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Microsoft Edit

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Re: Microsoft Edit

#261
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.

There are currently no ideal native app development frameworks on Windows. WinForms is the closest thing

We spent the better part of a calendar year researching what framework to update our MFC app to. We really liked the idea of staying first-party since our UI is explicitly Windows-only, and we looked at every framework - MAUI, winforms or WPF with a C# layer, WinUI3...

It quickly became apparent that WinUI3 was the only one even close to viable for our use case, and we tried getting a basic prototype running with out legacy backend code. We kept running into dealbreakers we hoped would be addressed in the alleged future releases, like the lack of tables, or the baffling lack of a GUI UI designer (like every other previous Win framework).

...We're currently writing our GUI in Qt.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lmao is any body still using turbo cpp?

OpenWatcom is the preferred choice of those still writing DOS applications, but there are those that still use Turbo C++ for the nostalgia.

Oh, a few years ago I wanted to write a simple program for dos. Since this is a Linux-only household otherwise, I was delighted to see OpenWatcom has a Linux port. I spent a good half hour trying to get a simple first version of the program I wanted to write running, but it always crashed right away. I simplified more and more until I basically arrived at hello world. On a hunch I ran the windows version of OpenWatcom with wine, and lo and behold, the program ran flawlessly! Once I googled that I found a couple of forum threads where people went like "yeah sure the Linux port produces broken binaries" because of course.

It's never the compiler until it's the compiler. Just didn't expect it during some simple fun coding at home. :)

Re: Microsoft Edit

#263

Meanwhile, they forced AI Copilot bloat into Notepad, whose singular use-case was supposed to be that it does one thing well without unnecessary features.

And if you uninstall the modern notepad, start's search doesn't find the old one.

As if start's search ever found anything...

Re: Microsoft Edit

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Apple normalised it, first with the iPhone. There are upsides (theoretically - less trash apps), but the review/curation process doesn't scale, and yep - the small devs are effectively told to bug off. 10 years ago I wanted to build a Love2D game, and release it for the three major OS's. The .love files are effectively ZIP archives, kinda like cartridges, but you need the correct Love2D version (they br…

At least signing is free for MacOS apps. And back when I used it only $100/year for iPhone apps.

... where is signing free for macOS apps?

You can use an ad-hoc signature to sign, but people who download the app will still have to jump through hoops to run it.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#265
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you opposed to learning vi which is already installed everywhere?

Because vi has all the usability of a keyboard made out of hedgehogs.

vi isn’t usable. it sucks. but the facts are it’s installed everywhere and you can learn how to use it in 10-15 minutes. easier to patch your ignorance of basic vi than it is to install software on every machine you’ll ever edit on.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#267
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well why not? Is there supposed to be a single elected shell for Linux? Powershell on Linux is just one of plenty others.

I'm not against it. Absolutely go for it. I just wonder what was the reason to port it and then I would like to have a word with a real living person who is actually using that shell.

PowerShell lends itself really well to writing cross-platform shell scripts that run the same everywhere you can boot up PowerShell 7+. It's origins in .NET scripting mean that some higher-level idioms were already common in PowerShell script writing even before cross-platform existed, for instance using `$pathINeed = Join-Path $basePath ../sub-folder-name` will handle path separators smartly rather than just trying to string math it.

It's object-oriented approach is nice to work with and provides some nice tools that contrast well with the Unix "everything is text" tooling approach. Anything with a JSON output, for instance, is really lovely to work with `ConvertFrom-Json` as PowerShell objects. (Similar to what you can do with `jq`, but "shell native".) Similarly with `ConvertTo-Json` for anything that takes JSON input, you can build complex PowerShell object structures and then easily pass them as JSON. (I also sometimes use `ConvertTo-Json` for REPL debugging.)

It's also nice that shell script parameter/argument parsing is standardized in PowerShell. I think it makes it easier to start new scripts from scratch. There's a lot of bashisms you can copy and paste to start a bash script, but PowerShell gives you a lot of power out of the box including auto-shorthands and basic usage documentation "for free" with its built-in parameter binding support.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#268
post #19

This is just a "because I wanted to" project. And I get that; done a lot of those myself just to understand what the hell was going on. But the rewrite of turbo vision into FPC and compiling to half a dozen targets has been around for 20 years. Turbo vision is probably the best text mode windowing library in existence. The cool fun kicks in when you can map a whole text screen to an array like so: var Screen: Array[1…

Every time I see a new modern TUI framework, my disappointment is the same: "Oh. This isn't as good as Turbo Vision."

I always thought Charm was pretty robust as far as TUI tools go[0]

[0]: https://charm.sh/

Re: Microsoft Edit

#269
post #135

Meanwhile, they forced AI Copilot bloat into Notepad, whose singular use-case was supposed to be that it does one thing well without unnecessary features.

Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions. While Satya might have made the change Microsoft Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.

The new Edit.exe is indeed safe from those things.

A requirement for the tool is that it must remain as small as possible, so that it can be included in the smallest distributions of Windows, like Nano Server. It is the rescue text editor there.

I’m sure plugins are going to do all the things that everyone doesn’t want (or does want) but the default edit.exe will remain small, I’d bet money on it.

Re: Microsoft Edit

#270
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the native GUI development APIs provided by OS vendors need a kind of "headless" implementation first, where you can build UI in pure code like winforms, and then they should offer a framework on top of that. I, personally, hate XAML. It's stricter than HTML/CSS and very opinionated about how to organize your application. I feel that XAML frameworks should have a common Winforms-like API behind them that…

Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of. MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey. There there is Qt as well. Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony. With comple…

Borland was pretty good on the GUI front, I think we're forgetting how easy it was to get something rolling in Delphi. It's baffling Microsoft still hasn't gotten their stuff together on this. They've been just releasing new frameworks since the WinRT era and hoping something sticks.
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