Any app that’s installed by default is always used by large numbers of users. Even if not for real text editing, plenty of people use it just as a temporary place to paste copied text to strip the formatting before copy/pasting it somewhere else.

I'm still kinda mad that there's no default shortcut for "paste without formatting" in Word, like CTRL+SHIFT+V in Chrome. It's like one if the most used feature for me in Word.

You may be interested in CTRL+ALT+V

My use cases:

1) to strip formatting of text

2) to validate text. For example spotting an O or 0, | or l, etc. Its quite normal when dealing with user input to find configuration errors this way

3) Quick temporary paste buffer. Nice when jotting down phonecalls. Better than onenote since it opens quickly and ready to accept input. it never opens on some random page full of categorized notes.

If I just need to take a quick note, I'll happily run Notepad, which opens instantly, write down what I needed to write down, save it, and then move on with my life. The "runs instantly" part is what still makes it useful, nothing else comes even close to just immediately giving you a textbox to spew characters into.

That's all it's for though, for real work, real editors (meaning different editors for different tasks, because writing a long text in a code editor is kind of like insisting on using a chef knife for everything in the kitchen. Possible, but a bit silly)

> nothing else comes even close to just immediately giving you a textbox to spew characters into

On my machine, when there's an Emacs daemon running in the background (so no existing windows, which might make this process faster), opening a new window ("frame" in Emacs terminology) and then closing it again takes 165 milliseconds total.

Google gives various values for "human reaction time", but one of them is 200 milliseconds.

I'd say that that's pretty close.

Unless you need to save those 12 MB of memory that the Emacs daemon consumes.

You're free to use whatever editor you want, but I find the claim that "nothing else comes even close to just immediately giving you a textbox to spew characters into" a bit doubtful.

Pretty sure tons of people use it still. It's the built-in editor, so while it's not a good code editor by any stretch of the imagination, it's infinitely useful for people who are not coding, who don't have some other editor or text processor installed.

I use notepad to take notes on calls. Opens very quickly. Other editors are usually filled with my other work. I can just pop open a blank text doc, take some notes, save it, and exit.

I use it every day. On my machine, it opens much faster than Sublime Text, let alone VS Code. If I want to see or change a small file, or want to write a quick note, I open Notepad.

I use it explicitly to lose formatting while I copy from browser to an application like excel or Word. The intermediate step causes it to lose all unnecessary text properties.

I use it for seconds when Windows somehow pushes it to the top of search when I clearly mean Notepad++. The close button works well for my use cases.

I still use Notepad and TextEdit throughout my day. Sometimes I just need to quickly note something down.

It's still my go-to text editor. My whole note-taking system is based on it.

Repeat: I am not asking what you use alternatively. Just commenting on perceived decline in anyone actually using Notepad