They also introduced a critical security vulnerability into notepad where they just had the markdown links shell execute
open linkwhich allowed just installing arbitrary software as long as the link was valid instead of just opening a browser.If you managed to get the file onto a person’s you could execute it by having the person click on the link.
If for some reason you’re stuck on windows, might I recommend notepad++ ?
Kate is great and available for Windows, too!
But also beware as notepad++ has had a security breach recently.
So has everything.
A text editor shouldn’t be having security breaches.
Technically it was the server for updates that got breached, not the editor itself.
Neither should Windows itself. But here we are. And have been for some time.
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Wordpad? I’ll stick to Word Perfect 5.1, thank you very much.
Word.
(or actually, Word. The one that ran on DOS and looked like an Emo version on QBASIC. I liked that thing).
GNU EMACS is RIGHT THERE in WINDOWS
You can INSTALL IT
(Well you can’t install it, you kinda just dump it in Program Files)
PEOPLE have been EXTENDING it for DECADES SAFELY
WHAT are you WAITING FORWell, since you asked… I’m waiting for guile-emacs to make a breakout like neovim did.
wait what the frick since when were they updating Notepad
Since Microslop Windooze 11:Enshittified Edition.
Win 11 has been a privacy/anonymity/usability nightmare. Thanks in no small part to MS enshittifying absolutely every corner of it with AI. Right down to grabbing it by the notepad.
Since last year.
As much as I liked old notepad, it is a pretty decent markdown editor.
I love most of the changes they made, but Copilot can fuck right off my Notepad. It’s supposed to be fast and offline.
Tabs were a welcome addition, but that’s where the good idea train swiftly leaves the rails.
What we needed was a built-in hex editor, and maybe some better tools for working with unicode that you can’t just type in on whatever keyboard you have.
Instead, they turned it into WordPad, which we already have.
Its not even wordpad. It only supports markdown not rtf… it only exists so they could easily shove copilot into it.
I get the saltiness about Copilot but this is getting ridiculous.
It got dark mode, sessions, tabs, and a Markdown viewer. How are these bad changes? How do these “only exist so they could easily shove Copilot into” them?
(btw, you can disable Copilot from Notepad with three clicks)
Notepad was supposed to be the simplest lightest weight text editor. It didn’t need to change.
Let’s try from a different angle: which functionalities of Notepad have been lost?
Well I’m not on Windows anymore so I can’t test it out. Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of
**bold**I wouldn’t want it to do anything other than show the literal text, and anything in that direction is a loss via added friction.
Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of bold
- You have to manually switch the display mode from raw to formatted for the formatting to show.
- It only works for saved
.mdfiles.
True, but IMO it makes a lot more sense to support markdown under Wordpad than Notepad since the controls and doc-style layout/rendering support is already there.
it only exists so they could easily shove copilot into it.

hex
Does windows power toys have one?
No idea. I want to say ‘yes’, but the last time I installed Power Toys was under Win2k.
Notepad’s sole purpose is to remove formatting from copied text.
It still does that job perfectly fine.
ctrl+shift+v is your friend
Doesn’t work everywhere…
But but but that’s unacceptable!
Custom hotkey to trigger simple plaintext clipboard script, couldn’t live without it.
(“Script“ is a scary word for many of us but you probably only ever see the code once or instead use some free open source clipboard manager that has “replace clipboard with plain text“ built-in.)
—
Anyway you’re right, I probably still use a similar workaround once a week!
Unsurprisingly Microsoft products are the least consistent with it
Not always (looking angrily at you Outlook, meanwhile your brother Excel excels (ha!) at doing this while inputting data).
Fuck excel. The default should be to leave whatever the fuck I paste in there alone. If I want you to reformat shit I’ll tell you to reformat it.
??
Everytime I paste something it there, the formatting (for better or for worse) stays on whatever the source was.But at least you can use the CTRL + Shift + V to paste it unformatted (Unlike Outlook)
Is it annoying enough you’d actually want to try fixing it or is the Notepad workaround good enough?
Neither.
I juat don’t really care as I’ll use the start menu to strip it.
Amd (at least ony machine at home and work, the default behavior is to strip the format and write plain text
Try doing upc codes and see how you feel about it.
Oh yeah…Data type pasting is…Interesting :p
that doesn’t usually work when copying between different Microsoft products. it always fucks it up somehow or simply doesn’t let you
That command gives me a bunch of more hoops to jump through
You can use Neovim (or any CLI text editor) for that
Unfortunately it has a use. Microsoft discontinued WordPad
I hated wordpad. New notepad is so much better than the old. An undo on old notepad would undo the last 1-7 sentences randomly, and wouldn’t redo. Remembering notes is also good, and I love markdown.
