigh)
msft will enshittify everything they touch until people give up and move to linux, which personally.....I am very happy about. Linux distros have gotten very good...very very good.
They were doing good when they were adding UNIX line endings and tabs, but now they're adding things that don't belong in notepad. It's a simple text editor. If you need those things then you need to be using a more capable tool.
The main Office apps (Word, Excel, etc.) *finally* support it with the most recent update. Took until the year 2024, but Microsoft finally got on board with their own universal standard.
Don't worry, support for formatting is coming next update - Microsoft /s
Tip: If you don't mind or want all the text in one line, use browser URL field for clearing formatting.
Today, for the first time, my decades-long bestie Notepad.exe crashed.
I wanted to deal with a large text. Pasted it. Then the autocorrect started running through, underlining most of the text, using up resources, it hurt me sensitivities, made my PC go loud. And the click to STOP THE GODDAMN AUTOCORRECT froze my notepad. Freezecrash. Evil!
Settings > off with the devil.
Or in my German version: Bearbeiten > Schriftart [!!!!] > Rechtschreibung
Squiggly lines I can live with, but automatic correction is also on by default.
That will make people who just wrote a short batch file for example reasonably angry.
Wordpad is being deprecated for whatever reason. I think they're trying to push people to use the free version of Word Online to get them deeper into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
It seems like they're adding a few bits to Notepad to compensate, but not sure why spellcheck of all things.
At first I thought I was going crazy when my text kept changing, like why on earth would I want auto correct on a PC? Just mark the damn word and I'll decide if I want it changed or not myself, thanks.
Say... would that autocorrect by any chance be using a remote ms service that scrapes input data for whatever AI bullshit they are trying to sell ?
The damn bubble can't burst fast enough, i hope it brings down a lot of garbage companies with it.
Getting rid of formatting was one of my main uses for simple Notepad. I can still do it. Spell-check? Auto-correct? Turned off. I never expected them anyway.
No. Stop it. It's a plaintext editor. That's what Wordpad was for, you con artists.
Notepad for plaintext, Wordpad for rich text, and anything more than that you paid for features.
But then they discontinued Wordpad, and now they're crufting up notepad with bloat.
For Zebra scanners, you can configure the scanner to slow down the output.
I ran into this problem when my workplace switched us to Win11. I had used a scanner and notepad for inventory for many years. Suddenly, scanned codes wouldn't show up until I pressed ctrl or an arrow key, which caused the characters to display one-by-one. It also broke my text replacer program.
Somehow, Microsoft made Notepad slower than Word.
Microsoft doesn't understand the purpose of its own application. The whole point of Notepad is that it's minimal. It's a tool for storing and editing plain text. It shouldn't have any bells or whistles. That's what Wordpad is for.
I really wish Microsoft would design Windows around the idea of "do as little as possible." I want Windows to be a base that everything else works on top of. Even stuff like Notepad, add the spellcheck and autocorrect but always have it off at default. Do as little as possible and let me choose what I want.
Surprised this isn't high up in the comments:
That's just a way for them to add "AI" to Notepad. There was probably no data scraping going on in Notepad (which in itself is a surprise) and now they found a way to add it.
Quiet autocorrect with no confirmation or undo is evil. I found out about this new "feature" recently, I was typing in Polish, but all my devices are set to English (as I can't stand Microsoft Polish, and English is better for debugging). And Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to silently change "i" (*and* in Polish) to "I" (first person pronoun in English). I understand red squiggly lines, I understand some software may not be aware of the correct language for spellchecking, but automatically and silently "fixing" things is just evil.
I use notepad exclusively to strip formatting metadata etc crap when I copy paste.
No I don't want that name in big bold red letters when I pull it from a signature. I just want the clear text.
Sometimes I want to keep formatting Sometimes I don't a quick jump to and from notepad is all I need.
Sigh I'm too old for this shit I guess
Urgh.
There is a niche that notepad filled amazingly, despite, or because, of its outdatedness.
It was quick, throwaway, if I needed a scratch pad it would be there immediately.
I don't need a note taking app. There are already hundreds, and a few really good ones.
