alt Hacker NewsI still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off.
Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.
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Notepad was historically just a thin wrapper for the "EDIT" window class, along with file loading and saving.
And WordPad was built on top of the "RICHEDIT" window class, and exposed lots of the OLE features provided by the rich text control. "Insert Object" is a powerful and potentially dangerous feature with a lineage going back to the Windows 3.1 days. As long as your DLL is registered correctly, any document in an OLE-capable program can cause objects from that DLL to become instantiated and deserialized.
Getting rid of documents able to instantiate arbitrary OLE controls is a good reason to try to remove WordPad. It's not just some simple styled text editor.
The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.
There is something in the toolbar that looks like an avatar in the screenshots on the page.
Do you need to log in to notepad now? What in the actual hell is going on?
Wordpad presented a “free” tool that they couldn’t monetize anymore. They want you to use Office. Copilot is shoved into Notepad so they can monetize your data stream.
Wouldn’t VSCode be a better alternative to wordpad?
I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Internally, the Notepad project existed to provide a minimal, shippable product that we could use as a testbed. We used it to validate everything from compiler changes to kernel32 loader behavior on beta versions of Windows. If Notepad didn’t run, your feature didn’t work.
This doesn't seem like a good idea.