I don’t use the ai and it never was in the way of what I needed, so whatever.The last time I used notepad the undo option worked both as undo and redo, since it only kept the latest change and undoing was also a change that could be undone.
I sometimes put together long bash commands to pull docker image updates. I would take five minutes building up a command, make a typo, pressed undo by muscle memory and most of what I typed out would be gone with no way to undo.
This was no one time occurrence, because I’m too lazy to pull up vscode or something else, it would be a weekly occurrence.
I cried when that old piece of junk updated to the new notepad. Never had that issue since.
I was devasted when I heard this
What am I supposed to use when ms-word breaks itself while I’m offline now
notepad
Images don’t work very well, but I guess you don’t need those if you have an imagination
Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.
However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.
That’s a funny way of saying “Re-install Windows 10” or “install Linux”
(I don’t use Arch btw)
(also, yes. The .bak thing works)
Isn’t notepad an LLM client now?
Waiting for the rename to copad AI.
CopePad
Feels like everything is. Might as well describe every app by it‘s (now) secondary function.
Some apps just have it as primary function now…
See Copilot logo in top right
Disable the Copilot logo with three clicks.
(Don’t get me wrong - I hate that they shoved a fucking LLM front-end into Notepad, but let’s not be silly and pretend like it’s all shit now. It still does the exact same job it always did)
@REDACTED@infosec.pub @RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip
@programmer_humor@programming.devI’d say LLM is a notepad client now.
That makes no sense even if you ignore the fact that Copilot can be easily disabled in Notepad, and it doesn’t directly load with the app (as in: doesn’t slow down startup or anything like that).
Notepad works just as it always had, it just has dark theme, tabs, sessions, and a Markdown viewer now.
@Alaknar@sopuli.xyz @programmer_humor@programming.dev
Well, I confess I’m in no good position to say anything about Windows 11, for I’ve been a daily Linux-only user (Arch, by the way) for almost a decade.
However, as far as I’ve seen about Windows, AI (especially that spying feature designed to take screenshots and create a lookup-able timeline, “Microsoft Recall” if I recall (pun intended) correctly) seems to be so intertwined with Windows that even the Windows Explorer’s Shell has now a hard dependency on AI-related and Microsoft Edge-related libraries. This way, if someone were to try and purge the Windows from AI-related crap, it will break the OS, Explorer simply won’t launch.
Also, “can be easily turned off” implies something that comes enabled by default: the exact same dilemma behind Mozilla Firefox and all the crap they’ve been imbuing inside the browser. In the end of the day, it’s a non-consented relation. The fact it can be opted-out doesn’t make it less of a non-consented relationship, for the non-consented relation already happened as the user proceeds to opting-out of it. In other realms of legality, it would be considered a crime, but as it’s something done by corporations (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google), they it’s suddenly “a-okay”.
Don’t take this as an attack against yourself, but holy shit, where are you getting your news from? Do people seriously believe that everything is AI in Windows now?
Recall is not yet live (it’s available as a preview feature), you have to enable it manually, and even then you can disable it easily.
Copilot barely does anything. They’re basically shoving the button wherever they can to goad people into using it, but that’s mostly it.
“Purging” the OS from “AI-related crap” would purge it from AI-related crap and not break anything (source: did this on my previous work laptop)
Also, “can be easily turned off” implies something that comes enabled by default
It’s a button. If you click the button, a Copilot interface loads with the file you’re editing pre-loaded as context. Unless you click it, it does nothing other than taking up space. You can disable the button from the Settings.
I agree about all the opt-out/opt-in stuff, but also understand why a company catering to 80% of the market defaults to opt-out - users are dumb, they have no clue how to explore features, so opt-in features remain forever disabled for 99% of them.
And then Apple does an update with an identical feature enabled by default, and everybody goes “damn, if only Microsoft thought of this!”
I don’t understand what “crime” you mean.
@Alaknar@sopuli.xyz @programmer_humor@programming.dev
Don’t take this as an attack
It’s okay, no offense taken.
where are you getting your news from?
Mostly from Lemmy, but also from Gizmodo.
Do people seriously believe that everything is AI in Windows now?
Tbf, it doesn’t help the fact that corps are shoving AI into everything they can and can’t. I’m far from being Anti-AI, but when we live in a world where everything is being AI-fied, I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment “Windows = AI”.
Recall is not yet live (it’s available as a preview feature), you have to enable it manually, and even then you can disable it easily.
