Notepad

AI sure killed the motto KISS. Copilot for notepad is literally using a nuclear reactor to light a single bulb.
- Figuratively
  
  That too.
  
  Literally has meant figuratively since it first appeared as a word in the 1700s and this usage is listed in every major dictionary
  https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html
  
  The use of "literally" is part of the figure of speech you're pedantically referring to. Saying "figuratively" would be redundant, as everyone knows Copilot is not a nuclear reactor, and also declaring that you are using a figure of speech "weakens" it (like /s for sarcasm). By saying "literally" they are saying "wow, this fits so well that this isn't even a metaphor anymore".
  If you want to correct everyone for saying literally instead of figuratively, correct every teenager saying "I'm actually dying rn 😂" with "ackshually you're not ACTUALLY dying, as I can see you are still alive typing tips fedora"
  
  I do apologize for using exaggerated words to beautify my sentences, tostiman, sir.
- Gotta scoop all the data from everywhere on your machine, even the temporary notes you don't save.
  
  They're not temporary any more, they keep coming back, I keep forgetting and then my PC reboots and I need to make a quick note and have to wait for 50 zombie text files to rise from the dead.
- The new moto is “keep giving me money stupid”
  How wasting billions on AI accomplishes that goal, I don’t know but I’m sticking with FOSS apps and platforms just to be safe
- The first nuclear reactor was used to light a single bulb. Presumably it was either an incredibly inefficient bulb or an incredibly inefficient reactor.
  Anyway this is all just an extension of everything having an app.
  
  Using an actual nuclear reactor to light a single bulb is literally using a- I'm kidding. I leave lemmy for a couple hours, come back and see a total armageddon, all because there are picky people about the use of words.

i installed arch on my laptop almost 10 years ago
I have to fix something maybe once a year and I only update once a week, if i remember
reboot maybe one time in a month
the myth that you need to fix Linux constantly needs to die
- My fiance is constantly fighting with windows 10 and 11 because shit breaks on there all the time. The challenge isn't that Linux breaks more often, or that troubleshooting it is harder, it's that if you have experience with how Windows breaks, and how to troubleshoot windows breaking, Linux breakages and troubleshooting feels entirely alien.
  
  I feel that, but in the opposite direction. I'm used to Linux, so the weirdness of Windows is alien to me, and every time I have to try to fix a family member's computer ("hey you're good with computers, aren't you? Could you take a look at a problem I'm having?" I'm a sap like that) I feel absolutely baffled as to what's broken and how it's even possible for that to break in the furst place.
  
  I am a system admin and have to run a ton of Windows servers, I feel it. If you don't keep up on the patch notes shit can get bad without even realizing it. I hate Windows for all the crap that is layered on it but it wouldn't be so bad if Microsoft didn't change shit just to change it and move stuff around without a good reason. The forcing of things is what really makes me upset. IDK about your AI shit Microsoft! ITS NOT HELPING
  
  Sadly I have to disagree. If I have an issue on Windows, I just can never find an answer because every result on my search is the microsoft forums, which of course never has any solutions that work.
  On the other hand, specifically for arch, the arch forums always have the answer for me because there are actual smart people on there.
  A side note, windows and their products always have terrible documentation, which can add to the frustration at times.
  
  Tbh, I disagree. Troubleshooting on windows for me became "reboot or reinstall it." Back in the days before 10 sure, but after it just got to the point where even microsoft support doesn't know how to do anything either.
  In contrast, I have a problem on linux, I google, I find a stackoverflow page with the answer in a few terminal commands which are usually explained, sometimes I go check that program's manual or help page before I use it, but the command usually does fix the issue.
  And it's not like you never have to use the terminal on windows, flash drive corrupted by windows and needs to be restored? Diskpart is here and it sucks but it works, CLI though. Editing conf files too, had to find (that was the hard part) and edit a conf.json file last week for a friend of mine who was installing a windows service.
  
  Even when I had only used windows, windows issues are so opaque, and the microsoft forums sucks. sometimes, the only advice anywhere is a "microsoft representative" saying to run sfc scannow and when that doesn't work, you're on your own.
- I switched from W10 to Fedora KDE a little over a month ago, and the amount of troubleshooting I had to go through during this time is unlike anything I've ever faced with Windows. I think I have a handle on things now, but the switch to Linux as a casual user was not as seamless as I'd been told over and over.
  Others experience may be different of course, but in my experience Linux is not as easy to use as Windows.
  Still happy with my choice to not swap back to Windows though.
  
