- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Linux is extremely stable nowadays. Just download Ubuntu and you’re set.
I recommend people start off on either elementary or mint depending on the walled garden they’re used too. It seems to make the transition easier; especially for those who are less interested in tech and see the OS as a means to an end.
Some people just don’t want to learn new ways of working, regardless of how much it benefits them in the long run. My 78 year old grandad being my most recent convert to elementary (after a lifetime of mac OS).
He hasn’t had any issues with the transition thus far. Everything is where he expects it to be, I don’t think he’s even realised libre office is a different application to Microsoft office. Whilst I’m sure he’d have the capability of working out Ubuntu; I also think the effort would be enough to push him back towards Mac.
But yeah, a near 80 year old can use Linux without any training or problems, which I feel really emphasises your original point around Linux stability.
I prefer Kate. (Da best)
(It’s also Windows supported.)
My next toot will be drafted on a blank Libre page with no AI checking anything.
I have bad news for you. It’s in your OS, there is no space safe from surveillance in Windows. That said, LibreOffice is a pretty heavy and complex application compared to notepad. I’m sure they can find a much lighter and simpler text editor to use as a replacement.
I liked notepad for it’s simplicity.
Even notepad++ was way more complex than notepad ever was.
It literally just used ASCII (or similar) characters to a file. You can’t open anything other than text on it, it won’t allow you to attach pictures, graphs, videos or even links. You need to type out the damned URL in its entirety.
N++ is great for what it is, but notepad, aside from it’s simplicity, was also great because it was everywhere.
Windows 11 started the down fall of my favorite simple text editor when they introduced… tabs.
I hate that. I close notepad, and then open it again and… Why is all this shit still here!!!
Get fucked Microsoft.
Notepad++ is a great option if you absolutely need to be on Windows. I started using it at work because all of my colleagues were on it, now I install it on any box I have running Windows while I set them up.
The plugins are great on Notepad++ too! I use it for work, JSON Viewer makes raw jsons much easier to parse through. Compare is really nice too to compare different files and spot their differences.
Plus it’s one of the only editors left that gives a single shit about your computer’s resources.
Vim? Ed? Nano? Pico?
I never really thought about just how personal Notepad is for me. Even the Notes app on my phone. I wouldn’t want anyone to look through any of it. I write some embarrassing shit. Pointless backstories for my video game protagonists when they don’t already have one. Drafts for important upcoming conversations. You name it. Get the fuck out of my space. Fortunately I’m still using Notepad++, but I’m sure Microsoft will slide its dick into that too, eventually.
That’s how it felt when Google announced Gemini into Gmail.
A lot of my friends and family didn’t understand the issue.
Google said a decade ago that gmail is like your secretary parsing through your mail to hekp out with scheduling etc., it was never to be trusted
Feeling the same, and currently in process of dumbing down my tech and decoupling from major tech platforms. They really got us by the balls.
Long live open source!
Notepad++ is what real humans use
I feel like there’s a way to communicate “np++ is the best” without calling people fake humans, even as a joke.
You should maybe think about relaxing just a little bit.
Right. In this instance, with hindsight (noticed it’s a meme community), I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve seen similar cases where the intent was to push someone down, though. I wasn’t sure, and sided with caution.
I didn’t mean to act uptight, or attack the commenter (I tried a mild tone), my bad.
You’re good my dude. No harm no foul.
Are you concerned we might be upsetting the AIs?
Chatgpt told me no once and I’ve been traumatized ever since. I know my place, now.
That’s actually impressive, chatgpt is such an asskisser, you must have really wrong.
This is a pretty random Notepad story, but: in 1999 I was doing web development for Internet Explorer 6 (yes, I know) using Classic ASP and Visual Basic (5 or 6? I can’t be bothered to look shit like that up). Probably my most important debugging tool was the “View Source” menu option in IE6, which would bring up the raw HTML of whatever page I was working on in Notepad. One day the “View Source” option just stopped working, completely. Clicking that menu wouldn’t do anything at all; I tried everything I could think of but just couldn’t fix the problem. For six months I was basically coding blind - I had no way of directly seeing the HTML my code was producing.
