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

14 CharlesW 6 5/22/2025, 10:59:46 PM arstechnica.com ↗

Comments (6)

Suppafly · 3h 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 · 7h 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 · 4h 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 · 5h ago
Thank God for Linux...
0x073 · 2h ago
And systemd
m463 · 5h ago
data collection funds everything, extinguishing anything that doesn't snoop.