  I have the exact opposite experience: I recently installed Fedora (stock, so Gnome) and had 0 issues. It was easier to install that Windows. The sidenote is that I have a Framework laptop, so my hardware is fully supported. And I was a Linux user before, so nothing looks alien to me. I didn’t need the terminal to get everything working, including wireless printing.
- I don't know what you're talking about because when I tried Linux it was a nightmare. The only thing that worked properly ironically was the printer. It's straight up would not play sound, if I plugged in headphones it would play sound but it would not play sound through the speakers. There were lots of people telling me I needed to install new sound drivers, or run arbitrary commands. None of them fixed it.
  It ended up being a problem with the USB driver. That's ridiculous, I shouldn't have to mess around with a driver for an internal component.
  
  Sounds like my experience from a while ago.
  
  What distro?
- With the apparent rise of immutable spins, it might get to be even less since user space is separate the OS space. I'm trying Aurora on my laptop to see if there is any advantage to running an immutable spin over the standard distros. I'm kind of torn about it right now, there are some advantages to both and some downsides to both.
- Same experience here. Despite rolling release and everything.
- What I will offer from my limited experience is that the Mint install I have will begin to topple over after a few weeks if I don't run updates, whereas my Mac will soldier on without missing a beat if I miss several months of updates.

This is a pretty random Notepad story, but: in 1999 I was doing web development for Internet Explorer 6 (yes, I know) using Classic ASP and Visual Basic (5 or 6? I can't be bothered to look shit like that up). Probably my most important debugging tool was the "View Source" menu option in IE6, which would bring up the raw HTML of whatever page I was working on in Notepad. One day the "View Source" option just stopped working, completely. Clicking that menu wouldn't do anything at all; I tried everything I could think of but just couldn't fix the problem. For six months I was basically coding blind - I had no way of directly seeing the HTML my code was producing.
Somehow I managed to still get my work done. Then one day I stumbled across an obscure forum post that said "View Source" in IE6 would not work if you had a shortcut to Notepad on your Desktop. I of course had a shortcut to Notepad on my Desktop since I kept everything on my desktop (yes, I know). I renamed my shortcut to "NotepadX" and suddenly "View Source" in IE6 started working again. Possibly the happiest day of my programming life. I played around with it and found that it didn't have to actually be a shortcut to Notepad - it could be a shortcut to any program or file, but if it happened to be named "Notepad" it would block View Source from working.
I would give anything to find out where this particular bug came from. It's really bothered the shit out of me for the past 26 years. I don't see how it could ever happen accidentally, so I have to assume that some MS programmer somewhere really hated people with shortcuts to commonly-used programs on their Desktop and decided to punish them.
- I love that story. Thanks for sharing. What a crazy bug. Maybe IE6 was integrating with windows in some weird way? I almost want to fire up a VM and see if I can replicate it. Think you can remember which version of windows it was?
  
  IE was literally embedded into the OS. There's no surprise there were bugs like that.
- Wow! Thank you for sharing; what an weird bug! Perhaps some ancient code to make use of notepad for view source if available, then the available function got changed, for other reasons, to if on desktop, then a different version of notepad broke the chain of borked code?
  
  Well, IE6 did open Notepad to show source by default, but it makes no sense why a shortcut to Notepad just existing on the Desktop would prevent that. Especially when it didn't even have to be a real shortcut to Notepad.

But why vivaldi of all things?
- People are too wussy to use waterfox or at least firefox. Just gotta have a chrome variant I guess
  
  Everything now, except for FireFox, is a WebKit/Chrome variant.
  
  Should've picked Brave instead it at least gives you a better user experience.
  If you're wondering bout the crypto stuff, all that can be turned off in under 1 minute in the settings. Turned it off years ago and forgot about it until someone once brought that up in a conversation.
  I also use other Browsers like Floorp, Waterfox, Chrome, Librewolf etc.
- What’s wrong with Vivaldi?
  
  further contribution to the google chrome hegemony
- Its UI and UX are very nice, I loved it while I used it, however, Im now using waterfox for privact reasons.