Somehow I managed to still get my work done. Then one day I stumbled across an obscure forum post that said “View Source” in IE6 would not work if you had a shortcut to Notepad on your Desktop. I of course had a shortcut to Notepad on my Desktop since I kept everything on my desktop (yes, I know). I renamed my shortcut to “NotepadX” and suddenly “View Source” in IE6 started working again. Possibly the happiest day of my programming life. I played around with it and found that it didn’t have to actually be a shortcut to Notepad - it could be a shortcut to any program or file, but if it happened to be named “Notepad” it would block View Source from working.
I would give anything to find out where this particular bug came from. It’s really bothered the shit out of me for the past 26 years. I don’t see how it could ever happen accidentally, so I have to assume that some MS programmer somewhere really hated people with shortcuts to commonly-used programs on their Desktop and decided to punish them.
I love that story. Thanks for sharing. What a crazy bug. Maybe IE6 was integrating with windows in some weird way? I almost want to fire up a VM and see if I can replicate it. Think you can remember which version of windows it was?
IE was literally embedded into the OS. There’s no surprise there were bugs like that.
Wow! Thank you for sharing; what an weird bug! Perhaps some ancient code to make use of notepad for view source if available, then the available function got changed, for other reasons, to if on desktop, then a different version of notepad broke the chain of borked code?
Well, IE6 did open Notepad to show source by default, but it makes no sense why a shortcut to Notepad just existing on the Desktop would prevent that. Especially when it didn’t even have to be a real shortcut to Notepad.
Probably tried to execute Notepad.lnk, because Desktop came before /system in the path, and however they were calling it did not resolve the link before executing - and that meant a hang, silent error, or no op
I used notepad precisely because it lacks features beyond writing text, this is such an anti feature
I think in general you can also just expect that any OS, techy or not, ships with a basic, lightweight text editor. The fact that Windows seems to want to change that is an anti-feature for the entire OS.
SublimeText might be a good next option. :)
Isn’t notepad++ better?
Not if you don’t use windows, or if you want a more modern looking and less busy interface, or integration with what I consider the best git GUI. I used to use N++ long ago, but after trying ST I realized it just feels clunky.
My entire work brain is in there. Hundreds of tabs none of them were ever saved. I was recently looking for something and found notes I took 2 years ago. I love it but I also get why a lot of people don’t.
Not if you want less features. 🤷🏻♂️
Personal preference. :) I use it bare bones but like having the option to extend when needed.
Yeah I have that as well, and I’m surprised how fast and light weight it feels compared to something like VS code
Kate exists on windows and linux
Notepad++ does way more out of the box. I’m saying this as someone who has used npp for over a decade and been using Kate since last September since indefinitely switching to Linux.
It doesn’t have AI tho.
(Joking)
A more notepad similar program instead of Libre stuff (for windows folk) https://www.editpadlite.com/en.html
If you can find the original editpad floating out on the net, it’s notepad without the file size limit, ancient shareware. The pro version is pretty sweet too, one of very few pieces of software I’ve paid for out of pocket.
Found the original, Jan keeps it alive.
https://www.editpadclassic.com/I lied, no download there anymore, but it probably exist somewhere.
I mourn Notepad as well, but Notepad++ is great and it hasn’t smeared shit on itself yet.
Notepad++ really earning the ++ once again.
Notepad had one job. Operate on a damn text file. Operate on the damn text files I choose.
I knew it was going down the drain when I reopened Notepad and it opened the files that were previously open. No. Don’t do that. That’s overly helpful. You were only supposed to operate on the damn files I chose. These files I’m about to work with aren’t necessarily the files I previously worked on. If I want this functionality I might as well open it in vscode.
I’m, like, screw it, might as well keep Emacs running if I need random temporary text editing.
VSCode: We already have an IDE.
Windows: But what about second IDE?
Personally I find that feature (including tabs in general) very helpful and is something i’d expect from a text editor in the 20th century.
Just my opinion. To each their own, but just wanted to share that it might also be many others’ opinion too.
I think I’d be able to agree with you if new notepad didn’t take a noticeable time to load. It used to be the 2nd fastest thing I could launch, after the Run dialog itself.
