Hands-On Windows 125 transcript

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0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to take a look at the greatest Windows app ever created, or actually we're just going to look at Notepad. But it's been around for a while and it's gotten really good. Let's come back next. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-on Windows.

I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to take a look at Notepad, the humble text editor that's been in Windows literally since the beginning. It debuted in the original Windows 1.0 in 1985. Before that it was something called Multi-Tool Notepad that Microsoft showed off in I want to say 1983, but then they stripped it down. It was actually more full-featured originally, but it became. You know, every operating system has to have a text editor, and so it does. But this simple app, this text editor right, it literally just works with txt files, doesn't have a lot of extra stuff.

Going on has improved dramatically over the years, and especially in recent years. If you follow me on the web, you may know that I work on my own version of a Notepad-type app. This is it called netpad and I'm trying to keep up with what Microsoft is doing in Notepad and it's getting hard. The new version has tabs. It's got all this advanced functionality. So I thought we would take a look at that now, because I think this is one of those things that just sits there in the background. No one really appreciates it, but actually notepad's a pretty special app.

So, yes, plain text, some of the changes that have occurred under the covers over the years. Back in the late 1990s, maybe right around 2000, they added support for unicode, so that means it supports all the world's languages. That's super important, um, and it allows you to kind of go back and forth between different languages in the same app at the same time, which is cool. Before that it was just antsy. Um. Far more recently, and I want to say two, three years ago, they added support for unix and thus macOS style line endings, and so if you look down here in the corner, you'll see it says Windows CRLF, which is the way that Windows text documents are formatted for line endings, and then UTF-8, which is the Unicode encoding format. But if I was to, let's see I could save this thing. I can't actually change the. Well, actually, maybe I can't. No, yeah, I can actually. So you can change the different encoding formats here if you want to. Nobody does this, but it's there because we have this subsystem for Linux sorry built into the system and that allows you to interact with text documents that might be part of that operating system as well.

Some of the changes I remember over time in Windows NT and I think in Windows 95 as well, they gave you the option to actually choose the font that you use. The default font has changed at least three or four times over the years. There was a brief moment in the Windows 10 timeframe where Microsoft was actually going to pull this thing out of Windows and put it in the store for people that wanted it, but then they started improving it again. They realized we need to keep this in here. And in Windows 11, it is like I said, it's improved dramatically.

So you see this tab-based UI. You can add tabs, close tabs, et cetera. They've kind of tightened up the UI. It's modern looking. It supports dark and light mode. So I'm in dark mode here in the system but I could arbitrarily go to light mode or just dark or just use the system, which is what I usually leave it on.

It has a beautiful find and replace. Actually, I got to type something. So you bring up the find box. You can expand it for, replace it, kind of floats there. This is a very unique kind of modern UI. It's very nice. I haven't been able to duplicate it. It's kind of irritating, but it's really nice. It also does spell checking, right, so that's not a word. And I could add that to the sharing, but I won't because it's not a word. But it has autocorrect, right, and so I haven't been able to trigger this today for some reason. But you know, when you type something like the quick brown thought, you would think that one of these things would you know, but it doesn't. But it will autocorrect from time to time as well.

But the most interesting thing it does to me and this is something that I think confuses people is that it supports what I think of as session state. So I have this document that I've not saved. You can see from this whole thing here that it's not saved. Now, in the old days, if I close this or if I try to open a new document or whatever, it would say hey well, hold on a second, do you want to save this thing? But now I close it and it just goes away. So it's like did I lose that? No, because it saves the session state by default. It just brings it back. So it will keep doing this. I could add more of these, I could add windows, but it will keep coming back. So that's kind of interesting.

Personally, I don't like it. I put this back to the default so you could see it. This is the way you will see it on your own system, but I actually turn that off. I don't like it. The other thing it does by default is it opens new documents and tabs, right, so if I go to the desktop and I open a text file like this, um, it adds it as a new tab instead of as a new window. Right, um, and you can, I'm just going to get rid of this thing, but you can, can, let me, actually let me do that, you can. He says, uh, change that, so you can have it open a new, a new window, if you prefer. That. That's actually the way I configure it myself personally, but this is an option now. So I think that it's, you know, it's pretty sophisticated, okay, so that's all really interesting, but there's something else.

So, in Windows 11, 24 H2, and it's only in certain countries, I know it's US, canada, I want to say, western Europe, and then a few other countries, and it's going to expand over time and it's only I believe it's only English for now. They've added this thing here to the toolbar called Rewrite. This is actually really exciting. So this is a co-pilot based AI tool that will look at the text that you have in a document or that you've selected, and then allow you to do different things with it. Now, obviously, for that to work, we have you have in a document or that you've selected, and then allow you to do different things with it. Now, obviously, for that to work, we have to have some text, right? So, um, let me go into here and I I grabbed this article here that laurent wrote on my site. It's reasonably short. I can copy it to the clipboard.

There's no formatting here, by the way, but if there was, one of the best uses for notepad is to paste. Actually, let me just do that first, like, paste something that has a bunch of stuff in it, right? So I could start like a um, uh, a copy here. So I have got, like, this thing is a format. You know, this is a certain format. This is a hyperlink. These are little images, this is a big image and when I paste that in, all I get is the text. Paste that in, all I get is the text. It just strips everything out. Notepad is wonderful for that. If you use it for anything, it might be just for that. It's really, really good for that. But here I'm going to take this article. I don't recommend writing an article in Notepad, although you know what it's probably getting pretty good. A little spelling mistake there, okay.

So now that we have some text, this thing lights up and you can see what the various options are. Right, you can rewrite it. You can rewrite it in specific ways make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone formal, casual, inspirational or humor and then change the format. And this thing works amazingly well. If you think about what a typical tech blog has been for the past 20 years. A human being somewhere in the world is probably reading a press release or an article or a blog that Microsoft or some other company has written, and then they rewrite it, and that's literally what this does. So in this case, I'll just click rewrite and you can see we got the AI pink, purple, blue the standard colors we always say and then you get this rewritten version.

Now to understand what's happening here. Let's make this big so you can see it. I can't move this thing, unfortunately, but the original here is about 2,000 characters and it says Microsoft will have some surface for business news at the New York stop of its Microsoft AI tour on January 30, 2025. And then this first sentence is basically that first sentence, but just rewritten, right? Microsoft is set to share updates regarding Surface for Business during the New York leg of its Microsoft AI tour on January 30, 2025. Okay, so those two things say the same thing.

Now, it's not always going to be perfect, right, but it does a pretty good job. But here's where it gets really interesting. So that alone is pretty good. Maybe that's what you're looking for. But you can also edit it for length, right? You can make it shorter or longer. So I'm going to replace the text so you can see what the difference is. It actually is just a couple of characters longer, so this is roughly the same size as it was before. So I'm going to go back to the original and now, this time, I'm going to rewrite it to make it shorter, right? So, same thing. It works on it. Works on it. Um, again, a little over 2000 words. So this is it's not going to be a lot smaller. I'm going to cancel that. Let's get out of there. Discard it, do Do a new one and just paste in what I got, and so you can see. It's 1,647 characters, so it's a little shorter. I can pull that out. That's one of the fun things about tabs. You can kind of compare the two and again, it's just rewritten. It's not dramatically different, but it is a little shorter. That's pretty good, but I but I'm going to use my favorite version of this. Not that I would ever use this in the real world, but rewrite this thing as a poem. This is surprisingly good, or it can be. Let's see what it says.

In May, the Qualcomm Surface Pro X appeared With Laptop 7, the Co-Pilot Plus was declared. In September, business models joined the fray A new Surface Pro X with 5G on display. I mean that sounds like a christmas song, it sounds like a dr seuss book. I mean it's, it's pretty good, it's, it's uh, it's not shakespeare, but it's uh, it's not, it's not bad. Um, I don't think most people actually want that, but it's, it's kind of fun and you can do other things too, like we, we will. Uh, let me go back to the. Oh, they have different variants. Sorry, that's not what I wanted, but you can go. Other things too, like we, we will. Uh, let me go back to the. Oh, they have different variants. Sorry, that's not what I wanted, but you can go and say well, I want this as a bulleted list. Um, there's different versions of this, but, um, let me just go back.