Notepad had one job. Operate on a damn text file. Operate on the damn text files I choose.
I knew it was going down the drain when I reopened Notepad and it opened the files that were previously open. No. Don't do that. That's overly helpful. You were only supposed to operate on the damn files I chose. These files I'm about to work with aren't necessarily the files I previously worked on. If I want this functionality I might as well open it in vscode.
I'm, like, screw it, might as well keep Emacs running if I need random temporary text editing.
- Personally I find that feature (including tabs in general) very helpful and is something i'd expect from a text editor in the 20th century.
  Just my opinion. To each their own, but just wanted to share that it might also be many others' opinion too.
  
  Meh, sounds like a worse version of notepad++, which has been very popular and reliable since the early 21st century.
  If they make notepad more bloated than notepad++ then I'd use it even less.
  But each to their own.
  
  I like how the tabs save when I close notepad. Its super helpful when I just need to jot down some quick notes or a serial number or something.
  And I'm really dumb so I often close my notepad window before I'm done and this feature has saved me numerous times.
  I don't have copilot in my notepad tho. Which is good.
  
  Gotta agree here with you. Yeah theoretically maybe someone really just needs a text editor with absolutely no additional convenient features (maybe the older versions of Notepad allowing different fonts and word wrap was too much for someone as well?). But this is such an objective improvement in 95% of usecases it's kind of ridiculous to complain about it.
  
  I think I’d be able to agree with you if new notepad didn’t take a noticeable time to load. It used to be the 2nd fastest thing I could launch, after the Run dialog itself.
  
  In the 20th century I'd expect something that can open, edit and save plaintext files. But we're 1/4th of the way into the 21st century.
  I find I have two uses for a plaintext editor: plaintext, and computer script. I don't like using rich text editors like Word for writing notes and such because the formatting options just get in the way; plaintext lets me "just write." And for this, there's very little automation that will be helpful.
  In the Linux ecosystem, plaintext editors are all trying so hard to be IDEs. They'll close parentheses or quotes or whatever for you, and if you're doing something like 15" to mean fifteen inches you'll get two, you'll hit backspace and it'll take both away...it doesn't help.
  If I'm programming anything of any size I'm going to open an IDE, probably because I'm working within some ecosystem. If I'm writing a couple lines of Bash I'll probably use Vim. So I'd rather tune my plaintext editor to write actual .txt files, as prose.
- FYI, you can turn this feature off. Click on the gear icon, scroll all the way down, there's a new section called "AI features", which has a toggle switch to disable Copilot. Once you flip it to off, Notepad looks and behaves precisely as it did in the past.
  EDIT: also, you need to be logged into a Microsoft account and have an active Copilot Plus subscription for any of the AI features to even work. If you try to use them without a subscription, you just get prompted to sign up for one.
- I hate it when my technology tries to be smart. Be predictable, you piece of junk. I dont need my laptop to sleep when I shut the lid because all that foes is stop it from shutting down. And opening it doesnt need to turn it on ffs. I blame company policy.
  I miss when things were simple, predictable, and you could simply work around them.
- VSCode: We already have an IDE.
  Windows: But what about second IDE?

For folks who cannot do this due to it being a work-controlled machine or otherwise, you can use notepad++. (Obviously id rather this be a tipping point to ditch all the junk at once, but sometimes that isnt feasible)
That said, i find i still need a throwaway notepad for fast trashy notes. In that case ive just uninstalled the new notepad and re-downloaded the legacy notepad then re-aimed "notepad.exe" to the legacy one.
There are a few guides out there, just search your standard "how to get legacy notepad"
- That said, i find i still need a throwaway notepad for fast trashy notes.
  My sibling in Talos, what do you think the tabs in N++ are for?
  I have >100 tabs in my N++ install because it's so easy to throw some trash note in there forget about it, then be able to search all open docs for some random keyword I threw in there.
  
  I use n++ for fast notes that I might need later, such as quickly making a step-by-step instruction as I go along, and notepad as a glorified clipboard for stuff I don't want to be available later.
  Having more than 100 notepad++ tabs would trigger the neat freak in me and force me to go through them all to save the important ones and delete the unneeded ones.
  
