As someone else who has never particularly liked Notepad++ either, I mostly agree that chasing after it is a mistake, especially this many years after Notepad++'s height in relevancy. Perhaps ironically, many of those same "must install" lists that included Notepad++ have moved on to other tools, one of them being Microsoft's own VSCode. VSCode is a "good, helpful" AI host to sell more AI, so I presume some "AI in Notepad" pressure is "capture the few remaining people not yet installing VSCode out of the box".

> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe

Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit