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Microsoft IT

The Slow Transformation of Notepad Into Something Else Entirely Continues (windows.com) 77

Posted by msmash from the who-asked-for-this dept.
Microsoft is rolling out yet another update to Notepad for Windows 11 Insiders that adds table support and faster AI-generated responses, continuing a transformation of the once-minimal text editor that has drawn sustained criticism from users who preferred its original simplicity. The update, version 11.2510.6.0, lets users insert tables via a formatting toolbar or Markdown syntax and enables streaming responses for the app's Write, Rewrite, and Summarize AI features.

The Slow Transformation of Notepad Into Something Else Entirely Continues More | Reply

The Slow Transformation of Notepad Into Something Else Entirely Continues

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  • WordPad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Monday November 24, 2025 @11:47AM (#65815303) Homepage
    I thought that was what WordPad was for. They cannot eliminate the plain text functionality of Notepad without making Shift-Ctrl-V standard across all applications.

  • Buggy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Monday November 24, 2025 @11:50AM (#65815313) Homepage

    *NOBODY* asked for this. This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what people use Notepad for. And because of these transitions, they've turned Notepad into a buggy piece of shit. Each update, more and more basic features have become unusable. They even broke basic ability to type into it in certain circumstances, ya'know, literally its most basic core feature!? Oh, right, "AI" should be typing for you now I guess!? UGH!

    • *NOBODY* asked for this.

      Exactly the response I've seen to at least 90% of whatever new features were being hyped by the marketing rags since Win8 hit.
      Glad I have no particular use for Microsoft anymore.

      • Win 10 was decent ... M$ really jumped the shark with 11. Fortunately doesn't affect me much. Moved almost completely to Linux Mint a few years ago, and only run Windows in a little padded VirtualBox cell to run a few specific programs that don't work anywhere else (and don't need Internet access, so it doesn't get it).

        • I disagree. Win 10 was awful. The licensing terms were awful. The in-os adverts were awful. The dark patterns in config settings that tried to prevent you from being able to turn things off were awful. The mandatory online account registration was awful. That's just what I remember off the top of my head.

          Win 7 was the last version of windows I ever used outisde of work, and I didn't even like it very much. Vista and 8 were dead on arrival so when Win 7 went out of support and Win 10 was the only viab

          • Online account and in-OS ads are pretty easy to bypass or turn off. The other stuff, sure, but again all mitigable under Win10. Windows 11 went from making those things inconvenient to disable to making them impossible to disable, and added so much more.

    • Also, for those who need advanced features like tables and spell check, isn't Wordpad still a thing in 'doze 11? The whole point of Notepad is to be able to edit text files essentially verbatim - for composition and formatting, better software already exists. But Satire Nerdella knows better, obviously.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        Also, for those who need advanced features like tables and spell check, isn't Wordpad still a thing in 'doze 11?

        No, it's not. It was removed in an update some time back, to push people into an Office subscription.

      • Microsoft killed wordpad. It seems that a small text editor with basic formatting and some text-related features was NOT something people wanted.

        Which makes the inclusion of basic formatting and some text-related features in notepad even more baffling.

        • They could have just kept it as part of Windows ... no cost to them to "ship" an existing .exe file.

          Nope, they killed it because it's adequate for word processing for a lot of non-technical people, but they wanted to nudge and nag people into paying them $100/yr for an Orifice 365 subscription. Got to keep milking the sheep.

    • oh contraire mon frere (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The person who asked for it was some guy at Microsoft who got a promotion for "impact".

      At MSFT if you want to get promoted you have to show "impact." You are not rewarded for effort. The awful incentive system at Google was more or less ported over to MSFT when Satya took over for Ballmer. Yes the old culture was toxic but changing away from a culture of engineering excellence and product-driven development was a big mistake.

    • This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what people use Notepad for.

      What people? Be specific, there's a billion PC users out there. Do you speak on behalf of all of them? Or just the tiny niche techie minority (sorry guys we are not the common user).

      Notepad into a buggy piece of shit. Each update, more and more basic features have become unusable. They even broke basic ability to type into it in certain circumstances, ya'know, literally its most basic core feature!?

