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Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.

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Telemetry said a lot of people were using notepad so if they shove AI into it the AI usage number goes up.

Wordpad confused too many people looking for Word and not finding Microsoft 365 for Family Workgroups Home Edition, especially after they boosted Windows 10 Wordpad to have enough features/power to replace the lost word processor of Microsoft Works, so it was removed.

That's a patently absurd reason (although I could totally see it). They could have just renamed it rather than destroy the value proposition of Notepad.

True. Though some of that destruction to Notepad isn't just the loss of Wordpad's fault but Microsoft's problems with Notepad++ eating its brand for too many years and making too many "must install" lists.

I'm not entirely sure how Copilot integration helps them beat Notepad++, but I suppose that's why I'm not a PM.

Why would they care about Notepad++'s impact, though? Nobody is deciding whether or not to use Windows based on Notepad. For some of us, Notepad was most useful in its original form and Notepad++ was not a good replacement.

But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe

As someone else who has never particularly liked Notepad++ either, I mostly agree that chasing after it is a mistake, especially this many years after Notepad++'s height in relevancy. Perhaps ironically, many of those same "must install" lists that included Notepad++ have moved on to other tools, one of them being Microsoft's own VSCode. VSCode is a "good, helpful" AI host to sell more AI, so I presume some "AI in Notepad" pressure is "capture the few remaining people not yet installing VSCode out of the box".

> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe

Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit

You're a little behind, it's Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium now

(They may have turned it into a joke, but that is the truth https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-microsoft-365...)

Maybe these days for interviews, instead of calculating how many golf balls fit in a schoolbus, they can calculate how much time, money, intellect, and brand goodwill they've spent renaming Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot. Then add in how much time, money, and intellect everyone else has spent trying to figure it out

Though to be fair I wasn't trying for accuracy, I also included throwback digs from Windows for Workgroups and Microsoft's "Edition" phase. (Windows 98 Second Edition; Windows Millennium Edition; etc.) Particularly because "Edition" will probably come back around and has already partially done so. (Some of the Microsoft 365 nomenclature does refer to the "home edition" versus "work edition", but for now it is still a little-e SKU difference and not yet a SKU Brand.) Microsoft marketing has gifted us so many terrible brand names across a long history of trying to find the worst, most generic brand names. (To which you can partially blame the "Great" marketer that looked at WordStar, WordPerfect, and many others and suggested to Microsoft the generic "Word" was the best approach. If you own the generic the only way to rebrand is to stack more generic.)

Office and Windows are good words. Copilot is a good word.

Microsoft and 365 are ok.

Microsoft should really be the hidden name like Meta or Alphabet.

Office Copilot is a great name. Of course they didnt use it.

Oh I know, it was tongue-in-cheek in the sense of "it's tough to out-satire these folks"

I'm not sure if they'll manage to top this one ("Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 SP3 Feature Pack") https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=442...

I might title this piece, "Full STEM without liberal arts"

Today I ran an into an issue with Notepad while at work. I tried to open and print a .txt document for an order, and it completely failed with some type of filesystem read error. Didn't save the log, since I was in a hurry to place the order, but a quick google search didn't help at all. Granted, the file is in a Dropbox folder, so I thought could be affecting it somehow, but notepad++ opened it just fine. Sure, using notepad to type and print orders isn't the best possible work flow, but it's always worked for me in that same setup previously.

I tried to explain why my document printed with line numbers to the recipient (who isn't particularly tech savvy), and felt like a crazy person while doing so.

Looks like I'll be using notepad++ going forward, with line numbers off, and I'm pretty confident they'll respect that preference and keep shipping software that works.

The purpose of Notepad, for Microsoft, is that it is an experimental playground, and always has been.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...

I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take.

Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly?

Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.

Tabs and auto-recover are welcome additions (but still cannot compete with the likes of Notepad++).

Tabs are fine I guess but also: it's NOTEPAD.EXE. Its purpose to be super primitive and launch in 2 milliseconds and give you a place to paste or type some text real quick. Anyone who needs a good text editor with actual features will just download the good text editor of their choice.

> Tabs and auto-recover are welcome additions

They were very unwelcome to me.

Simple example of the newly poor UX. I try to start notepad to jot down some scratch. It sluggishly reopens whatever it previously had open (e.g. from before a reboot)...and in doing so, doesn't actually create a new document for me.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. For my use case, it rendered Notepad unusable.

Then turn off session resuming? Turn off Copilot? They're options in the Settings menu, if you don't want them.

To wit: "Second was how he got Notepad to load files so quickly"

So much for that

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