I truly can’t fathom why microsoft are so bad at these things. I actually like the photos “app” on windows but it recently updated to instead of allowing cropping and rotating to having a colourful button for “edit in designer” which doesnt open anything, creates a blank photos window and crashes.
They are so bad at improving customer experience. I have an opportunity next month with our cto and cio and I am hoping to get across just how shitty they are to deal with and interact with.
Please keep us updated!
These are good alternatives for Microsoft’s Notepad and Paint:
- For Windows:
- For Linux (and other operating systems):
Kate is also available on Windows.
Photopea. Why bother with paint or a download when it’s all in a browser and Photoshop lol
Great, shitty web UI instead of shitty AI UI.
Win11 Paint annoys the hell out of me. This is it. We are breaking up. I’m going back to old Paint.
I ditched Notepad for Metapad years ago.
The whole point of Paint and Notepad is that they’re extremely simple and no-frills.
If MS really wants to add this bloat, it should be to their Office suite.
Switched to Linux Mint at home, quit my Windows developer job, and having a great time. I’ll never go back.
In my house 3 computers are already running Linux (Raspbian on Raspberry Pi, Debian testing on my PC and openSUSE on a family laptop), and I already talked with my dad to install Linux on his personal laptop as well, which is probably going to be Linux Mint (I am planning to replace openSUSE on other laptop with Linux Mint as well, because openSUSE sucks).
When you start adding bloat to notepad you know withea doubt you’ve really jumped the shark. Get fucked Microsoft
Welp, time to delete that shit and find replacements. Notepad++ is a solid upgrade over notepad, there must be something similar for paint that doesn’t have a steep learning curve?
PaintDotNet is what I used to use on windows. It was a great upgrade without being too complex.
PaintDotNet is perfect if you only need some commonly used “pro” features. It’s a relatively easy transition from paint.
All I use paint for is like drawing red underlines under text in screen grabs and shit like that. The most ‘pro’ feature I ever use is when I sometimes misclick the rounded rectangle tool instead of the rectangle tool and I’m too lazy to fix it. I’ll give that a shot tho, thanks.
Check out greenshot. Has a built-in editor that’s great for quick stuff like this
No shit? I’ve been using Greenshot for screenshots for a while (stupid Foxhole closing tooltips whenever I hit shift for the snip tool hotkey) but had no idea it did anything more than that. I’ll take a look, thanks!
Those are nice tools but they don’t replace paint, they’re way more complex.
I think Inkscape is brought up less often because of its focus on vector graphics, which can be confusing to people new to it.
Yeah I’ve only used Inkscape a little bit but I would not categorize it as a program that can quickly be picked up
I’m using pinta. When I type “paint” in my xfce search bar, it already brings it up automatically.
GIMP isn’t that hard to use for basics.
I never understood this one. What kind of course would you be doing that required very expensive paid software, but you didn’t know ahead of time that said software was required. I think the imaginary OP is just an idiot.
I personally think that’s the point. It just mocks the Linux Fanboys.
4chan greentext is mostly fanfic, always has been
It reads to me more as joke than something that tries to sell itself as a true story
Lol this resonates with me as a disorganized person
This one always gets a chuckle out of me.
Glad I made you happy!
Does that even run on windows without a bunch of hoop-jumping and some jank-ass chunky qt-style UI elements? I seriously haven’t looked at GIMP in like 25 years.
I’ve been using it off and on for over twenty years and it’s never needed more than running the installer to get it working on Windows in that time…
Fair enough, I haven’t looked at it at all since I last used linux a couple decades ago, that’s just been my experience with trying to use other linux-native software on windows.
Works fine every time I’ve used it in Windows, but I do mostly live in Linux now, so your mileage may vary.
Huh. I barely used it when I was on linux, so… shrug
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Man, does ANYONE needs this? Probably no one. This addition is just another way to force people to use AI so they can gather more personal information about that person. Specially with Notepad.
Will people be able to do thing without AI on the future if it’s being pushed so hard on everything? Like, they want to make our brains smoother and dumber lol
“Bro, if we keep feeding the AI more and more data, he willl be like a real human, then will be cracking sick jokes with me. He will be my first real friend!” – Elon Musk probably
He will be my first real friend
🤣🤣🤣
The worst part is if I’m using a work computer or something, I can’t just type into notepad anymore without considering that a record is being made.
Is there a Windows+R “oldnotepad.exe” that just works pre-installed?
You can either uninstall new version of Notepad or return to the old one using some registry trick (look it up).
Or you can download some version of Microsoft Notepad on the internet (probably not really that safe) or even ReactOS Notepad if you really insist of having such simple program, but using I’d recommend to use something like Notepad++ instead.
Notepad++ has a plugin that makes it the default even for things that would normally be go to Notepad.
I installed npp on one work computer but I don’t want to on the other one. I just want to use what is already installed.
Nobody’s forcing you to use it. I didn’t even know it was there until this article pointed it out, and when I tried it in Notepad it turned out to need an Office 365 subscription that I don’t have. So by default I can’t use it even if I want to use it.
Nobody’s forcing you to use it.
At least not there. For now.
So by default I can’t use it even if I want to use it.
You can use the feature for free by using Microsoft’s Copilot chat bot, making the subscription requirement even more stupid.
Again, that’s not forcing anything. That’s even less so - you have to deliberately go to an AI application in that case.
I wasn’t making a comment regarding forcing, I was sharing an anecdote how Microsoft themselves are offering free workarounds for features they want to get paid for.
And that AI is not free either. They bundled it with the Office update
They need to put AI inside the AI next and add a couple more full screens of ads , some subscriptions and super ultra premium++ edition OS DLC for functionality to save files.
Out of curiosity I’ve tried the AI feature in Paint (on my work computer) to erase something and use AI to fill in the background
I was removing a line between two items on a flowchart, background had diagonal colored lines in a regular repeating pattern (think college ruled paper at an angle).
Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!
I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.
But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.
Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!
Paint has two AI models depending on your hardware, whether you have a “Copilot Plus” PC or not.
On mobile so excuse my not linking to site but winaero tweaker has links for instructions how to replace current notepad with the classic notepad. Haven’t looked back since.
archive?
You know you can just copy the URL and prepend it with “archive.xx/” right?
couldn’t you just link it (archive.is)
Sure, I could
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