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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at breaking changes to Notepad paint and snipping tool in Windows 1124 H2.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat. This is a follow up episode of sorts to last week's episode. I looked at some of the major changes coming in Windows 1124H2, sort of at the system level in the OS itself. This week I want to look at some of the big changes coming to three of the apps that seem to be changing the most these days in Windows 11. Notepad Paint and snipping tool. So as with the OS level changes, some of these things are actually Copilot plus PC specific, most are not. I will try to call those out accurately as well as I can. So Notepad, let's bring that one up first. So Notepad, this has evolved quite a bit and if you think back to the Beginning of Windows 11, when Windows 11 first shipped in 2021, Notepad looked like it did in Windows 10, which looked like it did in previous versions of Windows. It hadn't really changed that much at all. Some of the early changes they made here were for things like the multiple tabs with multiple documents, session state management, light and dark mode support, which actually worked unlike Paint. And then they started adding the AI features, which are now largely available through this Copilot drop down menu. Sorry, I said copilot and I woke the demon. Let me close that. Sorry, I have that voice feature on. I should probably turn that off. So, Notepad, I have to say I respect the changes. We did an episode about Notepad, I'm sure fairly recently. So I've kind of liked everything they've done so far. If you don't like any of the new features, you can turn those off. Excellent. But the most recent change is a big one. And this is going to confuse people. And it's this little thing right here in the middle of the. This is actually a menu bar, not a toolbar, but you get a toolbar right in the middle of the menu bar because I don't know Microsoft. But this suggests that there's some kind of a formatting thing going on. And indeed there is a feature called formatting. Now, this is not rich text, right? So it's not RTF. It's not what we used to do with WordPad, right? That kind of light version of Microsoft Word. It is in fact for what Microsoft calls lightweight formatting or Markdown style formatting. So it supports markdown files, which are MD as opposed to txt, and it supports dot or markdown style input, but not really. Right. So if you know anything about Markdown, you might know that you could type hash and then this is a heading one. But if I do that here, it's just a hash with a heading one. And I can type some text and it's just text and I can, I know because I know Markdown. If I, if I could type, I could do, you know, this is a link and, and I could put inside a parentheses some kind of a URL, apple.com for some reason. And God, I finally know how to type. Okay, so that, that is marked down, but Notepad doesn't seem to understand it. And the trick is that we've got this little guy down here now it's not doing anything right now. But what it's telling me is that this document is plain text. So this is not Markdown, although markdown text technically is plain text. So it's not doing any sort of auto discovery of whatever. So I'm just going to delete that. But if you insert something this way. So if I. This is a heading one, actually a title. And now I type it, you can see it's actually kind of formatted. And now I can type some text like I did before and now I can type something that I'll turn into a hyperlink, right? And so select it link. I get this little pop up, I can do exactly what I did before and this time it will look correct. It's a hyperlink, right? I could click that and go to that website in the web browser. Now this just changed to formatted. And so this is the difference. And so I can turn that off and go this, they call that Markdown syntax. This is the plain text view of that thing. It's what I typed before, right? And I can go back. If I try to close this, it will ask me if I want to or just try to save it. It will ask me if I want to save it. And then it gives you this warning, right? In order to save the formatting, although technically it would still work fine, but for Notepad to understand it, you have to save it as a markdown file. That's what you would want to do anyway. So I will save that as a markdown. I'll just put it on my desktop here. Oops not overwrite that. And it's just a test. I'll just call it test, right? So I actually use a different app for Markdown, but if I double click this, you'll see that app and you can see it's got all kinds of couple formatting issues or whatever, but no big deal, save it. Okay, you can open it in Notepad. Most people probably won't have an editor of any kind of markdown editor. And so you could just do it this way. It would open in Notepad natively, I guess, and that's fine. So. Yeah. So why are they doing this? Well, it's not to replace WordPad. It's because actually developers use Markdown all the time. I use Markdown for writing, I use it for my books, I use it for the website articles I write. But developers use it for documentation. And so Markdown is super common out in the developer space, especially on GitHub. You'll see the readme file for every GitHub repository is a markdown file. It is plain text. The beauty of it is, well, actually I can't open it in Notepad anymore. I used to be able to do that. If you open it in just a text editor that doesn't understand Markdown, you get this view and this is just plain text. It's always going to be human readable. It may not be perfect, it's not, you know, great, but you can understand it. And it's obviously machine readable as well. So it's never going to go. It's never going to be something you could lose because nothing supports the document format. It's just plain text. Kind of an interesting thing. I'd like it to be a little more sophisticated around the way it does things. I think putting this up here is going to, you know, by default is going to confuse some people. But if you go in here, you can see you can just turn it off. So I'm not going to turn it off. I actually do use this, but kind of an interesting new feature. Okay, that's a big one. Controversial, I know, but