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Comment by hashtag-til | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the “Notes” app on Mac has at least the autocomplete now and I find it quite useful.

I’m very sceptical about all these AI announcements but text editing is case where I think this “AI” stuff can actually be used for good.

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Notes is a very different app to Notepad though. Nobody uses the Notes app to edit plain text files, which is the sole use case of Notepad. Notes is for writing, well, notes. Notes also has a lot of other editing modes and features like drawing with the apple pencil, scanning documents, cross device syncing, etc. As far as I’m aware Notepad can only edit plain text files.

It's unfortunate that Apple Notes doesn't handle plain text. I'd use it like this if possible.

Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete, autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers…

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194047/microsoft-notepad...

> Notepad got some of that just in 2024

I assume this was the 1:1 correlated w/ the deprecation/removal of wordpad, as both were shipped everywhere prior.

I used Notes to edit a text file once and learned a very important lesson; It changes all your double-quotes to fancy Unicode double-quotes. They may look prettier, but they completely break the code you are working on.

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