Microsoft’s Notepad; The Best Advertisement For Notepad++ There is

Maybe Killing Off Wordpad Was A Bad Idea … Just Like Your Users Said It Was?

Notepad used to be a lovely plain text editor, useful for stripping out odd formatting and characters from documents that had been through one too many conversions.  You could usually count on it to not hide invisible characters or line breaks when tweaking a bit of code and it was an oasis from the unwanted help many Microsoft products continually offered you.  If you needed a bit more advanced features and didn’t want to pay for Microsoft Office then there was Wordpad to come to your rescue.

Those days are long gone, just like Wordpad.  Instead Microsoft is shoehorning in a variety of features into Notepad which no one ever asked for, nor wants.  Nowadays if you fire up Notepad you will see it is tied to your Microsoft account and that Copilot button is sitting there staring at you.  You will also see Microsoft’s AI infecting the right click menu, offering to rewrite the contents of your document or to write it for you from a few prompts.

Notepad++ on the other hand can do all of that and more, if you want it to.  You aren’t forced to have these features, you have to add them manually, or not at all if you don’t want them.  If all you want is to work with plain text and not have bizarre hidden characters and formatting sneaking in, it looks like Notepad is now your worst enemy.