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NirSoft Freeware (2008)

nirsoft.net

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Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost as good as Mike Rowe .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

It's strange to me that people still remember this. It's been 14 years, but I guess it's nice to be known for something :)

I think the story blew up around the time that I connected with a bunch of Linux-loving friends in college, so in my case, the timing was perfect for memorability. I'll bet that some friends from then would remember it too, if I brought it up.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's essentially what happens. And it's a huge waste if you have 20 Electron apps running. Each ships with its own copy of Chromium which is as large as an operating system. I created a proof-of-concept called Electrino that uses the platform native libraries to cut down on app size: https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w... Unfortunately I haven't had the time to work on Electrino due to…

I've been thinking of something along those lines for years. I hope your project gets traction. I'd love to develop with web technologies exclusively, but what we've been doing with Electron is crazy. Imagine loading a whole new Win32 or Carbon/Cocoa for every app you open. I can understand the inconsistencies and lack of feature support that could emerge from using a different browser engine for each OS (Webkit/Edge…

Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve?

Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc.

Or am I totally wrong about this? I am not a web developer so I could be :)

Bonus question: how would this work for things like Atom and VS Code that are electron based. Could they become a PWA?

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#93
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.

I don't see why they would. Notepad is great if you want to do something really quickly w/ plaintext, and the fact that it doesn't really do anything else is the best part IMO. If you want nicer formatting you can use WordPad. Beyond that, there are a million alternatives (including the MS office suite)

Ever use replace all in Notepad, where it then begins slowly iterating, repainting at every step?

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os companies and politics in the first place. most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as fuck.

> most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as... I'd hesitate to make this generalization. I need to use slack on a macbook for work and it crashes regularly. I tried out VS code and it also would crash on occasion. Worse than that, coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use. There are plenty of non-electron apps that are stable.

I'm on a mac and use slack an vscode. Neither has crashed on me. I'm wondering if there is something about your mac setup.

I don't like that slack consumes some many resources. I love vscode so I don't care.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#95

Kind of retro site with a @yahoo.com email. Very weird for an advanced IT guy. "searchmyfiles" is awesome, by the way.

I tried searchmyfiles, and it's alright, but the best search tool I've found for windows is "Everything" by voidtools ( https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ )

I occasionally use it on a multi TB windows fileserver at work and after it does the initial index (which is really pretty fast because it uses the NTFS journals) searches are pretty much instantaneous. (I also use it at home, it's just less impressive after using it on that many files at work.)

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#96
post #84
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.

> I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work. With the diverse and enormous install base that Notepad has, do you really think it would be that simple? There must be all kinds of localization concerns, legal concerns, trademark issues, patent concerns, design and Windows brand concerns, that must go into a core OS application update. I agree that Notepad should be updated. But…

I was slightly facetious but compared to other changes this should be an easy one. It's probably one of the simplest changes you can make to Windows. I hope we can agree on that.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#97
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the icon for my Objective-C Mac app is larger than the executable binary (517 vs 394 KB).

You can probably shrink your icon down (losslessly) by dropping it into ImageOptim. https://imageoptim.com/mac

Or the command line util pngcrush

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#98
post #96
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work. With the diverse and enormous install base that Notepad has, do you really think it would be that simple? There must be all kinds of localization concerns, legal concerns, trademark issues, patent concerns, design and Windows brand concerns, that must go into a core OS application update. I agree that Notepad should be updated. But…

I was slightly facetious but compared to other changes this should be an easy one. It's probably one of the simplest changes you can make to Windows. I hope we can agree on that.

> It's probably one of the simplest changes you can make to Windows. I hope we can agree on that.

I certainly do not agree with that!

For example, Notepad has been one of the buggiest and weirdest pieces of software I used on stock Windows. It does weird things when saving files, like moving your cursor to another location, so if you are typing and saving and typing and saving you will end up with text misplaced all over and a bizarre file that has a weird back/undo history. With its large host of weird bugs I would not expect the current codebase to be simple to update, and surely you'd agree a rewrite of Notepad is more than a few days.

I in no way think that improving Notepad would be one of the easiest changes to make to Windows. Sure, there would be harder things to improve I'm sure, but I don't see why it's a contest at all. Updating Notepad sounds like the opposite of easy to me.

Improving Notepad for everyone who uses it, while not receiving millions of death threats for errors or bugs or unexpected, unwelcome changes in behaviour sounds nearly impossible to me, personally. Perhaps this is part of the reason it is so stagnant - MS sees little upside to making large improvements while seeing enormous risk. Just a guess.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#99
post #57
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that happens Notepad++ will probably the first explicit GNU GPL product from MS.

It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.

I'm sorry for going off topic, but I keep seeing this kind of comment and I want to get an answer - how is Notepad not a good editor? It can take any ASCII/ANSI/UTF file and output it in plaintext. It has line-wrap as an option. It loads fast and can handle files of decent size without lag. Users can set display and print fonts, etc. I'm really lost as to why anyone says Notepad is not a good text editor for basic text.

I've written entire websites in Notepad, not to mention it being my go-to writing tool for anything that doesn't need to be visually impressive or which I can add formatting tags to. I prewrite emails, cover letters, and long forum posts in Notepad. Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.

On the other hand, Notepad++ takes much longer to load, has more UI elements, and generally makes it harder to do the one very simple thing I want it to do - allow me to create and edit plaintext. Notepad2 was better on the UI last time I used it, but still took longer to load.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#100
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still way behind ProcExp for example.

A straightforward tool for everyone is not "behind" a comprehensive tool for experts just because it does less. Minimizing the probability of someone using Task Manager to shoot themselves in the foot is probably more challenging than adding an advanced feature to ProcExp.

The "Details" tab on the current task manager is plenty for shooting yourself in the foot but it lacks features for power users. I personally think they just don't care.
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