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Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#281

Post by lpcvoid »

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…

I would be have been pretty sad to hear that so much enthusiasm to improve the product resulted in problems regarding your career. That's promotion material, in my book. Glad it worked out.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#282

Post by pjc50 »

pjmlp wrote: post #274
pjc50 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++…

They've absolutely lost their roadmap, and I think they've also lost the distinction between solving a problem that Microsoft has versus a problem the users have.

And they've never quite dealt with having their platform be eaten by the web and the Apple Store / Google Play Store. See https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/10/20/introdu...

There's also the tension between dotnet core trying to be properly cross-platform vs having it actually support the various Windows toolkits. They've historically been welded into the build system as first-class citizens, rather than optional packages, which causes trouble as soon as you do a cross-platform build. WinUI3 goes halfway to fixing that by being installable as a package, but still relies on "true".

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#283

Post by gsinclair »

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.

Word’s modern Equation Editor.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#285

Post by pjc50 »

signal11 wrote: post #70
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…

I suspect it's a mindset change. Not heeding demand and staying stuck in the past was how Windows became a punchline, although I'm sure enterprise customers loved it. At some point it did begin to change -- I suspect it hasn't changed enough for HN readers. For instance, Unix LF support was added to Notepad back in 2018 (at last!) with a few registry switches for compatibility.[1] [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/c…

They tried about one-and-a-half times to do a big compatibility break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT and Windows Phone. It was a failure, of course.

I'm not entirely clear whether the "current" API set called "WinRT" is the continuation of "Windows RT". It sounds plausible but it could just be Microsoft being terrible at naming.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#286

Post by jhgb »

tasogare wrote: post #266
jeffmill wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why not releasing it as NewNotepad or something? This way it keeps the old one working but provides a newer alternative. Like Paint and 3DPaint or whatever it is called.

Yestepad.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#287

Post by bombcar »

wiseleo wrote: post #227
grishka wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all can be worked around given enough will. Excel files do have a format version number in them somewhere, right? I'm sure they do. So support the old behavior for older files, and the new one for the newer ones. All files created with the new version of Excel won't be affected by that bug, but the older ones, that might rely on it, won't break either.

It gets worse. This workaround is also in VBA, which has an enormous install base. Books on Excel programming explicitly call out this issue. This is one thing I definitely would not want fixed. You will break countless workflows that have operated for decades.

And even better non-excel spreadsheets have to know the bug and imitate it when opening excel docs.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#288

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #282
pjmlp wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++…

They've absolutely lost their roadmap, and I think they've also lost the distinction between solving a problem that Microsoft has versus a problem the users have. And they've never quite dealt with having their platform be eaten by the web and the Apple Store / Google Play Store. See https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/10/20/introdu... There's also the tension between dotnet core trying to be properly cros…

Yes, I can clearly see that point of view.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#289

Post by tpxl »

rasz wrote: post #243
Tempest1981 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Prevailing reason for the speed of ms code: >I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

Didn't someone then implement a terminal emulator with colors, unicode support, fonts etc and it wasn't a doctoral research project?
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