  Yeah you don't even need to save every new tab that you have random stuff noted down in. They've recently added a new feature to pin tabs as well, so I'm actually considering just making a notes.txt file somewhere and pinning that instead of all the new tabs I end up with.
- No need to download anything really.
  Go to System -> Optional features and verify that Notepad is listed and if it isn't add it.
  Go to Apps -> Advanced settings for apps -> App executions aliases and disable Notepad.
  Enjoy the classic notepad again.
  
  Ah you are indeed correct. I'm probably thinking of classic paint, not notepad.
  Either way, i have the downloader for ye old notepad and paint tucked away on and off my machine for future sake when my company middle management decides they want to try to push the new AI tools down our throats for productivity again.
- For folks who cannot do this due to it being a work-controlled machine or otherwise, you can use notepad++
  That is assuming their work-controlled machine already has Notepad++ installed, right?
  
  It depends on how locked down it is. There is a portable version that doesn't require install, but also you might get in trouble for running exes from the web.
  
  Nope!
  Amusingly there is a very large overlap in the companies that want to try to force ai tech crap onto their workers, but dont limit admin controls for users.
  But to be more specific, what i meant by work-controlled is that you cant just install linux on a work machine or uninstall office products for alternatives due to company licensing.
  Nothing preventing you from just not using that crap though of course but at that point you know your own company limits than i would so god speed!
  Last thing you'd probably want to do is be forced into sitting in a class with Mr.MiddleManager / Mr.NepotismHire to go over why these AI products are actually good for you and they arent happy you circumvented that.
- At work I have to use Windows, Notepad++ is my safe place. It is fast, there's plugins for years, and it handles (with some wait time) 100 000 line long documents.
- Or, you can just turn Copilot off from the settings panel.

I mourn Notepad as well, but Notepad++ is great and it hasn't smeared shit on itself yet.
- Notepad++ really earning the ++ once again.

I used notepad precisely because it lacks features beyond writing text, this is such an anti feature
- SublimeText might be a good next option. :)
  
  Isn't notepad++ better?
  
  Yeah I have that as well, and I'm surprised how fast and light weight it feels compared to something like VS code
- I think in general you can also just expect that any OS, techy or not, ships with a basic, lightweight text editor. The fact that Windows seems to want to change that is an anti-feature for the entire OS.

> Vivaldi
- Vivaldi is great.
  
  The musician? Sure. The browser? Not so much.
  
  The people who like Vivaldi are the same people who don't like eating ass

Notepad++ is what real humans use
- I feel like there's a way to communicate "np++ is the best" without calling people fake humans, even as a joke.
  
  You should maybe think about relaxing just a little bit.
  
  Are you concerned we might be upsetting the AIs?

Good luck. As of this writing, I have UNINSTALLED copilot from Windows 11 Pro FOURTEEN TIMES in the past 3 weeks. I continually turn off its access to running in the background and terminate and its services in task manager multiple times a day. I've blocked the app in my non-MS antimalware suite. I have uac enabled to block unauthorized apps. I have disabled it in my startup apps repeatedly, to no avail .
I have disabled Edge browser everywhere possible, but Edge still manages to open itself up and REOPEN COPILOT even though I've disabled Edge multiple times and it is literally not the default app for even a single file type.
It's no longer POSSIBLE to install a single Office app, or uninstall single office apps. I do not need and do not want to bloat a ton of my SSD boot drive with Access and Designer and Publisher. The windows store standalone version of Outlook cannot load or save .pst backups.
MS has returned to even worse than its evil Borg ways. But now it's one of several threats to the continued existence of privacy anywhere for anyone.
Down with #enshittification #deshittify the #internet. Up with #CryptPad #Nextcloud #OnlyOffice (and to a lesser extent the commercial version #CollaberaOffice). Up with #StandardNotes and #ProtonMail, #ProtonCalendar, #ProtonDrive, #ProtonVPN, and #ProtonPass. Sad RIP to any and all security patches for #RIPLibreOffice (libre users - switch to security-patch-maintained software asap!)
Up with companies based in countries with strong privacy protections, that provide zero-knowledge services, and that do zero or minimal logging and discard logs swiftly (yay for thegood.cloud)!
- LibreOffice is dead? When did that happen? I just installed it on my new system a few months ago.
  
  libreoffice's most recent release is from a month ago and the most recent commit was 41 minutes ago. i wonder if the thread starter is confusing libreoffice and openoffice
- Men will literally uninstall Copilot fourteen times instead of using Linux.
  
