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Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#271

Post by watersb »

jeffmill wrote: post #256
pantaloons wrote: post #58

I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason. I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps…

> For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember t…

If I could upvote you ten points, I would.

I love Notepad. I love the .LOG feature. I hit F5 for fun.

For some reason, the dead-simple text editors have always fascinated me. It's damn near good enough.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#272

Post by pjc50 »

pjmlp wrote: post #257
userbinator wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same Microsoft who said UWP was not the future only two years ago, is still continuing to rewrite applications in it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883351

Yes, because WinUI is a clusterfuck so they need to keep using what they have. Currently 2307 issues open, https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues And this is just one repo, then you can hop into C#/WinRT, AppSDK, C++/WinRT ones as well. Hence why they keep releasing WinUI 2.x series, although 2.6 was supposed to be the very last one before WinUI 3.0 goes stable. However if you go to the community meeti…

I came back to Windows Gui development this autumn, and we thought we'd try jumping in to WinUI3 as newer == better, right? Really hasn't worked out that way. It's literally only just hit 1.0. The prerelease versions had problems with "unpackaged" deployment (which is one of the key things we want, so we don't have to wrestle with the Windows store).

I just got an internal email saying "MS has a very convoluted process for getting a developer account just to publish apps to the Microsoft store and not even our MS rep knows the correct answer" from the person trying to set that up, so that's going well too.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#273

Post by Randor »

jeffmill wrote: post #256
pantaloons wrote: post #58

I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason. I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps…

> For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember t…

Hey Jeff,

Small world, I worked with you on the Windows Update team. Hope you are doing well. Good to see you here on the HN forum. I also remember the notepad incident!

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#274

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #272
pjmlp wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because WinUI is a clusterfuck so they need to keep using what they have. Currently 2307 issues open, https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues And this is just one repo, then you can hop into C#/WinRT, AppSDK, C++/WinRT ones as well. Hence why they keep releasing WinUI 2.x series, although 2.6 was supposed to be the very last one before WinUI 3.0 goes stable. However if you go to the community meeti…

I came back to Windows Gui development this autumn, and we thought we'd try jumping in to WinUI3 as newer == better, right? Really hasn't worked out that way. It's literally only just hit 1.0. The prerelease versions had problems with "unpackaged" deployment (which is one of the key things we want, so we don't have to wrestle with the Windows store). I just got an internal email saying "MS has a very convoluted proce…

Yeah, I really don't want to be on their shoes, and if we on the outside don't make our pain points clearly visible, I have the feeling that management will never change course.

On the outside it looks they have made a mess across teams, and now everyone is competing for our attention regarding Forms, WPF, WinUI 2.x on UWP (XBox, HoloLens, Windows until WinUI 3.0 catches up), WinUI 3.0 (some day), MFC (WinUI with C++/WinRT is a mess except for ATL/WRL fans with their deep IDL/COM love), MAUI, PWAs, or better yet, just wrap Blazor everywhere.

So I can't belive they are like the dog on a burning house, rather not allowed to fix the mess that Windows 8 brought into Windows development, and talk publicly how they actually think about all of this.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#275

Post by native_samples »

lazugod wrote: post #234
grishka wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always liked Apple's approach more. There are public APIs that are mostly guaranteed to work across system versions. Then there are private ones. You can reverse engineer them. You can use them in your apps. They might even do what you wanted. But you're on your own with them, as Apple rightfully considers itself free to break anything that isn't part of the public SDK. Microsoft, on the other hand, sees that so…

How do the various Linux flavors handle this kind of thing?

They just break everything and tell users/devs to suck on it.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#276

Post by native_samples »

clavicat wrote: post #259

There is something pathologically dysfunctional about a trillion-dollar organization that thinks a few imperceptible improvements to decades-old programs that individual programmers have created far superior versions of for free are worth announcing like it’s a marvel of engineering. We saw the same thing with Windows Terminal—they even made a trailer for it. Like, these are the kinds of updates that would take one p…

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way is that they have a marketing problem: everyone knows that Windows has ignored the basics for decades in favor of all kinds of random crap like rewriting their web browser 3 or 4 times, putting adverts in the start menu and so on. But the foundational stuff an operating system is expected to do, like open text files or provide a calculator or a working terminal app, has been rotting away unloved and unowned.

So now they're finally (!) fixing some of these issues. They have a terminal that isn't a total embarrassment now. OK it's slow but at least the features are there. They are upgrade Notepad. They upgraded the Calculator. These projects are revealing weaknesses in their new round of Windows APIs but fine, whatever, at least they're dogfooding stuff now and it's not like the original Windows APIs smelled of roses either.

As a result, yes, they seem to be making a big deal about stupidly small stuff. But, whatever. I can forgive them for that. They all do it: GNOME makes fancy marketing material for changing icon themes or adding a dark mode to their settings app or whatever, Apple promote lots of trivial stuff as well. It's still better than the status quo of Windows development for the last 20 years.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#277

Post by tasogare »

seritools wrote: post #118

10 minute QA because they don't seem to have done it: - It consistently starts slower than Notepad3 while having substantially fewer features to load (and also slower than the old Notepad of course) - THEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS (especially when grabbing the scroll bar handle). Any amount of delay is too much in notepad - the animation runs at 60Hz even on a high refresh rate screen, so it loo…

Always the same crap with MS redesigns those days (like the Terminal one): there is fancy useless shit like Dark Theme but the basics like a functional IME are broken. What the point of a text editor if it well, can't input text?

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#279

Post by jussij »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #190
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Microsoft is still pretending that UWP/WinUI isn't a complete mistake. All those issues are inherent to that technology.

Doesn't UWP/WinUI render using DirectX? What makes it so slow?

Just take a look at the last 25+ years of GUI development.

In all that time, as computers have got blindingly fast, the one and only constant is the guarantee GUIs continue to get get slower.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#280

Post by dhruvdh »

garbagecoder wrote: post #199
dhruvdh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chance that your use case is basic and hasn’t changed in 20 years, but I think there is a higher chance of it’s a case of general hatred for Microsoft. > only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors. Do people not see what their feelings towards Microsoft turns them into?

List one feature from Word that didn’t exist in 2003 that you depend on.

I don’t use Word at all, there are many other pieces of software in the Office suite, many which simply did not exist 20 years ago. If you think nothing has changed then it is very likely you don’t need Office.
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