There’s AI Inside Windows Paint and Notepad Now

Welp, time to delete that shit and find replacements. Notepad++ is a solid upgrade over notepad, there must be something similar for paint that doesn't have a steep learning curve?
- PaintDotNet is what I used to use on windows. It was a great upgrade without being too complex.
  
  PaintDotNet is perfect if you only need some commonly used "pro" features. It's a relatively easy transition from paint.
- Haven't seen these two paint alternatives mentioned yet:
  Krita
  Inkscape
  
  I think Inkscape is brought up less often because of its focus on vector graphics, which can be confusing to people new to it.
  
  I'm using pinta. When I type "paint" in my xfce search bar, it already brings it up automatically.
  
  Those are nice tools but they don't replace paint, they're way more complex.
- GIMP isn't that hard to use for basics.
  
  Does that even run on windows without a bunch of hoop-jumping and some jank-ass chunky qt-style UI elements? I seriously haven't looked at GIMP in like 25 years.
- Tux Paint

When you start adding bloat to notepad you know withea doubt you've really jumped the shark. Get fucked Microsoft

Man, does ANYONE needs this? Probably no one. This addition is just another way to force people to use AI so they can gather more personal information about that person. Specially with Notepad.
Will people be able to do thing without AI on the future if it's being pushed so hard on everything? Like, they want to make our brains smoother and dumber lol
- The worst part is if I'm using a work computer or something, I can't just type into notepad anymore without considering that a record is being made.
  Is there a Windows+R "oldnotepad.exe" that just works pre-installed?
  
  Notepad++ has a plugin that makes it the default even for things that would normally be go to Notepad.
  
  You can either uninstall new version of Notepad or return to the old one using some registry trick (look it up).
  Or you can download some version of Microsoft Notepad on the internet (probably not really that safe) or even ReactOS Notepad if you really insist of having such simple program, but using I'd recommend to use something like Notepad++ instead.
- "Bro, if we keep feeding the AI more and more data, he willl be like a real human, then will be cracking sick jokes with me. He will be my first real friend!" -- Elon Musk probably
  
  He will be my first real friend
  🤣🤣🤣
- Nobody's forcing you to use it. I didn't even know it was there until this article pointed it out, and when I tried it in Notepad it turned out to need an Office 365 subscription that I don't have. So by default I can't use it even if I want to use it.
  
  So by default I can’t use it even if I want to use it.
  You can use the feature for free by using Microsoft's Copilot chat bot, making the subscription requirement even more stupid.
  
  Nobody's forcing you to use it.
  At least not there. For now.

I truly can't fathom why microsoft are so bad at these things. I actually like the photos "app" on windows but it recently updated to instead of allowing cropping and rotating to having a colourful button for "edit in designer" which doesnt open anything, creates a blank photos window and crashes.
They are so bad at improving customer experience. I have an opportunity next month with our cto and cio and I am hoping to get across just how shitty they are to deal with and interact with.
- Please keep us updated!
  
  We are saving literal millions a yeae by moving from google. Its a bottom line decision, the best I can hope for is to colour their view to hold the opinion against the savings in discussions down the line.
  Sharepoint overcomplicates everything.

Notepad is perhaps better known as a code editor than a word processor
How many insane people are using notepad for software development that it's "better known" for that?
- I think most everyone who is sane has moved on to coding in MS Word by now. Much better, and you can italicize and bold parts of the code for emphasis.
  
  Case sensitivity in the language is soo last year. Formatting sensitivity is the new hottness!
- Maybe they saw somewhere that people use it to format text and assumed that has something to do with programming.
- It used to be common.
- <funfact> The majority of the early internet (HTML) was mostly created in Notepad and similar basic text editors. </funfact>

The whole point of Paint and Notepad is that they're extremely simple and no-frills.
If MS really wants to add this bloat, it should be to their Office suite.
- I think the whole point of Paint and Notepad is that they are installed by default. They are there to give you the most basic functionality MS can offer without charging you extra. Now they are simply trying to get some extra money by funneling users to AI/MS 365.

These are good alternatives for Microsoft's Notepad and Paint:
For Windows:
Notepad++
Paint.net
For Linux (and other operating systems):
KWrite (or Kate if you want to have more advanced features like Git integration, project explorer, extensions, etc.)
Pinta (it recently got a pretty good 3.0 update, with GTK4/Adwaita integration)
- Kate is also available on Windows.
- Almost any default text editor on Linux is better than Windows notepad, and many are straight up better than Notepad++
- Photopea. Why bother with paint or a download when it's all in a browser and Photoshop lol
  
  Great, shitty web UI instead of shitty AI UI.

Switched to Linux Mint at home, quit my Windows developer job, and having a great time. I’ll never go back.
- In my house 3 computers are already running Linux (Raspbian on Raspberry Pi, Debian testing on my PC and openSUSE on a family laptop), and I already talked with my dad to install Linux on his personal laptop as well, which is probably going to be Linux Mint (I am planning to replace openSUSE on other laptop with Linux Mint as well, because openSUSE sucks).

Holy shit is notepad just fucking ruined.
I don't need any of that shit I just need to view a short log or something on someone elses computer. Now it cant do that without auto saving and reopening shit.
Nobody is writing a document anyone cares about with notepad just fucking leave it.
- Notepad++ is good.
  
  Switching to Linux is even better.
  
  Ya but I'm not installing that on other people's computers. Also its more than needed for notepad things.
  
  double the Ai?

They need to put AI inside the AI next and add a couple more full screens of ads , some subscriptions and super ultra premium++ edition OS DLC for functionality to save files.

Out of curiosity I've tried the AI feature in Paint (on my work computer) to erase something and use AI to fill in the background
I was removing a line between two items on a flowchart, background had diagonal colored lines in a regular repeating pattern (think college ruled paper at an angle).
Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!
- I've been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn't write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I'm a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.
  But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you're doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.
- Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!
  Paint has two AI models depending on your hardware, whether you have a "Copilot Plus" PC or not.

And that AI is not free either. They bundled it with the Office update

Win11 Paint annoys the hell out of me. This is it. We are breaking up. I'm going back to old Paint.
I ditched Notepad for Metapad years ago.

Pinta has become my favorite image editing tool. Every other one I feel like I have to fight with in order to do anything (looking at you Gimp), but Pinta is so easy and intuitive it's a joy to use.

A1… it’s all computer!

On mobile so excuse my not linking to site but winaero tweaker has links for instructions how to replace current notepad with the classic notepad. Haven't looked back since.

Good news everyone!!!!!
Microsoft Ctrl-C copy is now fully AI!

archive?
- You know you can just copy the URL and prepend it with "archive.xx/" right?
  
  couldn't you just link it (archive.is)