  My dude, I spent my first six hours on Linux Mint trying to get my touchpad to actually work.
  I only fire up my Linux dual-boot when I'm feeling bored and think "you know what my day needs? A lot more frustration."
- Sir this is a wendy's
- Might as well install linux at this point if you hate windows this much. Or just install LTSC where none of this bullshit happens
- Hey I want to know too what happened to libreoffice?

Vivaldi
Ahm, sure?
- Yeah, was wondering about that. I’ve just installed it for the first time and while it looks OK, i’m wondering what the catch is.
  Any privacy or security holes that one might to be aware of?
  
  Just the usual one: it's a proprietary fork of Chromium.

Notepad++ is a great option if you absolutely need to be on Windows. I started using it at work because all of my colleagues were on it, now I install it on any box I have running Windows while I set them up.
- The plugins are great on Notepad++ too! I use it for work, JSON Viewer makes raw jsons much easier to parse through. Compare is really nice too to compare different files and spot their differences.
  
  Plus it's one of the only editors left that gives a single shit about your computer's resources.

People complain that Linux is inconvenient but then prostrate themselves upon the broken, buggy, ad-infested spyware that is Windows. Doesn't seem very convenient to me. This person thought that their Notepad data was private before Copilot? Ha!
- Sadly most people grow up using and are tought Windows from the first time they touch a computer so its quirks and workarounds of bugs are engrained in the users mind.
  Uprooting their entire (current) knowlegebase is inconvenient.. but it's still for the greater good of their privacy and in my opinion effectiveness of whatever they do.
  
  The fundamental roadblock here is: people are generally done with 'learning' when they become adult. Not learning computers or software, or anything else in particular. Just learning. There seems to be a somewhat common idea that 'education' and 'learning' is for children, and as an adult, you should have better things to do. Sadly, we can see all around where such an idea leads us.
  
  IMO usually a lot easier than learning Windows too. But I can understand them not knowing that if they've never tried. All they know about Linux is that it's nerdy and technical.
- "convenient" ≠ "best option" or even "easiest option".
  Linux is inconvenient because they would have to go out of their way to switch to it. Windows is convenient because it's right there and ready to go on essentially any computer.
  And people dont care about "best" or "easiest" options because to most people a computer is just a means to an end.
- All of the Copilot features in Notepad require manual interaction. When you click the button, there's a menu with options like "Rewrite", "Summarize", "Make shorter", "Make longer", etc., which either operate on the current selection or the entire document. How exactly that's implemented is obviously speculation, but most likely it will only send your data to Microsoft when you actually activate one of these functions. In fact, none of them even work without an active Copilot Plus subscription (I've tried). There is no free tier here, if try to use any of these features without a subscription, you'll just get prompted to sign up for one.
  Also, the entire thing can be easily turned off from the settings panel.

Use Copilot to write your own Notepad. With Blackjack. And hookers.

Upset about notepad, so downloaded a bunch of random software that has nothing to do with editing text files?
- Not A tipping point but several. They've been upset about a lot of things but this was the last straw.
- Thought the same thing, nothing wrong with Libre Office, but why not Notepad++?
  https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
  
  For me personally, I was using Notepad++, but the enshitification of notepad, to me, was just the last straw. It was another thing in Windows becoming worse, & there was no sign of the enshittification stopping, so I finally jumped ship & switched to Linux.
- You can get gedit for Windows.

Kate exists on windows and linux
- Notepad++ does way more out of the box. I'm saying this as someone who has used npp for over a decade and been using Kate since last September since indefinitely switching to Linux.
  
  It doesn't have AI tho.
  (Joking)

I liked notepad for it's simplicity.
Even notepad++ was way more complex than notepad ever was.
It literally just used ASCII (or similar) characters to a file. You can't open anything other than text on it, it won't allow you to attach pictures, graphs, videos or even links. You need to type out the damned URL in its entirety.
N++ is great for what it is, but notepad, aside from it's simplicity, was also great because it was everywhere.
Windows 11 started the down fall of my favorite simple text editor when they introduced..... tabs.
I hate that. I close notepad, and then open it again and.... Why is all this shit still here?!?!
Get fucked Microsoft.

