this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
This is not enshittification. Here's where the term came from:
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.
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.
I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.
I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.
There is no need to coin a new term, when "rent seeking" has done just fine for hundreds of years now.
This is not a new concept.
But… MUH BUZZWORDS!
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
Perfection.
That one and "FAFO" in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
Shockingly, I don’t know that one! I thought I read FIFO before rereading that.
“Fuck around and find out” for everyone else who didn’t know.
Ahhhh THAT overused phrase. Of course we’d have to acronym/initiaism it.
At least we don’t (yet) have PSGWSP. Ugh it felt gross typing that.
I do too, considering it never needed a new term to begin with. This isn't a new concept, and we already have a name for it: rent seeking
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...
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.
Leaks of company secrets will increase.
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)
Unfff pump my veins full of Notepad++. I wanna feel the autosaving tabs course through me. I need that tabbed indenting experience. AAAAAAAAAAA
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.
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.
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
Neat, TIL of another app. Unfortunately, it looks like development has been abandoned. The last update was from 13 years ago.
LiteXL is also pretty good.