572
Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
198 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 264 points 2 years ago (67 children)

You know what's free (as in beer and speech) and not being enshittified? Notepad++

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 67 child comments
    •
  • [–] 100 points 2 years ago (17 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 17 child comments
    •
  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Hardly "stolen". Suff like tabs is very basic that n++ didn't invent.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago

    And even if Notepad++ had invented it, it's not "stealing" to do the same thing. Notepad++ still has its tabs, nobody stole them. Copied them, maybe. Inspired by them, perhaps. "Stolen" is just a deliberately emotion-baiting term.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 12 child comments
    •
  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I suppose we could point to emacs for formatting and syntax highlighting

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
    load more comments (1 reply)
    • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • load more comments (2 replies)
  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago* (32 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 32 child comments
    •
  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago* (13 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 13 child comments
    •
    load more comments (13 replies)
  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    But… MUH BUZZWORDS!

    (I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    That one and "FAFO" in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Shockingly, I don’t know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    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...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
    load more comments (2 replies)
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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)

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
    load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I haven't noticed any of this. Where are you seeing them?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • load more comments (2 replies)