Cantankerously and all at once.
Now that's the way to do it!

linux is definetly not all of that anymore.
but yes, one step at a time, its time will come for ya.
- I'm gradually immersing myself in Linux until my Macbook loses macOS support, at which point I'll go full time on Asahi, having learned the ropes from Mint on my old Mac mini.
  There are still some things that send me scuttling back to macOS, glad that Preview exists with its easy to operate editing and PDF viewing. But I'll learn to make that stuff second nature in Linux. Eventually.
  
  Hopefully Asahi will support it

My next toot will be drafted on a blank Libre page with no AI checking anything.
I have bad news for you. It's in your OS, there is no space safe from surveillance in Windows. That said, LibreOffice is a pretty heavy and complex application compared to notepad. I'm sure they can find a much lighter and simpler text editor to use as a replacement.

Installing cross-platform programs like that is a great way to prepare for a move over to penguin town, and check for any blockers keeping you from making the leap.

There's a lot of discussion here without any mention of Sublime Text.
- Are you even a programmer if you don’t just do everything through ed?
- I think my programming career was notepad++ then sublime, then vscode, and presumably now I should start using Cursor but I can't bring myself to do it.
  
  my journey was notepad++, vim, atom, vim again, neovim

Linux is extremely stable nowadays. Just download Ubuntu and you're set.
- I recommend people start off on either elementary or mint depending on the walled garden they're used too. It seems to make the transition easier; especially for those who are less interested in tech and see the OS as a means to an end.
  Some people just don't want to learn new ways of working, regardless of how much it benefits them in the long run. My 78 year old grandad being my most recent convert to elementary (after a lifetime of mac OS).
  He hasn't had any issues with the transition thus far. Everything is where he expects it to be, I don't think he's even realised libre office is a different application to Microsoft office. Whilst I'm sure he'd have the capability of working out Ubuntu; I also think the effort would be enough to push him back towards Mac.
  But yeah, a near 80 year old can use Linux without any training or problems, which I feel really emphasises your original point around Linux stability.

I'm glad I left Windows again when I did (about 2 years ago). There's no AI bullshit in vim or mousepad. That said, vim is available on windows, so a full switch isn't necessary if you're not all about that Linux life.

I never really thought about just how personal Notepad is for me. Even the Notes app on my phone. I wouldn't want anyone to look through any of it. I write some embarrassing shit. Pointless backstories for my video game protagonists when they don't already have one. Drafts for important upcoming conversations. You name it. Get the fuck out of my space. Fortunately I'm still using Notepad++, but I'm sure Microsoft will slide its dick into that too, eventually.
- That's how it felt when Google announced Gemini into Gmail.
  A lot of my friends and family didn't understand the issue.
  
  Google said a decade ago that gmail is like your secretary parsing through your mail to hekp out with scheduling etc., it was never to be trusted

Feeling the same, and currently in process of dumbing down my tech and decoupling from major tech platforms. They really got us by the balls.
Long live open source!

Notepad is their digital safe space? Come on.

Go to System -> Optional features and verify that Notepad is listed and if it isn't add it.
Go to Apps -> Advanced settings for apps -> App executions aliases and disable Notepad.
Enjoy the classic notepad again.
- Like all fixes for Windows, this will either
  go on an ever-expanding list of workarounds that gets reverted every update, or
  be done once, forgotten, and then accepted along with many other concessions next update.
  Microsoft thinks opt out means opt out this one time.
  
  True enough. My own machines are already running linux, except for the work laptop and that isn't mine.
- Install notepad++
  ???
  Profit
  
  As discussed elsewhere in this thread I use both for different purposes.
  Notepad for me is a glorified clipboard for stuff I don't want to be saved while stuff in Notepad++ is things where I like having the files autosaved for the future.

Its not really AI its just a string manipulation program, that, rather pointlessly, summarises paragraphs. The sort of thing you see done in BASIC in old program listing books.

Shout out to people who can't spell but persevere on!