      Curiously what bugs have you encountered in Notepad? So far I've hit none. Can you describe in what scenario you weren't able to type in Notepad? I'm curious.

      • Nobody gives a fuck about your shitty smug âoecuriosityâ, you smarmy insufferable douche.

      • What people? Be specific, there's a billion PC users out there. Do you speak on behalf of all of them? Or just the tiny niche techie minority (sorry guys we are not the common user).

        Everyone on earth hates the new notepad.

    • Just download an alternative from the official repos.

      Oh, wait, I forgot we weren't talking about Linux here...

  • Notepad (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Haven't noticed any notepad changes since I don't use it to begin with, so I'm not irked that they're changing it. For me it's gvim, though I have heard notepad++ is good.

  • You have options (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Monday November 24, 2025 @11:52AM (#65815319)

    Use something better like notepad++, if you are still using notepad maybe change your workflow. I realize that this can be difficult if you are doing tech support on someone elses machine.

  • If this doesn't bring it into existence, nothing will.

  • Somewhere in Redmond (Score:4, Funny)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Monday November 24, 2025 @11:54AM (#65815327)
    Fluorescent lights burn bright over a windowless basement cubefarm. It is 1:24 AM, and Bill Alberts, 48, is living his best life.

    Due to an org chart mishap, he has been given exclusive control over a neglected application shipped in the base install of Windows, and he is having going nuts, adding every feature he ever dreamed of.

    He knows his time is short; soon enough some auditor will notice. He reviews his (HIS!) feature roadmap with a combination of anxiety and glee.

  • Can you install classic Notepad or a barebones editor without the AI vermin infesting it and just not use M$'s latest abortion?
  • If notepad becomes unusable, try notepad++

  • Quick tip: this is where MS lost it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cley Faye ( 1123605 ) on Monday November 24, 2025 @12:08PM (#65815375) Homepage

    When microsoft execs wonder "why are people not happy with out products?", this is where we should point them toward. (I know they never ask themselves this question, unfortunately). As far as windows tools were concerned for the last forever, they had notepad: extremely barebone text editor, and wordpad.

    Notepad go-to use was to "clean" the clipboard, or note something super quickly. Nothing more, nothing less. For every other usages there was a better tool. And conversely, there was no tool that ensured that a copy/paste would be clean better than notepad.

    They also had wordpad. I never really knew what it was for, but it could do some amount of formatting/page layout, and could save usable enough files. It filled the niche of people that wanted "some" formatting beyond bare-bone notes, but did not want a full word processor supposedly.

    Then came microsoft, killing wordpad out of the blue, and putting all of these features (and more, obviously) into notepad. Basically, they consider that the use case for wordpad is still present, since they keep the features up, but they renamed it "notepad". And in doing so, they removed the actually useful notepad, in favor of go fuck yourself.

    It is impossible for most of us to understand how far removed people making these decisions are from the real world.

    • Other than Win95&98, I haven't been really unhappy with their products. I'll buy the product and use it until it won't run on whatever new hardware. The "removal...from the real world" is that the customer is now the large-percentage stockholder (who uses neither Notepad nor Wordpad).

    • Re:Quick tip: this is where MS lost it (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thoriumbr ( 1152281 ) on Monday November 24, 2025 @01:08PM (#65815491) Homepage
      I worked on a large IT product provider some time ago, and what we are seeing is dev teams having to do something to justify their employment by "doing something, anything."

      Performance monitoring meetings take into account new things you created, functions you changed and things like that. Notepad was basically the same since Windows 95, with added long filenames, UTF8 and something else behind the covers, but the UI was basically set 25 years ago. Great for us users, not so great for the dev future...

      So then management asks: "What innovative things have you done lately?", devs have to do something. AI is the new thing? "We added AI in Notepad." Cloud is the cash cow? "We dumped a free product (Wordpad) that could somehow compete with our Office365 offerings."

      Devs hate it, us users hate it, but it's just a nice looking line on the manager's spreadsheet: "Number of AI features added to legacy products" or "modernized legacy software" or another BS lingo like that...

