In case you're feeling left out in Notepad, you can right-click › "Search with Bing..."

Only for selected text.

notepad pros:

* doesn't send your text to the botnet

* works with multiline text

cons:

* isn't 2 keys (win-R) away. I personally had to type win + N + O + T + E + P until it showed up, then hit enter.

> notepad pros: > * doesn't send your text to the botnet

hm, yet? And are we even sure about that? Who expect that what you type in the Run dialog being spied on and sent to MS? Is this even documented anywhere?

At this point I'm considering all MS softwares have become mainly hardcore spyware, with maybe some secondary legacy functions remaining (but in lots of cases being stripped slowly, while getting more bloated at the same time).

probably you can be confident with a copy of wireshark

Unless I do that all day, not really (and then I would need to configure tons of things to block the traffic), and things are getting worse and worse. I just received an update from Dell of Intel integrated graphics driver and it seems they phone home (to Intel, most probably, I doubt Dell receives a special version that send to Dell instead of to Intel whatever they thought it would be interesting to spy on), although I'm not sure the original ones did so, nor if I have even been warned that they do.

Probably illegal under GDPR laws, but like that kind of company gives a shit...

I will just abandon Windows, it's not worth it anymore. Win 11 incompatible with most not-so-old PCs will be a good occasion.

The mothership only got "notep" :/

Not great because when they see how many people use Notepad, they're going to replace it with a piece of shit like they did with the snipping tool and Freecell.

> * isn't 2 keys (win-R) away.

Unless it's always on - an Alt-Tab away. I use Notepad++ for that, it comes in handy with seemingly infinite undos and autosave.

You can just add a shortcut named "n.lnk" pointing to your favorite editor and put in a folder that's in your %PATH% and then you can just type "n<enter>" in the Run dialog.

There's also a way to add aliases via the Registry, but it's way more cumbersome.

That con is why I've used Authotkey to bind notepad to win-N.

Personally, I just type Win+R and then `no`, down, enter.