Never heard of Tutanota mail, anyone here know anything about it?
- I use the free version, it's ok. Not as user friendly of feature packed as gmail. I think they renamed to just "tuta".
  I find the web interface and android app are a bit limited - I think you need to pay to get decent searching and autofilter/rules and so on. If stuff is important you need to stick a tag or a folder on it fairly soon othewise it might become hard to find.
  Option for encryption, but I rarely use that because I don't trust recipients to understand why they should care.
  ~~Based . . . can't use that word~~ Located in Germany so believe what you like about GDPR and privacy laws and stuff like that.
  Overall I'm happy with it. It's fine for just doing your basic sbemail stuff. It hasn't been good enough to convince me to go for paid version, so I can't say about the paid features.
  
  I use the paid version and it's a huge upgrade. You can administer your own domain, set up a catchall email, arbitrary numbers of emails you can send from, etc.
  It's definitely not as snappy as Gmail though.

I like Focuswriter, it's a little more feature rich than Notepad, but it stays out of your way and has that same "Just me and a blank page" vibe.
- does it leave behind formatting upon copy/pasta like notepad does?

Learn to use Vim. It can be anywhere and everywhere.
- Vim is hell to learn (a few weeks), but the second best time investment return I've made of any skill, ever (1st was learning to walk).
- Yeah, but if you're forced to use Windows, then installing and running vim is a nightmare (unless you want gvim, but I don't think anyone wants that).
  
  Huh, I never noticed any issues when I used to use gvim (a fair few years back, mind). What's the problem with it?
- Does it run this new OS? emacs? It's a great OS but doesn't have a great text editor.
  
  with emacs evil mode, you can add a pretty good text editor to the emacs ecosystem: vim
  
  No, no, no, you're thinking of iMacs which are Apple's all in one desktop offering. But thy can definitely run MacVim.

As a Linux daily driver, LibreOffice is ass. I've tried, but it just feels like a cheap, not nearly as good alternative to Microsoft Office. Hate to say it
- I wouldn't say it's ass, but it's definitely not office.
- I don't understand what people are using office for that libre can't do. Are we not just putting words on paper?
  
  It's probably advanced Excel users, mostly. Also, people who heavily use the collaboration features of MS Office.
  
  I use Excel for a lot of advanced things, but even their word processor is garbage. I tried to use it to take notes for DnD but things like bullet points wouldn't work correctly, spacing got all messed up, etc. Just a ton of small shit. I eventually just switched back to the web version of Microsoft Office.
  I absolutely love Linux, but some things Microsoft does better, and Office is one of them.
- OnlyOffice is a bit more polished and similar to MS, have you tried that?
  
  Having used LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, I find that if you need a full office suite, (and fortunately I don't anymore), LibreOffice has more 'stuff' in it and perhaps a bit better comparability with Microsoft 365 than OnlyOffice. Still, I had no real beef with OnlyOffice. It's a somewhat lighter on space the LibreOffice for sure.
  Thankfully, all I really need anymore is AbbiWord and Gnumeric for my now simple and infrequent needs. Soooo much faster and lighter than a full office suite.
- As someone who's used Apple's Pages as my primary word processor app for the past 18 years, I've spent the past 6 months or so using only LibreOffice in order to get myself to a place where I'm not reliant on Apple hardware.
  And oh my fucking god, LibreOffice is dog shit in comparison. It's horrifically unwieldy, to the point that it's only marginally easier to use than Word. And Word is God's continuing punishment of all mankind for what we did to Jesus. Word is ebola tearing through an orphanage. Word is Kid Rock covering the collected works of U2.
  And LibreOffice Writer is just a little better than that.
  It kills me that Pages is locked to Apple hardware, because it's just so nice to use.
- OnlyOffice is pretty good
- I even installed it on my work laptop because Microsoft office is ass. I have 1 pet peeve and that is the horizontal scrolling in Calc.
- If you don't need to do anything fancy it's pretty okay. But I also wouldn't use it for more advanced stuff.
- Back when I last used it (we're speaking ~8 years ago), I was actually happy using it instead of MSO. ...until I opened a Word document and all the tabulations and spacing went to shit. I don't know whether it got fixed yet, but as soon as they always look identical to the pixel, opened in either editor, I will finally ditch Word.
  I guess the same goes for Excel/Calc. Once all the functions are called and work the same, all the formatting looks the same in both, I'll stick with Calc.
  (It might come across as I'm being MS elitist, but it's quite the opposite - I would love to switch, but if the admin requires docx, I have these two to choose from. I understand it's not Libre's fault, but I can't do much, either)
  