    • Notepad go-to use was to "clean" the clipboard

      I'm sorry what? Why are you opening an app to clean your clipboard? If you need to strip short text just literally paste it into any text field, heck paste into the windows search field does the job. If you're cleaning paragraphs of text then it sounds like you're pasting into something that supports paste-special. Notepad isn't a tool for this, literally any windows textbox works equally for this.

      Nothing more, nothing less. For every other usages there was a better tool

      Actually it was more. Plenty of people use it to open text files, or make quick edits. You may not, that doesn'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Torodung ( 31985 )

      Download Microsoft Powertoys [microsoft.com] (not to be confused with Sysinternals [microsoft.com]). Universal, unformatted text paste available. No more shuffling it through Notepad.

      There are a lot of quality of life features in it. All I do now is hit CTRL+ALT+V and plaintext, universally for the most part.

  • Want the simplicity of what Notepad used to be? Mousepad is for you. Too bad it's not available for Windows.

    Windows users will just have to suffer with whatever complex, bloated piece of yak manure Microsoft comes up with next.

  • The real deal, of course, is that users should not have any "raw text" files to edit anyway. Those that do may, sooner or later, want to do other things outside the Microshop.

    Office, Onedrive, Outlook - the world is wonderful but don't even think about changing a settings file, dear customer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Torodung ( 31985 )

      No. That's what Regedit (I use Registry Workshop) is for. There haven't been flat-file text configs since, I dunno, Windows 3.0? Everything beyond that, Windows 95+, it's just legacy jank. I like that 3rd parties refuse to use the registry, especially if it's a portable app, but I wish they'd let you know when they do. And then there's the whole AppData kerfuffle. Is it in Local? Local Low? Where the hell did you put your text config file?!

      Many Win32 and AMD64 programs have plaintext configs, as do games. Y

  • Am I the only one fatigued by Windows news? We don't need a news story about an update to a text editor
  • This is like taking the paper notepad I jot my weekly shopping list onto and including an encyclopedia, internet presence, and marketing department spam. The end result is that there is no longer room to write anything down. Oh and they turned my pen into crayon.

    -and no, not that pen.

    • I am employed in a full-on MS shop, where our laptop environments are pretty locked down. So I am subject to all of the Microsoft nonsense. Like effing paint.exe is also begging you to activate Co-pilot. Like every-single-time-I-open-the-application. And as others have noted, the very reason that the bare-bones applications are useful is because they only have limited options. No need to navigate through multiple menu options, etc.

      I use Paint for notations on quick screen grabs that I am using to te

  • Notepad with features is OneNote.

  • Markdown was already partially supported in Notepad for Windows 11. This appears they are just adding markdown functionality that was blatantly missing. You have to manually select View -> Formatted to even use this, otherwise it stays just a plain text editor like normal.

    As far as the Write, Rewrite functionality. Have no idea what that does. But once again it already existed and they are just "improving" it. This is also something you have to manually select to use. Or just use it just as a pl

    • Markdown was already partially supported in Notepad for Windows 11. This appears they are just adding markdown functionality that was blatantly missing.

      Why would I want that? And which version of MD? I'm aware of at least 3 different versions (meaning 3 difference sets of commands); all because the originator of MD refused to create a definitive standard so we all suffer ... not that I can remember the weird commands most of the time (is *this* bold or was it **this**, and why doesn't /this/ give me italics when it did in that other program, etc). Unless they're going to also add a preview pane so you can see what MD you entered does (like VScode does), th

  • it's all been shit since edlin
  • Notepad++ it is then.

  • You can literally tell Notepad to shut it all down. All of it.

    Figure it out. It's in settings. The settings keep changing, but you can dock it all down to no-AI, no tab memory, does "exactly what it used to, and no more."

    And if that's not good enough for you, get Notepad++ already. It's a much better text editor and can do markup and automatic indentation of code with a closeable tree. Most of what I used Notepad for was editing .cfg, .ini files, and scripts, and I expect that's what many of us do here.

    Only

    • Sometimes updates re-enable those settings, hahaha.

      You can't unenshittify Windows. You're gonna take it in the keister!

  • As someone who has scarcely ever interacted with winblows in the past decade or so, I just have to say, reading this is really pretty funny. Microsoft is like a parody of themselves.

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