let's bring up paint. And so I don't have paint in there. I'll just search for paint. Bring up paint. Paint's another one. Lots of Modernization under Windows 11 started off really poorly. In the early days this was just light mode. It didn't support light and dark mode, but now it does both. It's brought back a lot of the keyboard shortcuts. So it's kind of more like the way it used to be. I think it was earlier this year I did an episode just about paint and how I use paint. And of course at that point it had evolved a lot over time, but it has evolved even more since the last time we spoke to me, the big one is this move toward more professional tools. So paint supports layers like Photoshop does. And I use that when I do my Christmas card. I'm sure I used that example where you can put images in different layers and then turn them on and off and see how it impacts the image without the full image, without destructively ruining what was underneath it. Right. It's kind of a neat, kind of a new thing. And this works with a lot of the new features. So including some of the stuff we're going to go over here, the AI based stuff that they've been doing over the past year or so includes things like this background removal tool here and now there are so many of these things, they actually have this menu and what you're going to see here will vary based on whether you have a Copilot plus PC or a normal PC. And this is another area where I'm going to forget which is which. But co creator and image creator. I believe that image creator is the one that required you just click on and find out. But I believe this is. No, this does not require a Copilot plus PC. So it must be co creator that does. So depending on the type of computer you have, you're going to see slightly different things. There is also A welcome experience now. And I only point this out because this is starting to turn into a pretty complex tool. So they're actually kind of helping you understand what these new features are. I've already clicked through this on this computer, but you can bring it up with this little bullhorn that we got here. So new stuff, there's Generative Erase. And so actually to do that, let me bring up an image and this is not a great choice, but I will use it nonetheless. So you can see that whole thing. This is an AI created version of sort of the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper, if you remember that. And if I wanted to go in here and say Generative Erase, it will let me draw over the areas, the area that I want to erase, right? And so I could kind of go in here and be like, get rid of this thing. And really what it's doing is Generative Erase and fill, right? It's not just going to remove whatever that little bush thing is there. It's going to try to replace the background. So it looks pretty good. Actually it doesn't look any different at all. Depending on what it is you're trying to like. For example, if I went here and said, okay, I want to get rid of this giant cloud, you can see it takes a little while for one thing, right? It does the little AI blue, pink, purple animation, hand waving thing and then we'll see what comes out. That's not working at all. So that's terrible. So we're not going to. We're just going to move past that. But this works. The Generative Erase feature works with some of the other stuff we're going to look at too. So there is now Object select. So speaking of Photoshop like features, this is kind of cool. This is not a great image for this again. But now I can select objects. So as I mouse over, it selected the entire background. If I chose say Generative Erase from this, actually this would be a mess, I would imagine. So I can actually. Is there a. You should get a little pop up thing here. It's going to take a little while because this is actually a pretty big image and this is a big chunk of that image. But it's probably going to throw in a green mess. Looks terrible. It's trying to make it look like the rest of the image. This is not a great choice for this type of thing. But I showed you those like the bush earlier that didn't work. So if I select that and then do Generative Erase, this should look more natural. This is a simple Little thing. It will just be some kind of a green color. So it's probably not perfect but it's pretty good. And of course I could have done that on a layer as well. I didn't but that would make that thing non destructive. So I can just control Z back. But that's pretty cool. So if you are familiar with these kind of tools that you see in like paint.net or Photoshop, whatever really useful to have. And then on the more frivolous side there is a sticker generator because we all need stickers. I'll just use the little sample that Microsoft put there. So it's a cat wearing sunglasses because I can't possibly be creative right now. And actually in this case I think I will put a. I'll put this one in a layer. So it's going to make four of these things. I can choose one moving nice and fast. And yeah, I'll put this little guy in there and there he is now. So this is in a layer and so I'm not going to do anything else with that. I'm just going to close that and I can. There it is. So I can't move it now. It's not an object anymore. Although I could object select but because it is in a layer I can hide it. Right. Which is pretty good. If you do want to. If this isn't where I wanted this thing, I would have to just basically do that again. Right there's. So I could hide that. I could hide that. Go back to. Yes, yes, yes, thank you. Oh, I'm hiding the layer. I got to do another layer and then go back to that thing. This is still there. So I can just click it again. Double click. I guess I got to drag it in. So you have to decide where it's going to be from. You can't move this thing later. It's not an automatic layer of its own kind or whatever like you might have in Photoshop or whatever. So you can kind of resize this thing. Okay, that's okay. But once I let go of it, it's just there. So it's, you know, it's not Photoshop but it's. It's still pretty cool. I not really sure I would ever use a sticker, but it's okay. And do not save that. Okay. And then the Snipping tool. This one to me is the most impressive. When Microsoft first rebranded what is now Snipping Tool and when it going