In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe goes from "barely maintained" to "it writes for you"

15 CharlesW 8 5/22/2025, 10:59:46 PM arstechnica.com ↗

Comments (8)

peacebeard · 1h ago
“Barely maintained” is a rude way to say mature, stable, and functionally complete.
Suppafly · 10h ago
I miss the original notepad that was barely maintained. I always knew if I just wanted to view something just as quickly and plainly as possible I could use notepad to open it, if I wanted more features, I'd use something like notepad++ or something specific to the type of file.

I do like that the new notepad remembers what you have open in unsaved tabs, but only because I use it mostly at work. On my home pc, I don't really want the "generic text file preview app" to remember every random thing I've ever pasted into it after I reboot.

WarOnPrivacy · 15h ago
Our end users have the same text file open in 22 consecutive tabs now. So I tweaked away that option.

And as long as I'm disabling stuff that wasn't asked for, copilot is gone too.

xeonmc · 12h ago
You can tweak away the new notepad entirely. It’s just an execution alias which you can deactivate. The win32 notepad will always be shipped with windows in two copies[0].

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060328-17/?p=31...

ciconia · 12h ago
Thank God for Linux...
RetroTechie · 1h ago
And editors without AI features integrated.
0x073 · 9h ago
And systemd
m463 · 13h ago
data collection funds everything, extinguishing anything that doesn't snoop.