Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Why is there no proper text editor like on other systems - oh, right, M$ wants to sell office 365 subs! "Well, you can download-", yeah, sure let's have grandma go to Huckter Joe's Totally Not Trojans inc. JUST TO EDIT TEXT! IN FUCKING 2025!
it really is weird how much proprietary OSes gatekeep basic-ass good text editing, and how absolutely nothing mainstream includes even basic developer tooling anymore. there’s a big, unnecessary moat around development and I don’t like it.
Does Windows no longer have notepad?
Apparently it's infested with AI now - maybe PowerShell ISE is the closest thing to a reasonable text editor that comes with Windows nowadays, and that's only because it's a deprecated app they haven't removed yet
I feel like AI is the antithesis of notepad, conceptually.
edit: antithesis, not activities. Thanks, autocorrect, for rendering my comment nonsensical.
Microsoft deprecated powershell ISE in favor of vscode. No new versions of ISE will be released going forward.
Vscode/vscodium is a whole lot better to work powershell in, but it sure ain't a basic text editor. The days of first party basic text editing are gone on Windows.
is notepad good?
I haven't used Windows for years, so I can't say what it is now, but it used to be great for note taking (as you might guess) and basic text editing. Basically anything that didn't require any formatting. In fact, I used to use it to remove formatting from text during copy and paste back before "paste without formatting" was an option.
If you were making a joke and I was oblivious, I apologize.
no joke, I just don’t like notepad and how Microsoft’s handled its development. I feel like it’s by far the weakest built-in plaintext editor I’ve used across multiple OSes, and there’s so much easy stuff they could do to make it better, but instead they’ve shoved in a bunch of shit nobody asked for like AI of all things, so it’s not even particularly lightweight anymore
usually if I have to touch windows I find notepad++ on Huckter Joe’s Totally Not Trojans inc or emacs if I’m in hell again (long term development for a corporation that only does windows) but there’s a lot of reasons to want a better lightweight built-in option
I think it depends on what you're trying to do (with the versions of notepad I've used). It's great for just putting a bunch of text in a file. If you want to do literally anything else, it sucks, but it serves its purpose well.
I'd rather use vim for the most part, but if I have to take notes in Windows, notepad was my go-to.
I used to use it to remove formatting from text during copy and paste back before “paste without formatting” was an option.
Last year when I was forced to use Windows for work, I noted that "paste without formatting" didn't always remove all formatting. So I still needed a text editor to do that.
Fantastic, just fantastic.
Wow, and this does not even touch on all the news, tops, widget garbage set as default ux. There is no place for Trump or Musk on my PC yet when I tried W11, each boot was basically a countdown to me seeing their ugly mugs by hovering in a wrong place and getting full screen news overlay.
I've been asking my work to turn these off. We have banks of computers for online trainings, and clock in/clock out etc. It gets really old trying to open things and getting the overlay. On my personal work computer before I traded in for a work provided one I had completely gotten rid of a lot of this crap. It irks my soul that it's back now because IT doesn't consider it to be problematic enough.
some of the settings windows appear to be really old windows stuff that got sort of just hung on there. Which is fine if they work but the whole GUI is a bit of a hodgepodge. It's like they took old windows, threw a new incredibly clumsy GUI on top, and also abandoned the effort halfway.
The settings system has been that way since like Windows XP. This is not new to 11, except that they added a new layer of gui styling to the mess, but that happened in 10.
Windows 10 and 11 periodically beg me to turn on OneDrive and 365 and switch Edge to the default browser and stuff like that
Thanks, I enjoy the diaries of other peoples' software pains! I hope I will be able to avoid Windows 11 forever. Not counting on it, though.