This is the best summary I could come up with:
The feature is not immediately accessible in any current Windows Insider build, however, enterprising users have ways and means to delve into the operating system and haul out experiments that are not yet ready to see the light of day.
A pop-up menu titled “Cowriter” is visible, with options to tweak the format and content of the text.
Microsoft has been hard at work ruining updating Notepad in recent years.
Its GUI was updated with the introduction of Dark Mode, and tab support turned up in 2023.
Something else could have been added to Notepad instead of AI but hey gotta ride the hype train."
AI in Notepad, as shown in the screenshots, does not seem to make much sense – we’re sure the wise Register readership could think of something more appropriate for the editor.
The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The bot’s actually not AI powered, but uses Sumy to algorithmically create a summary.
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
Because AI is obviously better at solving math than the code programmers wrote. Duh. /S
In all seriousness, if you show Bing Chat an equation, it will go through the steps and solve it clearly, it’s actually really helpful. I really don’t understand all this hate for AI just because it’s AI. New technology is cool and useful, and I’d understand hating it because it’s made by Microsoft, I try to use free software including free AI, but AI in itself is not bad or useless.
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.
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 love Paint because when shit started hitting the fan in windows, Microsoft’s neglect actually elevated Paint to the best stock program on there. It’s the only image viewer I use on windows because it opens instantly and takes practically zero resources. Even large images can be opened faster than the crappy calculator, which is still the same calculator from Windows 8 by the way. I hope they never touch paint again.
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.
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.
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.
bound out RAW HTML and other code in notepad
You’re someone who likes pain huh?
Explorer still can’t do it though.
Wait, it does now?! Hell freezes over?
It does contain random political statements however which is sometimes concerning.
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.
It’s because apparently being anti Russia, anti authoritarian and pro Ukraine is…pOliTiCaL
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.
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.
But… MUH BUZZWORDS!
(I really hate the Reddit-style overuse of that word.)
That one and “FAFO” in its various incarnations can take a break for a bit, IMO
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.
They’re sacrificing the utility of the tool to make it part of their new AI-driven operating system as a service platform.
You don’t know that. You have no idea how this “cowriter” will be integrated. It could be just a little button off on the side, maybe with a setting in the configuration to hide it entirely, and you can ignore it completely.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)
Neat, TIL of another app. Unfortunately, it looks like development has been abandoned. The last update was from 13 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.
I always thought that my local use of a plain text editor should use a lot of CPU power (and electricity) in a huge data center.