As far as I read, it’s partially true. Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall “to improve productivity”, anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.
They’re basically shoving the button wherever they can to goad people into using it, but that’s mostly it
It’s a button. […] Unless you click it, it does nothing other than taking up space.Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features “summarizing”, “auto-formatting text” and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.
“Purging” the OS from “AI-related crap” would purge it from AI-related crap and not break anything (source: did this on my previous work laptop)
Okay, fair point.
I agree about all the opt-out/opt-in stuff, but also understand why a company catering to 80% of the market defaults to opt-out - users are dumb, they have no clue how to explore features, so opt-in features remain forever disabled for 99% of them.
I heard the same during a discussion about Firefox here in Lemmy. “Users are dumb, so corp needs to guide them through the new features by enrolling them automatically”. Whenever I hear about how “users are dumb”, I can’t help but wonder how the so-called “dumb users” are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph or, even worse, (it doesn’t even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone’s lives)!
And then Apple does an update with an identical feature enabled by default, and everybody goes “damn, if only Microsoft thought of this!”
Maybe it’s because iThings aren’t socially pushed as Microsoft things are. You said yourself: Microsoft is “a company catering to 80% of the market” dominating the PC market, not Apple.
what “crime” you mean
Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it’s software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.
Mostly from Lemmy
Yeah, Lemmy is weird, especially the tech-related communities for some reason. It’s like: “if it’s not Linux and FOSS, it’s literal cancer, unless it’s Microsoft’s, then it’s literal radioactive and aggressive cancer”.
I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment “Windows = AI”.
100% agreed. However, as with any other opinion, fundamentalism is bad, m’kay. I get why people are tired of AI (I’m in the same boat!) but there has to be rationality involved.
As far as I read, it’s partially true.
That’s just ordinary standard click-bait from a tech site. They themselves mention that the rollout will be “to beta users”, that means Insiders. Insider builds are very different from regular builds and many features are force-enabled in them.
Which makes sense: if you’re making the very conscious decision of signing up to Windows Insider, after going through the warnings about the nature of the program, you should know full well about what it comes with.
I was reinstalling my wife’s Windows recently and was asked if I want to enable Recall, with a very prominent “the feature is in preview” on the screen.
Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall “to improve productivity”, anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.
Oof, there’s a bit to unpack here.
-
If it’s workplace, it’s not the employee’s device, it’s the workplace’s. Nothing the employee does is private, that’s the whole point of managed devices. Nobody ever looks at what the employee does (unless their manager is completely fucking insane), because nobody has the time for that, but in case of, say, litigation, or such, the data is there. Recall isn’t needed for that.
-
Microsoft has zero access to Recall data. It’s 100% local (hence the “Copilot+ PC” requirement - these are the PCs that have CPUs with an “NPU”, or “Neural Processing Unit”, allowing them to run LLMs locally without killing performance).
-
For hackers to get to this data, they’d need to break the network security measures, the account security measures, anti-virus security measures AND BitLocker. Which is to say: a hacker getting access to Recall is the least of a workplace’s worries, because it means they’re effectively wide open to the Internet.
-
There’s not much in Recall that you can’t extract from the browser’s cache. Many of these things are actually less useful, because even if you steal someone’s password by scraping Recall data (and that’s assuming something goes wrong and Recall doesn’t redact it), you won’t be able to sign in from a different device due to MFA. However, if you have such deep-level access to the device, you can, instead, steal the token used for logging in - that one usually already comes with the MFA token, so you can sign in anywhere.
Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features “summarizing”, “auto-formatting text” and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.
Those features - to my knowledge - only work on the devices with the NPU, which is to say: they run locally. I haven’t really looked into it, though. Either way: they are fully optional and dormant until the user clicks them.
Whenever I hear about how “users are dumb”, I can’t help but wonder how the so-called “dumb users” are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph
Check any news source for the road accident numbers. You start to see a trend now?
or, even worse, (it doesn’t even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone’s lives)!
Did you not notice who won in the US last year?
Maybe it’s because iThings aren’t socially pushed as Microsoft things are
How do you mean? The only difference I can think of is that Apple users are generally more enthusiastic towards Apple products than MS users. That being said, we’ve seen countless times that whatever Apple does is called “revolutionary”, whereas when MS does, people don’t care. First touch-screen phones: Microsoft. Best digital assistant: Microsoft. Best optimised mobile OS: Microsoft. Etc., etc.
And we’ve already seen that recently with Recall - Microsoft announced it, and people lost their shit, talking about how dangerous that is, how security is 100% compromised right now, and how everybody has to switch to MacOS or Linux.