But I suppose this goes with Microsoft core value of bloat until it sinks...
Ffs.
Spellchecking I wouldn't mind, but I hope autocorrect isn't an always-on thing. I've used Notepad for holding a lot of text that I need to not have arbitrarily changed, like code snippets or keystrings.
Please no, the simplicity of the program is why I use it to actually take notes. I don't care if I spelled a word wrong, I just need it to keep words on it.
I often write in Notepad so the words don't auto-correct and the red underline is distracting for when I'm just trying to get thoughts out and not be sidetracked with correct spelling.
Added functionality actually makes it less useful for me.
They should fuck off modifying their apps and changing things that don't need changing. I just found out how to disable tabs in the 11 version, and your calculator is a big ugly kid's toy these days
Why would you want that? Notepad is essentially a basic script writing thing. Grammar and spelling is most of the time supposed to be wrong for all that sort of stuff.
This is part of the enshitification of killing WordPad, which is so stupid.
Stop it! I was using Notepad the other day and it's keeps doing "helpful" things for me. Like when I say "Restart it with systemd", it get autocorrected to "Restart it with system" *every damned time*.
You can turn autocorrect off from the settings gear on the right of notepad window. I like not having to download third party apps and use notepad to getaway from autocorrect as well. Hope they don't change it any further
Nah, Notepad++ is one of my immediate downloads for a fresh install. That's a hill I'll die on, I don't want Microsoft telling me what they think I need. Edit: some have mentioned Ninite - also a fantastic tool, and yes I utilize it.
Notepad++ used to be a number 1 download, but I've found that I have basically replaced everything I used to use it with VS Code.
Then you finally look and you have a million notepad++ tabs open and you have to go through and systematically close them while making sure you actually saved them somewhere. But hey, I found my DnD notes.
I have about 300 tabs by now, the oldest is prob dating back to 3-4 years. I refuse to close them as non of them are safe and what if one of them have something useful! It's my archive of not interesting thoughts and practical/productive stuff!
You have ADHD too?
There's a setting to disable that. I too had too many tabs open, no more!
Oh yeah, disable it and lose all the stuff that 'I'll save later'. You're just trying to get me to lose my stuff! Next you'll be telling me I shouldn't hoard every consumable in a game 'just in case'.
I mean, what if you need it? Then you'll regret using it now. Best to just keep it for later.
After all it's only the last boss, maybe during the credit you'll need that potion.
Next he'll tell us we don't need to keep hundreds of browser tabs open and to favorite them instead. Absolute nonsense!
Notepad++ is great for throwaway notes though. Something vscode isn't built for. I personally use both with a strict divide in purpose.
I prefer Obsidian for notes, throwaway or otherwise.
Big ups for Obsidian. Feels like my old favourite Atom, but for notes. It's a gem.
Just switched from using NP++ for years to sublime, I found I *hate* the interface for NP++, and constantly having to close old tabs out. I’m sure there’s settings blah blah. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by sublime, super fast to open and looks modern, literally all I need is to edit some yaml files or change code quickly, anything more goes into neovim. It’s been great for my basic needs.
There are indeed settings! Here's the blah blah: disable tabs and enable the Document viewer instead.
I use VSCode a lot, but know it very poorly. Does it have macros? Is there support for notepad++ style macros in an extension? Does it support multi-line editing/is there an extension for that? This is the killer for me on notepad++, I use it to bridge a gap between notepad and low skill text manipulation automation tools (like how some people use excel). Basically use it for anything throwaway I don't want to write a script for.
There are numerous macro extensions and it supports multi-line editing.
Sublime forever
I don't do enough coding for VS Code. Mostly just YAML and other config files.
That’s exactly the kind of stuff I use VS Code for. Anything fancy I just throw into IntelliJ.
You can install Notepad++ from the command line using the built-in Microsoft tool winget. The command is *winget install notepad++*.
Notepad++ likes to autocorrect as well - maybe they fixed that, but it was annoying enough I just moved to vscode. The only thing it can do that vscode can't is text column editing.
Notepad++ was the first software I searched for when I got a Mac as my secondary device at work. Had to settle for OneNote.
