I found a copy of the win98 (I believe) notepad.exe a while back, and it works perfectly on windows 11 (though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??). I can write text into it, save it, and load text again. What more does notepad need? And it has a very nostalgic font too
Win9x Notepad in particular can only load files up to 64KB in size (edit: and supports only ANSI encoding, no Unicode). There were some actually useful additions to it up until Windows 10 or so - for example being able to handle LF (in addition to CRLF) line endings. But yeah, everything added in Windows 11 is just pure bloat.
I somewhat regularly use the almost embarrassing key sequence Ctrl-C Ctrl-L Ctrl-V Ctrl-A Ctrl-X to sanitize text I’ve copied from a browser, using the address field to remove any formatting.
I explicitly stopped this habit so that I don't accidentally do it with sensitive data I don't want to go to my search engine provider's auto complete API.
Disabling remote search autocomplete is one of the first things I do when I setup a new browser instance. It's a privacy and security nightmare I don't want.
Same here. And I just noticed yesterday that Firefox had added and enabled a "Suggestions from sponsors" feature. Which I've now disabled, but presumably it's been sending anything I type into the address bar to Mozilla since 2021. I am tired of Mozilla but Chrome is very much worse.
ETA: I only noticed yesterday because a "sponsored suggestion" popped up when I was typing, which I've not seen before. So either they actually enabled it recently, or advertisers don't bid on the kinds of things I usually type.
At most I want the address box to do is look up a dns name. Which can still be a risk if I were to hit "enter" with sensitive information which could in some cases get pushed out to my DNS provider (which is me, but then it's possible the address would be pushed out to another resolver, and will also be logged in an unexpected place)
I do a similar thing but use the start menu search, Ctrl-C, WIN, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X. You can do it all in one hand and can get really fast, assuming the start menu doesn't lag behind.
There's also the downside that it publishes all of your clipboard content to Bing search so maintain vigilance for confidential data...
I use Edge’s address bar to de-wrap long URLs that have line wrapping and indentation in a proprietary packaging system’s SBOM. I paste in, then copy out the unwrapped URL to another application.
I've been using Win+R to paste it in the windows run box.
Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.
Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...
I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.
And funnily enough, Office for Mac doesn’t allow you to do this, or at least it didn’t used to. I think I may’ve just noticed that it’s started working.
Doesn’t work for me. The absolute most infuriating thing is that copying text out of OneNote pastes as AN IMAGE. The only way around this is sanitizing the text in a notepad on the host machine itself.
I have my firefox browser configured to keep using a separate search field and not make search queries in the url bar. It annoys a lot my partner if I let her use my computer to check something but it is frictionless once you unlearn bad habits.
Yep. Back when I used to teach Windows programming in C commercially, the course exercise was to replicate notepad. It was surprising how many of its features you could implement in a week-long course, especially as many of our clients were no great shakes at C.
This was on Windows 3.1. I don't think the version of notepad there had any Unicode support - certainly the one in our training course didn't; I didn't feel up to teaching C, the Windows API _and_ Unicode. It was just a slightly realistic exercise where our clients could implement as much or as little as they felt happy with, making use of standard windows controls as much as possible.
Notepad is so slow at loading large files that it crashing quickly is a feature.
The windows 7-10 versions that could open anything would just get stuck for half an hour when you opened the wrong thing in them, which was rather annoying.
For those of you on macOS who still want to benefit from arguably the best drawing application ever conceived, https://jspaint.app/ is THE way. Use it all the time when editing screenshots.
Bonus point: that Windows 95 style "error" beep when pasting too large image. Always sends the shiver down the spine and confuses the coworkers around (we're an all-Mac shop).
Kind of a weird feeling that in order to get the better Windows 11 experience one requires programs from four operating system versions earlier.
Windows 11 also takes a huge amount of time to get working as i intend. I have to remove a lot of 'features' and heavily optimize some processes. It's stable and it works, but i'm getting more and more annoyed by it that upcoming updates sometimes destroy all my effort.
Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.
> Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.
You won't know until you try. My mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 till Windows 7. She hated Windows 8, and that's when I decided to switch her to Linux (with XFCE) - and she felt the UI was a lot more familiar to her than Windows 8. I recently showed her a few screenshots of Windows 11, and she finds her current desktop (now on KDE) a lot more familiar than Windows 11. Same with Office, she prefers the older style toolbar of LibreOffice than the ribbon UI of modern versions Office.