from Windows 10 to Windows 11, it was originally Snipping Tool, they changed the name to something else. Now it's back to Snipping Tool. I thought of it as superfluous. I didn't really see any need for it. It's interesting to me how indispensable this thing has become. The controversial bit here for me was that they made it the print screen replacement. So when you press print screen, which I'll have to do on this keyboard up here, you get the overlay for Snipping Tool, which now has a bunch of stuff on it, right? It used to be in the beginning it was just screenshots, and then they added screen recordings. So it's snips and recordings. If you're doing a snip, which is a screenshot, you can choose between these different shapes, right? Full screen window, freeform, et cetera. But there's this other stuff now, right? And so this is really interesting to me. There's also some other features I think we looked at earlier. Like you can do things like trim screenshots, trim screen recordings. There's a feature coming where you can take a short screen recording and turn it into an animated gif. That's, you know, not a horrible idea. But what I want to focus on now are these things here which are mostly new. So the first two here, this is just a toggle between the two, you know, snip and recording. Screenshot, screen recording. Right. This is also not new. This has not changed. These are the same options that have been there for whatever amount of time. But if you have a rectangle selected like I do there, I gotta bring it back, of course. Oh, it took a screenshot of nothing. So if I bring that thing back, actually let me put a window in there so we have something to take a shot of, I guess, and I go this wrong keyboard. Bring this guy back. Let's look at the first one here. So this is called perfect Screenshot. And you could actually do this by just doing a normal screenshot while you're holding down the control key as well as it says. But let's just select that. And what this lets me do is sort of draw roughly on this thing. So in other words, I'm not gonna. I would never be able to with the mouse, grab this window. Exactly. I mean, obviously in this case, there's also a window screenshot I could just choose. But what it will do is use AI to understand what it is I'm trying to select. And then just select it for me, right? So if you're using a pen or multi touch or whatever, this kind or a mouse, right? This is a really nice way to just grab exactly what you want so that I can click capture and you can see it's just the window. So that's. That's cool. There is also. Oh, maybe I should bring that back. Actually, the next one is Click to do. Now this is actually nothing special. This is just another way to launch Click to do. So if you think in terms of snipping tool, because I'm capturing something, it will just bring up the normal click to do experience. So you've got text and graphics you can do things with. If I were to right click on any of these, I get the same actions as I would get just launching Click to do Right Windows key plus click or whatever or Windows key plus Q. I'm not gonna do that. I'll just escape out of that. But so it's just another way to do that. This next one to me is huge. I actually need this kind of thing a lot. I take a lot of screenshots. Depending on your needs, you might find this really useful as well. And what that is is a color picker. So this time we're actually not going to take a screenshot or a screen recording. Instead you just select this color picker tool and you get this little eyedropper and it gives you the color. Now you can choose up here what form the color you will copy to the clipboard will take. If you're a web developer or a programmer, you typically would work with this hex number. This is very familiar to me. But you can choose these other values as well. Maybe you're making a graphic and a graphics program like Photoshop and you need to get in a color. Exactly right, Whatever it might be. So as you move around, you can see it's just telling me what all the colors are. So once I just grab a blue color here, I get this thing, I click it, you can see it says color copied. And if I were to go to let's put it Notepad and paste, you can see I get the hex number for that color there. It's very cool. So that's neat. So that's actually most of the new features in Stimping Tools. So the next thing over is like more tools. And this is just an overflow menu. I'm not sure why Color picker is in there twice, but you can say, I don't actually want to pin this, but I do want text extractor, which is one of the things we've talked about before. This is basic OCR capabilities, right? So if I were to do text extractor on this part of the screen. You know, AI blah blah blah. Copy all the text. I think we've already shown this, but incubation is not a great example. But it gives you just the text whatever was on screen. Really, really cool. So that has turned into an amazing tool. Stepping told this editing functions. I mentioned the ability to trim the video on either side. I think. I think I did that in a previous video and like I said, coming soon also GIF creation off of a video. So the only thing it doesn't do is capture the mouse cursor, which is something I actually do need for my own screenshots a lot of the time. So I'm hoping that's something that we get eventually. It has everything else. It's pretty good. So pretty impressive. And except for Click to Do, I believe all of those features are for everybody. Click to do obviously requires a Copilot plus PC, but the rest of those features are just for everyone. So kind of a mix in there for all three apps. So notepad, Paint and Snipping tool. Lots of new features. By the time you watch this recording, you should have all of them, depending on the kind of PC you have. Right? But this stuff has all been happening over the past few months. Pretty cool. Well, thank you so much. I hope you found this interesting or entertaining at least. We have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can learn more at TWiT TV. H O W thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our club TWIT members. We love you. If you're not a member, please check it out TWIT TV how and think about supporting the channel. Really appreciate it, but I'll see you next week.