This is a surprisingly useful tool. It's bizarre to me that this thing notepad, right. So part of the changes to copilot that I glossed over in a recent episode about the changes to 24h2 is with the new copilot app. They've gone from a model where some things were free and some things were paid, and now the things that were paid, everyone can access up to a point for free. So if you click on this, uh, where do you click? Where do I see this? Yeah, here. So you see, here, I've got this as 28. So this is like my AI credit balance at Copilot, right, and so every time I do this, I use a credit, right. So I can't just do this forever and ever, like, eventually they're going to say, hey, you can't use this anymore for the rest of the month, you've run out of credits or, if you'd like, to subscribe for the paid version of Copilot. So that's the little upsell. So this gives everyone an opportunity to see something that previously might have required Microsoft Word, microsoft 365 commercial or consumer plus a paid version of Copilot, but now you can sample it for free right inside of Notepad, the simplest app on earth. Except now, suddenly, it's not the simplest app on earth. It's kind of incredible. So there you go. That's kind of neat. You may not have that on your computer yet. If you don't, you should have it pretty soon, uh, sometime in the next couple of months.

Um, before we go, though, I wanted to just share a couple of other tips related to notepad. I use notepad every single day. You may recall from the episode we did on paint a few months back, I think back in October. I also use that app every single day as well, and I've developed my little habits here. So you can right-click on the pin here for the app in the taskbar and you see this list of recent documents, which is super useful.

This thing at the top I use a lot. I use it enough that it's often in this list, but every once in a while it's not, and so what I would have to do before was go. I know where it is so I can go into my book folder and find it, so I can go just launch it that way. But you can pin this. This isn't a notepad feature, but it's particularly useful for me with notepads. I use it all the time. So you can go to any one of these and just pin it and it will always be on that list. So even if it runs off the recent list, you'll always have access to it. That's kind of cool.

I also mentioned that by default, new tab is the the method, not new window, right? So, for example, if I type control plus n, it does new tab. If I control control t does new tab. But what if I actually do want a new window? Right, the shortcut is control shift n and it brings up a new window. So I actually just turn it off so it always does new window. But if you want to leave it on the tab interface, it does consume less resources. If you use a lot of documents at one time, you can still have a new window if you want it and just do the shortcut. I think, yeah, you can do it from the menu as well, so that's good. Then if you are I don't want to say a Luddite per se, but if you looked at everything that I just showed, said nope, I don't want anything to do with that.

I want a much, much simpler version of this app. You can get it. I don't necessarily recommend it, but I'm going to show you how. Against my better judgment, I'm having some settings app issues here, so it's taking a while, but that's okay. So you need to do two things. So first you have to go into the Windows System 32 folder If I can figure out alphabetical and then you got to go find the executable for notepad, which, of course, is under N scroll, scroll, scroll. It's down in here somewhere. Okay, I went by it. Okay, so here's the old and you can see this has got that old windows Vista glass style. So this is the old version.

Now, if I run this oh, I already fixed it, I think I already screwed it up If I run this normally, it doesn't do that. Normally it runs the new version. But that's because I went into Apps, advanced App Settings and execution aliases and I already turned it off. So what you do is you come in here and turn this off. That's why you saw the old version. Normally, if this was on like that, like it is normally, and you ran this, you would see the new version, right. So you turn this off and then you run this and you get the old version. This is literally the old version.

So this is dating back to the very early 2000s. Is dating back to the very early 2000s. Um, you know the old menu, the big menu, the old font, uh, thing, the about box, all this stuff from the past, right, if you want a new, you could, you can do a new window. Um, there's no tabs, old ui, there's no support for dark mode. This is just straight up win 32 app, pretty cool.

But turning off the alias isn't enough, because if you, you know, if you launch notepad from here, you get the new version. So what you can do is copy a shortcut to wherever I'll put it on the desktop, but um, where, of course I can't find it because I have a million things, uh, and then you can see it has the old icon. So you can put this anywhere you want, um, you could pin it, do whatever with it, but when you run that, you get the old version of the app. So I don't do that myself, but you know again, if you were horrified by what you saw, the old version of Notepad is still in there. You know, it's kind of incredible. That's the most legacy of legacy apps there is, I think.

So there you go, notepad. It's not your father's notepad, I guess your grandfather's notepad anymore. It's a completely new app. So I hope you found this interesting. We'll have a new episode of hands-on windows every thursday. You can learn more at twittv h-o-w. Thank you so much for to our Club Twit members. We love you and I'll see you next week.