So maybe install it on a spare device as a trial and see how they like it?
When was the last time you tried it? Assetto Corsa EVO has a Gold rating on ProtonDB[1] and apparently SimHub also works fine, according to the SimHub forums[2].
I have the mspaint.exe from the same version too :P. It complains about registry stuff on launch but other than that it works fine. There's no spray can in the modern paint!
They also added strange hacked on half-support for alpha-transparency in modern MS Paint. Meaning there is an alpha layer, and imported staff may utilize it, but if you need to do anything with that layer, you're basically SOL.
Better to have no alpha-transparency than whatever this is. At least old Paint just turned it white, and you could manipulate the white layer, with this working with the alpha layer is a nightmare.
I need to just break down and find an old version of that... from before the Jasc sellout. IIRC, it ran via Wine without issue too.
I try to use Pinta/Paint.Net, but it's not quite as good as I remember psp being. I don't even hate the newer MS Paint... thought I'm only on windows for my work environment and even then.
Aside: I've been using my personal computer more, so I can work on a limited surface with docker and ai agent, then just bring in the components I'm working on when ready. My work environment is really locked down, no wsl, no docker... and it's like working in 2002 to some extent... It's literally easier for me to create stand-alone projects, work on a given feature in complete isolation... AI agent mostly to boilerplate the environment and most of the automated sanity tests, then I can focus on just what I'm working on.
I feel bad for anyone at MS who thought these applications needed anything more than bugfixes. Welcome to the Notepad team, the entire world would be better off it you did nothing at all!
Windows 11 still includes the old notepad.exe in its Windows directory [0]. Windows just “helpfully” redirects it to the new app if you try to run it. You have to turn that off in Settings under “App execution aliases”. Then you get the old Notepad.
[0] In the unlikely case that it isn’t there, you can add it through System > Optional Features > Add an optional feature.
> though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??
For many built in windows apps, the 'about this program' menu item just invokes a separate program, 'winver'. If you go Start -> Run and type in winver, it does the same thing.
Since there'll be nowhere to run, could I be one the first? Don't wanna have to deal with the hassle of having to watch my loved ones being chased down.
It needs far more features apparently. Tons more. That's why Notepad++ is popular. Which also had a severe security vulnerability recently. Which was actively exploited by some state actor like China.
Strictly, no. But it was a vulnerability in the design of Notepad++, key elements here being the featureset that requires frequent updates and the lack of integrity checks during the upgrade process.
This has prompted me to move on from Notepad++ - it's sad, because I've used it for many years, but this is too much.
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Microsoft Store has a built-in CLI with that exact functionality. You just run `store updates` to check for updates to store-managed apps, and you can target specific items with `store update <update-id>`. Of course, there's also winget for non-store applications (`winget upgrade`). I find them pretty handy as I have become quite used to managing my Linux installations with pacman over the past year or so. I discovered the store CLI completely by accident. It's not widely advertised.
I am driving an Ubuntu installation because it's what's my current employer mandates and coming from arch it feels like going back to Windows. Oh-my-zsh, opencode, gemini-cli, bun, pyenv, nvm... All installed with curl | bash which is not as bad as a .exe or .msi -- those are scripts you can still easily inspect -- but it's also bypassing the pkg manager.
But I guess that's what you get when you fragment your ecosystem in apt, snap and gnome extension manager. I need to master nix asap.
The third party hosting provider had nothing to do with package integrity, that was under Notepad++ control and basically they had none. The real issue is every company or application creating their own Internet update system.
You can if you use the windows store. It's just that you usually install things outside of that, unlike in linuxes where you generally use the package manager that can handle updates for you
There’s a real problem trying to use the store with command line tools as they don’t use Windows standards for installing things but create GUID folders under your profile instead, which means your path has to be full of garbage or you have to create a lot of aliases.
You can jump through a couple hoops to get WinGet working in Windows Server environments without much issue. IIRC, there's a single PS1 script you can run to do it, followed by a reboot.
The OS provided option can be bare bones, stable, secure and just utilitarian. This promotes having people choose their own tools for the features they want and not really expecting much other than reliability from the OS version. They didn’t need to mess with a good thing.
