Ctrl + Shift + V should paste without formatting, but for some reason Microsoft Office software (Outlook, Word, Publisher) refuses to follow this standard.
I also appreciate that Notepad notes now don't need to be manually saved to a file. They're probably in temp storage somewhere, but the point is you can just write and close.
Put .LOG at the beginning of a text file. When opened in Notepad, you should get a date & time stamp.
Open filename.txt, type something, save and close.
Now you have a journal for system and config changes, document collections, time entries, client visits, whatever. Has worked on every Windows box I ever had to use.
You copy some text from a webpage and put it in your email or word processor, it copies the formating too and everything looks wonky. If you paste the clipboard content in a text editor, like notepad and copy the text from there, you strip the formating.
You copy some text from a webpage and put it in your markdown/LaTeX document in your text editor, like vim. Then you use pandoc/pdf-latex to export in whatever file format you need. It never looks wonky, it looks exactly like you tell it to.
Every text editor removes formatting, plain txt files don't have any format. but text editors, like Notepad are very usefull to edit eg, config files or scripts, where isn't desirable to change the original format.
There are apps way more useless than Notepads-
Outlook intercepts and disables it because of course it does and instead pastes it with the formatting but with a little drop down box at the end of your text pass address you can click to remove the formatting like you tried to do with you with hotkeys.
I have to use Outlook for work, but never intentionally do so if I choice. Truly amazing. If there's anything that can be messed up, it will be.
Yeah they just want to collect every single bit of data you have. AI is a data collection tool. A reason to send everything you type or use to their servers. I swapped to Linux fully over 4 years ago and my windows 10 install is still sitting on my older SSD drive. It's a good reminder to format that thing and use it as a backup drive in my Unraid setup.
Don't shame notepad! Just the other day I had to alter a host file so a computer could talk to a server! That's a very important thing and I wouldn't have been able to do it without trusty notepad!
I use Firefox with DuckDuckGo. But I do agree that Google is so pervasive in the browser space that pasting text to the URL bar without further context can be reasonably understood in most instances, as sending data to Google.
So windows 11 sucks for a number of reasons, but one thing it doesn't suck for is updating the notepad program to have autosave and being able to reopen last notes even if not saved to a file directly. Makes it actually usefull as a notepad
It does AI autocorrect to text though, which I'm not sure how I feel. It hasn't ruined anything for me just yet, but they're starting to try and make it automagical, which is exactly what I needed not to be.
I mainly use the Blue Velvet editor (works also in mobile). There you can save locally in plain text (without any format), PDF or in htm. (Rich text or code). Works right in the browser.