Autocorrect is probably the most frustrating thing you can add on a machine that has a keyboard. I get that phones need it, because phone typing is awful and has no haptic feedback, but if you have a real keyboard, the odds that you're intentionally just typing something not in their dictionary is much higher, and we already have an interaction model for dealing with that, with the red underline. This also is just infuriating because Notepad was supposed to be the bare bones app with none of that shit, while Wordpad was the one with a few basic features, for someone who didn't need Word. Now that they've killed Wordpad, the normal thing would be to leave that gap to encourage you to pay for Word, but they're actually doing the worse thing and shoving new shit in the "basic" app where it's unwanted by the few people who use it.
When i make a mistake I want it to be my mistake. Im ok with sending an email with a typo in it. Oops. When the computer makes a mistake for me i become irrationally angry about it. When i send an email with a word i typed correctly but outlook changed the word, i become irate. Doubly so if i already disabled autocorrect and it somehow decides to enable itself again.
"I have altered the settings. Pray I don't alter them further"
You can turn it off, but Windows is used in the corporate world, where countless of instances are running in the datacentre or the cloud, and now you either have to turn it off individually whenever you happen to edit a file, or the sysadmins have to put more work into disable it centrally through group policy or whatever method is available for Azure or Amazon instances.
Nah they’re all using Word anyway.
> You can turn autocorrect off from the settings Given Microsoft’s general form, that setting will last until the next patch Tuesday when it “miraculously” returns to its default setting. And Edge is now your default browser/PDF/image viewer/CAD software too.
I completely hate how Chromium and derived browsers removed "open pdf in external app" silently, not just from default. Though you can run Linux with X inside Edge or even Slack (with debug console), so now everything is OS all the way down
>I like not having to download third party apps and use notepad to ~~getaway~~ get away from autocorrect as well. You shall not escape, not under my watch! *Getaway* is a noun, *get away* is the verb/adverb combo you wanted.
It knows "Restart it with systemd" should be written in vim.
Yup, the reason they are doing this is because they want to add their shitty predictive text to it im sure of it. If you use word, go to 'advanced' and turn off 'predictive text' or whatever its called. I do a lot of medical writing, and let me tell you, predictive text is dangerous as hell. Basically, it starts writing for you by subtly cueing your brain. The writing it generates is awful if you start using its suggestions. In short, it's like having someone whispering into your ear, the way it constantly appears where you are watching on the screen while you type. **Get it off, it's not good**
https://i.imgflip.com/8w9i64.jpg
Same with paint, they've added layers and by default the first layer is transparent so when I copy and paste from paint, the white background is actually transparent... So frustrating when trying to share quick sketches
Snipping Tool copy and paste. That's what I do most of the time when I just want to quickly share something in a program that has layers. But not that laggy as hell Snip & Sketch app that Windows added recently. The good, old Snipping Tool. Dang, what is it with Windows just making every app worse?
Reminds me of the time I spent an hour wondering why my AWS Api calls were not working. It turns out that MS Teams helpfully somehow changed "...1+2..." to "...1 + 2..." in the API key when copy-pasting *from* the correct string inside teams. There is a good reason that we want some of our tools to not be so automagically helpful, And having auto"correct" enabled by default in notepad is a perfect example of something I do not want. Autocorrect in Word I can understand the logic of - in Notepad, just no.
I'm a programmer, and I also happen to be at least a decent speller. 80% of the time I see a red squiggly line, it's something that's spelled correctly. Lots of times it's something like a class name from some code I'm sharing. PersonController (there's the red squiggly) is not misspelled. And, I know, not all places can be aware of words being squished together. This textbox on Reddit honestly shouldn't behave like my Visual Studio IDE. And that's only half of my beef with it. We need better tools to manage spellcheck dictionaries. When I add a new word to the dictionary on my web browser, then I go to discord (which is just an Electron app, so it's still technically a web browser input box), that same word is still being marked as misspelled.
I uninstalled the "new" notepad. That gives you the old notepad. I actually use Editpad Pro for "real" text editing, so I only use notepad for, well, notes, and the way the new notepad worked was annoying.
IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE CREATING A NEW NOTE ABOUT WINDOWS! DO YOU LIKE TO RESTART? Y/Y
Similar shit in MacOS drives me up the wall every single time
The greatest thing about notepad was the lightness and simplicity. But of course they go and ruin that too.
Use notepad++ instead, it’s way better.
How about just making undo work for multiple steps. And make double and triple click work properly.
This. What users want is an **undo button** that actually works, we don't want you to change the text that's written. Imagine trying to type a password into here, not noticing that autocomplete helpfully made one of your letters lower-case.
>Imagine trying to type a password into here, not noticing that autocomplete helpfully made one of your letters lower-case. Exactly, I use notepad when I want a text editor, not a word processor.
Check out Notepad++
Yeah, this made that decision for me. I have not in the past just because notepad is just there.
There are not many things on earth I hate as much as an app that automatically changes what I wrote because it thinks it knows better. Underlining is okay, although I wouldn’t really need this in Notepad. I mainly use it when I actually just need a no-frills plain text app.
You have to wait another 41 years for that
Word 2065: AI will read your brain and turn your half formed thought into the greatest novel you have ever known. Notepad 2065: You might get auto save in another 41 years.
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
[удалено]
They will slowly turn it into WordPad. 🙃
Hahaha. And it will be part of a “new” Microsoft Works package you can buy.
I wonder if they will write a new notepad. May be called “MS Text”.
Nah. Office Note 365 just to f* up people who use OneNote.
And it will be online only.
Probably this!
since MS Word is the “advanced” version, this might just be called [MS Letter](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/19i3pa/write_letterz_n_shit_yo/)
Nice link to Word! Lol
Microsoft works, that is a name I have not heard in a long time. Will it still have that silly dog animation helper
Buy? Like to own? No no no, it's a monthly subscription.
*get a subscription for
Good one! And it will require a Premium subscription to share these files with others. I’m looking at you, Power BI.
Notepad ++ always a good alternative
Especially if you happen to open very large text documents... I haven't tried it in some years, but it used to give notepad fits.
Most applications fall over or have their functions severely impaired when opening anything approaching 1GB. That includes a super lean text editor like `vi`. It's actually surprising because 1GB isn't really a lot nowadays. I usually have to resort to some combination of `grep` and `less` instead.
For a text file, without imbedded images... 1GB is a LOT. The entire Lord of the Rings books are less than 20MB. 1GB+ generally means your logging has hit an infinite loop, and you just want to `tail` the file to see what it's repeating.
I think notepad++ handles it well. Not that I spend a lot of time editing gigabyte text files in windows... :-)
Notepad++ will usually be ok, and for anything it can't handle then use Baretail!
1GB is still a fucking lot for a text file. If you have that much text, it's computer generated and it's doing that because there's a bug or your logging settings are horrible. Or you're doing big data analysis with a CSV and should have moved to a different solution.
I suspect they don't actually want people abusing a plaintext editor as a note taking app, but are forced into supporting it on a basic level one way or another due to user expectation. Probably won't ever go as far as formatting features, but you never know.
But I would guess that something like 90% of people using Notepad are tech savvy or programmers where it can be used to view simple text encoded data. What programmer expects autocorrect for this? Why would anyone else use such a basic editor?
My workplace use notepad for every customer interaction for the past 15 years. We've only just started to move onto oneNote as it has password features and rich formatting which syncs nicely for quick interactions. I will miss notepad
> But I would guess that something like 90% of people using Notepad are tech savvy or programmers It's probably more like a 60% / 40% split across the world, though. The branding of notepad signifies it as a note-taking app, which it can never live up to. So we are always stuck with something that is bad for general use and bad for power users / coding.
Microsoft Notes?
Nah, they just got tired of other OSes having basic text editors that make Notepad look like it's from the fucking stone age. Like GNOME's gedit is practically an IDE by comparison to Notepad.
Its notepad. I don’t expect it to have features. I just want it to write and store text without it trying to correct or reformat anything. *When* I need additional features, I then use Notepad++.