  From what I heard, MSOffice documents saved on their proprietary format will almost always find a way to not look quite right, because haha fuck you, pay for Office365

A more notepad similar program instead of Libre stuff (for windows folk) https://www.editpadlite.com/en.html
If you can find the original editpad floating out on the net, it's notepad without the file size limit, ancient shareware. The pro version is pretty sweet too, one of very few pieces of software I've paid for out of pocket.
- Found the original, Jan keeps it alive.
  https://www.editpadclassic.com/
  I lied, no download there anymore, but it probably exist somewhere.

I prefer Kate. (Da best)
(It's also Windows supported.)

Imagine thinking you're a snob about a minimalist text editing experience and Metapad isn't even mentioned
- Because anyone who's actually a snob about a minimalist text editing experience is using something like neovim, emacs, or kakoune, not some notepad replacement.
  
  Neo? Not snobby enough.
- Who’s thinking they’re a snob? Notepad is (or had been for a very long time? I don’t know what modern Windows includes anymore) included by default for PC users.
  If it’s already there and it served the purposes OP needed, they would’ve had no reason to look for an alternative. OP may not know about Metapad, especially if they aren’t “a snob about a minimalist text editing experience,” they just liked a minimalist and ubiquitous tool that worked well for them until it showed clear signs of AI encroachment.
- I'm pretty sure Vim doesn't have Copilot integration
  
  And I promise you ed doesn't

"I'm tired of being shit on by these catholic priests."
"Oh bro you should totally switch to buddhism."
This is what all you Linux proselytizers sound like.
I don't want an alternative, I want a goddamn solution to my problem.
- Tbf if I went to mass and the padre covered me in dookie and showed no signs of stopping, my absolute first thought would be to leave, wash myself well, and never go back. If I decide I have to have a religion, yeah, I'd probably try full buddhism instead of some ostensibly fancy expensive one like Scientology. The fact that you just take it and go back for more because you can't imagine your life without Catholicism, dookie and all, is what puzzles me.
- I guess you should stop going to church then would be the answer to your analogy
  
  So no more technology, live in the woods? Linux is just the first step on that path.
- If your problem is proprietary computing getting increasingly bloated, invasive and esoteric then Linux is the solution. You sound like a battered wife making excuses for her husband.
- Enjoy your doodoo I guess? Not a Linux guy but I wish I was.
- As a Linux user I am so incredibly deeply sick and tired of seeing idiots do this. Granted I cant help you at all since I dont use Windows but not reviving any help is better than actively unhelpful advice.

"I'm done with Microsoft Windows™ because I dislike Copilot™! I will now move to Linux even though I heard it breaks constantly and install LibreOffice which probably doesn't even have a spell checker!"
E: Yes I can see how that was too subtle, keep downvoting.
- I don't see the problem. Ignoring the fact that Linux doesn't break that much, they said they got tired of AI so they moved to a platform that doesn't have AI.
  
  I'm not mad about the downvotes or anything, but I'm astonished that everyone misreads my comment like that. Man, Internet discourse has really shifted.
- Weird take. Im a Linux noob and I haven't broken it once since installing a year ago, and libre office obviously does have a spell checked. It's a Microsoft office competitor, not some barebones text editor.
  
  Linux still has an unstable reputation among aging Windows nerds who haven't tried it in 15 years.
  
  I'm also enjoying a stable Linux setup and use Libre spellcheck. I just found it weird that the OP spreads such false information in this supposedly anti windows post, but nobody got it, so joke's on me
- FYI, the author of the post addresses this kind of comment in her thread on Mastodon (see source).
  
  I... I don't think they do.
- Have an upvote for a controversial (hopefully on purpose) cliche take.
- Works on my machine.
- Wrong, GNU/Linux is absolutely perfect and you're just broken. Now beg for forgiveness before our lord and savior Richard Matthew Stallman for committing the sin of using absolutely proprietary software or we'll consider you bloat and sudo rm -rf you
  :3