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AI Has Come for Sweet, Innocent Notepad
(gizmodo.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I love notepad++, but to me, both have different uses. Notepad is like my basic sticky pad just to copy-paste basic stuff to it and come back to reference throughout the day. Also, notepad opens instantly and everything else is slightly slower. It's just the reason why I like it more. Notepad++ is for editing and manipulating data for me.
One of the uses of notepad was also that it's installed by default, and was a place you could be assured wouldn't mess with your text. No formatting, no weird characters you didn't ask for.
Notepad++ is great, but you can't be assured it's installed on any arbitrary Windows machine.
And ephemeral unless you specifically wanted to save something. Since I got win 11 at work instead of disappearing on reboot the next time I open it I get 50 fucking notepad instances and I can't find the actual doc that would've been useful to save because its in a background tab. Fuck this shit.
You can turn it off, but the fact that you have to go into the settings and toddle about is ridiculous.
It's a notepad, why does it even need settings to twiddle?
Oh my god that drives me nuts. I haven't saved it so why is it still here?
Can't you install Notepad++ to a thumb drive and run it by just plugging it into a Windows box? As a bonus, you can save Ann your text files to the thumbprint so they're always right where you expect them.
You can, but plugging thumb drives into work machines is not always kosher
I don't have admin privileges and can't install Firefox on my work computer but I can install Firefox on a thumb drive and then run it from the thumb drive because IT admins are idiots
I totally get that.
Check out Textpad. You might like it. The only nuisance with it is the default config settings are a little oddball (things like keyboard shortcuts, etc). But it's highly configurable so you can set it up the way you like and then it's good. It has more features than Notepad, but it's still pretty simple and can do cool things like search files / folders for strings, has regex support, etc. But the extras stay out of your way and it's pretty clean and simple for "notepad-like" usage.
Thanks! I will try it out. It's always great when you find a new app to use.