Exactly. The less fearures notepad has the better. That's literally why I use it.
The grandfather of all editors is still there in linux - ed Released in 1973
I maintain my stance that Notepad's charm comes from the fact that it's a dumb text editor with no extra features. Would not be surprised to see Notepad get integrated ads to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 plan sometime in the future.
Am I wrong in thinking that, if you really want bells and whistles on Notepad, you could just download VSCode?
Notepad++ it's even in the name
Seriously. Everyone recommends Notepad++ as a must-have install, but I've always *liked* the fact that Notepad is the dumbest text program you could ever have. I use it as a notepad, which means what I write is always just for me so I can remember whatever bullshit I needed in that moment. The last thing I want is for it to start trying to predict what I *really* meant to write or to save shit without me saying so.
There is probably a better way, but I find myself using notepad the most when I want to strip something that I copied from like a webpage or something of all it's styles/font so I can paste it somewhere else without that stuff. Otherwise I tend to use notepad++.
I just discovered this the other day. There a Microsoft tool called "power toys". It has a bunch of features you can toggle on and off. One of them is you can define a shortcut for universally pasting without formatting. Game changer for me.
Notepad is for things you want to lose on restart, notepad++ for the things you want to keep (it auto saves)
Notepad started autosaving some time ago, at least for me.
Notepad++ is the most popular. I prefer Sublime Text 4.
Isn't Sublime the one that keeps spamming you with a prompt to upgrade to the subscription version?
I stopped using Evernote because of its insanely aggressive nagging to subscribe.
They still kind of feel like they're for entirely different purposes. VS code for programming/scripting languages and Notepad for just writing regular text
That you want saved nowhere (not run through Microsoft systems for spellchecking)
I thought it was the entire point! It’s plain text, black on white, what you type is what you get. You have Word if you need editing and layout. You have Sticky Notes if you need simple text with nice presentation. You can get Notepad++ if you’re a sweaty nerd who thinks “regex find-and-replace” is not only necessary, but cool. The only thing notepad has going for it is that it’s quick and dumb.
As a teacher, I use notepad when I show grammar mistakes specifically because it's dumb and lets me write the mistakes my students make without giving away where the mistakes are 👀
Same. I miss old notepad. It was literally just a huge text box with a file control. It was perfect.
Your not wrong. Their in my opinion are trying loop people into subscription software anyway they can, even using something like that. Notepad didn't need spell check, we'd use Word for that. (sigh)
...I actually think you need more autocorrect in your life.
Autocowrecked?!
msft will enshittify everything they touch until people give up and move to linux, which personally.....I am very happy about. Linux distros have gotten very good...very very good.
They were doing good when they were adding UNIX line endings and tabs, but now they're adding things that don't belong in notepad. It's a simple text editor. If you need those things then you need to be using a more capable tool.
Agreed. I use notepad ++ and would hate to see all the squiggly lines of everything I have in there.
Honestly my main use for notepad is pasting text to get rid of all it's formatting and url links quickly. SO quick!
Ctrl+Shift+V
In programs that support it.
It keeps the bullshit formatting now. Doesn't show it, but if you then copy it and paste it into whatever the bullshit formatting will still be there.
This doesn't work in Microsoft word
The main Office apps (Word, Excel, etc.) *finally* support it with the most recent update. Took until the year 2024, but Microsoft finally got on board with their own universal standard.
Don't worry, support for formatting is coming next update - Microsoft /s Tip: If you don't mind or want all the text in one line, use browser URL field for clearing formatting.
Notepad++ is life
They should make a new program, call it wordpad. It'd be like notepad and MS Word had a baby. GrwT idea, no?
Today, for the first time, my decades-long bestie Notepad.exe crashed. I wanted to deal with a large text. Pasted it. Then the autocorrect started running through, underlining most of the text, using up resources, it hurt me sensitivities, made my PC go loud. And the click to STOP THE GODDAMN AUTOCORRECT froze my notepad. Freezecrash. Evil! Settings > off with the devil. Or in my German version: Bearbeiten > Schriftart [!!!!] > Rechtschreibung
Just uninstall notepad and then you can use the windows 10 notepad
I was really unhappy with the red squiggly underlines suddenly showing up unannounced in notepad.