Then, two weeks later, Apple announced it’s identical but less secure version of Recall, and there was nothing overtly negative in the media about it. Some sceptical articles here and there.
Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it’s software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.
That’s, unfortunately, not how it works. I agree that dark patters suck and people who use them should be banned from making any executive decisions regarding software ever, but most of the time when people are complaining about dark patterns these days, it’s completely benign shit.
Like, come on, a button showing up with a new feature is now a “dark pattern”? Let’s be real here.
-
So… they removed Wordpad to push people into using Word… and now they removed Notepad to push people into… this monstrosity? Why does Notepad support hyperlinks now?
Back when I used Notepad, it was to strip out rich text formatting and reliably get consistently distinct text, especially if I configured it to use a monospace font. Now I have to worry about embedded hyperlinks sending me to God-knows-where?
If you are stuck in Windows, use Notepad++.
Control + Shift + V pastes as plain text.
*sometimes
I always thought the default font used by notepad, courier, is monospace. But I mostly stopped using windows years ago so maybe that changed
notepad has formatting now? o_O
does it produce markdown or something?
Yep it’s markdown, and yep they had a CVE with second highest grade cause of it
heh, ofc. Apparently something to do with file:// and such uri handling, apparently executing local files? Yikes.
not just local files
if you click a link to file:///123.45.67.89:69420/files-download/virus.exe it will download and run virus.exe from that IP address
it still works, but now there is a “Dangerous Link Location: This is not a web link and may lead to the execution of malicious code” warning, but previously it would silently run the file.
kinda wild a file-link ever went straight to executing it after download - which on it’s own could be dangerous as well.
I guess the “the s in IOT stands for security” also applies to notepad: “the s in vibecoding stands for security”
Aren’t CVE grades meaningless anyway with how they are declared in real world?
We run CVEs through our software inventory and configuration and come up with a new score that measures how bad it is for us.
It’s a UWP (i think? they renamed the platform twice already) vibecoded app now, notepad.exe still around.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn’t un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
I’ve totally fallen for markdown. I want more normies to know about it.
All the nice things about rich text with none of the Word.
Sad RTF noises.
RTF requires special software, whereas you can easily read Markdown in a console. It’s superior in every way.
If you use the formatting bar to format text, it unlocks the View→Markdown menu which has two options - Markdown or Syntax. This allows you to toggle seeing the source or formatted markdown.
If you do not use the formatting bar to format text, markdown is not enabled. I manually typed in text in markdown format and the menu didn’t un-grey.
You can go into the app settings and turn off formatting, which will hide the formatting toolbar.
I think you really have to work hard to be offended by this.
Additionally, for those Notepad Purists™ who are offended by any features being added… Tabs are handy. And having it auto-save drafts and auto-open them is also handy - for me. Maybe you don’t like that, but you can disable the auto-save in settings. Can’t turn off tabs, but you can set it to open in new windows, so pretty close to disabling that.
If this is what drives you over the edge to use Linux… okay, bud, have it your way - and I’m a Linux enthusiast, so I’m all for it. But being pissed off by something you have to specifically enable seems a bit silly to me. It’s the hallmark of fascism - “Other people have the right to exist! FUCK THAT!” - a little hyperbolic, but the principle is vaguely the same. :P (And what’s the internet without hyperbole? :) )
STOP DOING “STOP DOING MATH” BUT ACTUALLY WANTING TO STOP THE DOING
- TEMPLATE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY STOP DOING MATH
- YEARS OF SNOWCLONING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for “greaphic desgni is my PASSION:”
- Wanted to play satire straight anyways for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called “FORREST GUMP”
- “Yes please give me pictures of BAD TEXT on backgrounds. Please give me BADDIES of it” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Memers have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the imgurs & reddits we built for them:
STOP DOING ‘STOP DOING “STOP DOING MATH” BUT ACTUALLY WANTING TO STOP THE DOING’ SINCE IT WANTS TO STOP THE DOING
They have played us for absolute fools
wut
Markdown support is actual nice and useful.

This, but he’s yelling “plain text” instead of drainage.
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Not embracing every bullshit data mining change tech companies shove down our throats is fascism, got it. An intelligent, well reasoned, not at all fucked up thing to say
Yes, you have accurately characterized what I said and didn’t miss any of it in the slightest. Well done, you. Congrats on not completely missing the entire point. I am honestly impressed by the complete lack of comprehension. Nicely done.






