Meh, sounds like a worse version of notepad++, which has been very popular and reliable since the early 21st century.
If they make notepad more bloated than notepad++ then I’d use it even less.
But each to their own.
See I’d use Notepad++ if I was coding or doing any kind of actual file editing.
However, when I’m at work and need to take a phone call, the tabs in Notepad and the auto saving are literally game changing for me.
That being said I haven’t bothered with the AI stuff in it at all, and it feels as usual, Microsoft doesn’t stop when they have a Good Thing already, they keep pushing it beyond that point for their interests. And now we’re left with not a basic editor but a personal assistant.
Long live Linux and freedom of choice.
But that is literally what I use notepad++ for: tabs, keeping unsaved files (good for temporary things like reminders) and also because I swear it opens faster than notepad.
Gotta agree here with you. Yeah theoretically maybe someone really just needs a text editor with absolutely no additional convenient features (maybe the older versions of Notepad allowing different fonts and word wrap was too much for someone as well?). But this is such an objective improvement in 95% of usecases it’s kind of ridiculous to complain about it.
I like how the tabs save when I close notepad. Its super helpful when I just need to jot down some quick notes or a serial number or something.
And I’m really dumb so I often close my notepad window before I’m done and this feature has saved me numerous times.
I don’t have copilot in my notepad tho. Which is good.
The best part is that it even retains unsaved documents (and unsaved changes in existing ones), which makes it very feasible to use Notepad as sort of an extended clipboard. Surprisingly good thinking for Microsoft.
In the 20th century I’d expect something that can open, edit and save plaintext files. But we’re 1/4th of the way into the 21st century.
I find I have two uses for a plaintext editor: plaintext, and computer script. I don’t like using rich text editors like Word for writing notes and such because the formatting options just get in the way; plaintext lets me “just write.” And for this, there’s very little automation that will be helpful.
In the Linux ecosystem, plaintext editors are all trying so hard to be IDEs. They’ll close parentheses or quotes or whatever for you, and if you’re doing something like 15" to mean fifteen inches you’ll get two, you’ll hit backspace and it’ll take both away…it doesn’t help.
If I’m programming anything of any size I’m going to open an IDE, probably because I’m working within some ecosystem. If I’m writing a couple lines of Bash I’ll probably use Vim. So I’d rather tune my plaintext editor to write actual .txt files, as prose.
3rd use perhaps being syntax recognition?
That would fall under “computer script.”
I am either:
- Writing in plain human English, in which case I need a PLAIN TEXT editor. Maybe I want spell check and stuff like that in it.
- Writing computer code, for which I’ll use a code editor or IDE. Maybe I want syntax highlighting and bracket closing and auto indent here.
FYI, you can turn this feature off. Click on the gear icon, scroll all the way down, there’s a new section called “AI features”, which has a toggle switch to disable Copilot. Once you flip it to off, Notepad looks and behaves precisely as it did in the past.
EDIT: also, you need to be logged into a Microsoft account and have an active Copilot Plus subscription for any of the AI features to even work. If you try to use them without a subscription, you just get prompted to sign up for one.
I hate it when my technology tries to be smart. Be predictable, you piece of junk. I dont need my laptop to sleep when I shut the lid because all that foes is stop it from shutting down. And opening it doesnt need to turn it on ffs. I blame company policy.
I miss when things were simple, predictable, and you could simply work around them.
Learn to use Vim. It can be anywhere and everywhere.
Vim is hell to learn (a few weeks), but the second best time investment return I’ve made of any skill, ever (1st was learning to walk).
Yeah, but if you’re forced to use Windows, then installing and running vim is a nightmare (unless you want gvim, but I don’t think anyone wants that).
Huh, I never noticed any issues when I used to use gvim (a fair few years back, mind). What’s the problem with it?
Does it run this new OS? emacs? It’s a great OS but doesn’t have a great text editor.
with emacs evil mode, you can add a pretty good text editor to the emacs ecosystem: vim
No, no, no, you’re thinking of iMacs which are Apple’s all in one desktop offering. But thy can definitely run MacVim.