Squiggly lines I can live with, but automatic correction is also on by default. That will make people who just wrote a short batch file for example reasonably angry.
Fortunately it can be disabled with the gear in the upper right.
Shouldn't have been turned on in the first place. Notepad is a dumb text editor and nothing more. Microsoft already has Wordpad.
Wordpad is being deprecated for whatever reason. I think they're trying to push people to use the free version of Word Online to get them deeper into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It seems like they're adding a few bits to Notepad to compensate, but not sure why spellcheck of all things.
Fucking shareholders demanding ever-increasing YoY profits.
nooooooooooooooo
📎 Do you mean "moooooooooooo"?
> 📎 TIL the Windows rendition of the paperclip emoji is modeled after Clippy.
Or maybe you meant ‘pooooooooooooo”?
>nooooooooooooooo No. (this correction by Microsoft)
Dammit. I used Notepad specifically because there was no bullshit attached to it.
That's not gonna fly on Microsoft's watch. Nothing flies on Microsoft's watch except bullshit they are trying to stick to the AI-hallucinated wall
Gotta pump up those YoY profits Think of the shareholders!
Idiots. I use it mostly for notes to myself in client folders - abbreviated questions, bits of code, little of which would pass a spellchecker.
You can disable it.
That's good. I'm still on windows 10 but probably not for long.
Until you can't.
Notepad's major use is stripping formatting from copied text - I hope they don't ruin the one job they had.
I use notepad BECAUSE no spellcheck or autocorrect
Spell check is one thing. But auto correct is bane of any serious IT engineer
At first I thought I was going crazy when my text kept changing, like why on earth would I want auto correct on a PC? Just mark the damn word and I'll decide if I want it changed or not myself, thanks.
Terrible idea is terrible Notepad fills the void of free form They can't leave well enough alone
Noooooooooo. I dont want anything autocorrecting my text dumps, api keys, etc. notepad is perfect as is.
No! That's not what it's for! The last thing I want is notepad altering what I type. It's not a word processor!
Notepad++ for life
I ain't ditching Notepad++.
Honestly, never. Faster than Notepad with a ton of features.
God damn Microsoft is spiraling
Say... would that autocorrect by any chance be using a remote ms service that scrapes input data for whatever AI bullshit they are trying to sell ? The damn bubble can't burst fast enough, i hope it brings down a lot of garbage companies with it.
DO NOT WANT
Nooooooooooooo Notepad was the one place I could go to get away from this
Probably adding copilot.
This is literally the ONE place where I absolutely do *not* want autocorrect…
I don’t understand why it would have this but not autosave.
Getting rid of formatting was one of my main uses for simple Notepad. I can still do it. Spell-check? Auto-correct? Turned off. I never expected them anyway.
I like it. As long as its *super* easy to turn off, I use notepad to jot down story ideas and spellcheck can help.
Can I have the old notepad back please
Fuck no please. Notepad is supposed to not change a single character ever.
Notepad is supposed to be simple. If you want a slightly better notepad use wordpad. Anything more advance you use specialized software.
I wonder if this is linked to the AI data collection stuff, and they patched it into notepad
Great, break the only reason I use notepad. Fuck it all. I'm going back to emacs.
No. Stop it. It's a plaintext editor. That's what Wordpad was for, you con artists. Notepad for plaintext, Wordpad for rich text, and anything more than that you paid for features. But then they discontinued Wordpad, and now they're crufting up notepad with bloat.
Booo! Not cool! It's not a word processor. It's a text editor. If I wanted a word processor, Windows already comes with WordPad.
One of the most annoying “features” we find on every tech product where we type text.
Meanwhile Notepad can’t handle quick inputs from Barcodescanners…
For Zebra scanners, you can configure the scanner to slow down the output. I ran into this problem when my workplace switched us to Win11. I had used a scanner and notepad for inventory for many years. Suddenly, scanned codes wouldn't show up until I pressed ctrl or an arrow key, which caused the characters to display one-by-one. It also broke my text replacer program. Somehow, Microsoft made Notepad slower than Word.
Microsoft doesn't understand the purpose of its own application. The whole point of Notepad is that it's minimal. It's a tool for storing and editing plain text. It shouldn't have any bells or whistles. That's what Wordpad is for.
I really wish Microsoft would design Windows around the idea of "do as little as possible." I want Windows to be a base that everything else works on top of. Even stuff like Notepad, add the spellcheck and autocorrect but always have it off at default. Do as little as possible and let me choose what I want.
you've discribed linux
Surprised this isn't high up in the comments: That's just a way for them to add "AI" to Notepad. There was probably no data scraping going on in Notepad (which in itself is a surprise) and now they found a way to add it.
Feature creep nobody asked for. Should have just keep the WordPad and do whatever extra they want in there.
My first "IDE" losing it's main capability
Quiet autocorrect with no confirmation or undo is evil. I found out about this new "feature" recently, I was typing in Polish, but all my devices are set to English (as I can't stand Microsoft Polish, and English is better for debugging). And Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to silently change "i" (*and* in Polish) to "I" (first person pronoun in English). I understand red squiggly lines, I understand some software may not be aware of the correct language for spellchecking, but automatically and silently "fixing" things is just evil.
I use notepad exclusively to strip formatting metadata etc crap when I copy paste. No I don't want that name in big bold red letters when I pull it from a signature. I just want the clear text. Sometimes I want to keep formatting Sometimes I don't a quick jump to and from notepad is all I need. Sigh I'm too old for this shit I guess
Its good to have *speling chak* but will it cost speed ?
How many points do you think that story was?
Urgh. There is a niche that notepad filled amazingly, despite, or because, of its outdatedness. It was quick, throwaway, if I needed a scratch pad it would be there immediately. I don't need a note taking app. There are already hundreds, and a few really good ones. But I suppose this goes with Microsoft core value of bloat until it sinks... Ffs.
Autocorrect is a terrible idea for notepad
So they can track what you do in your notepad
Spellchecking I wouldn't mind, but I hope autocorrect isn't an always-on thing. I've used Notepad for holding a lot of text that I need to not have arbitrarily changed, like code snippets or keystrings.
Leave notepad and paint alone, they are perfect!
Please no, the simplicity of the program is why I use it to actually take notes. I don't care if I spelled a word wrong, I just need it to keep words on it.
I often write in Notepad so the words don't auto-correct and the red underline is distracting for when I'm just trying to get thoughts out and not be sidetracked with correct spelling. Added functionality actually makes it less useful for me.
I use notepad because it's so lightweight and simple. They're slowly turning it into wordpad, despite deprecating wordpad.
Notepad sucks now. For Gods sake, I only need it to launder text!
Oh Jesus. Come on.
OK, we here you about the long list of issues concerning Windows 11. So, in response, we put spell check in notepad...as a treat.
I'd say, "20,000 monkeys at 20,000 typewriters..." but that would insult monkeys and typewriters
Please clap
FIRE THE FUCKING IDIOTS WHO DECIDED THIS!!!
They should fuck off modifying their apps and changing things that don't need changing. I just found out how to disable tabs in the 11 version, and your calculator is a big ugly kid's toy these days
Literally the only thing I use notepad for is that I don't want any of the "help" features.
Probably a quiet way to feed their AI with more data
i dont want it it doesnt even work, coz i often write notes in 2 languages (danish and english)
Gross, they already butchered Paint
Just wait until they give it a ribbon, themes, ai and make it subscription based or put in app ads.
Why would you want that? Notepad is essentially a basic script writing thing. Grammar and spelling is most of the time supposed to be wrong for all that sort of stuff. This is part of the enshitification of killing WordPad, which is so stupid.
I bet this is only because they want the "spellchecker" to harvest your data.
thanks for taking out word and passing and making office subscription based.
For all the people saying Notepad++, VS Code is better in all ways. Snappier, more powerful, more extensible. Instant open like notepad.
I was writing code in it the other day and notice my formulas wasn’t working. Notepad needs to be barebones basic.