Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11 • Hacker News Board

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#291

Post by emerged » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #109

twojacobtwo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Notepad++? I just tested it on my system after reading your comment and the difference between Notepad++ and Notepad was barely perceptible (the former being slower by ~0.1 seconds, at a guess). It also has a lot of quality of life features that notepad is missing - my favorite is that it auto-saves a cached copy of unsaved documents during shutdown and presents them to you on next open for saving (thi…

Yes, Notepad++ is really great. In my case, I would tend to have a bunch of text files in tabs that slowed loading, so associating 'txt' with it meant I'd have to wait to jot a note down. I could have fixed this by closing all tabs before putting it away, but I'm happier using VS Code for my larger text file needs and good old notepad.exe for quick notes.

FYI notepad++ has a setting to open a separate instance for each file. It drives me crazy when I install on a new machine and it defaults to the behavior you’ve described.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#292

Post by userbinator » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

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 should just go back to pure Win32. First thing to port: Teams.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#293

Post by orloffm » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

I moved from Windows to Xubuntu recently, and the single thing that I miss most is this feeling of simple sturdy low latency applications that Windows once provided. Notepad, Paint, the whole Windows pre-Vista aesthetic. It was even present in IE6 - every website felt as a heavy paper form in it. Now everything went to Chrome-like weightless fragility. Microsoft should've fixed all the WPF issues (including blurry rendering, stupid lack of margins by default etc.) 12 years ago and made it ready for the cross-platform evolution of dotnet. That would've solidified their desktop presence for a decade at least. Now they are just putting more and more nails into the coffin.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#294

Post by orloffm » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

vq wrote: post #137

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. I used to use Notepad years ago as it's practically guaranteed to exist on every Windows machine. I can't say much about productivity, but performance was abysmal for larger files. As for reliability, the main reason I never use Notepad now, even for most trivial things, is that Notepad++ will always bring my session back, with all open tabs, regardless of whether I saved the…

I'm sure the editor is fine for a basic editor that comes with the desktop environment, it looks functional enough, but the language in that article is just weird to me. It reads like some kind of prank.

It's a "you probably never worked in a corporation" type of thing. Someone is trained to write things like this, and it's impossible for that person to do it differently, plus no one is in a position/capacity/incentive to affect that.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#295

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #292

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 should just go back to pure Win32. First thing to port: Teams.

Win32/Winforms (can't really cope with DPI scaling) or WPF?

As pjlmp says, that would be an admission of failure.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#296

Post by jrm4 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #95

jrm4 wrote: post #81

From the Linux side of the fence; Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial? Why encourage or tolerate an operating system (slash ecosystem of apps) with such a limited view of choice? Announcements like this really lay bare the collective dumbing down that these centralized ecosystems encourage. Someone's going to respond with "people don't like thinking about c…

How many people use Microsoft windows 10? Latest: 1.3 Billion https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsdevices That, along with the tendency towards Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's law of triviality, means a lot of people care. Android has a comparable number of users, but I think we should compare desktop PC systems here and in this case, Linux users have much lower expectations of Linux Desktop along with not…

What I'm suggesting is that insiders in IT are perhaps overestimating how much people care, as part of the general argument that Microsoft and Apple often dumb down the whole computer experience for everyone.

Specifically: Okay, bikeshedding. Bikeshedding is what it is for individuals and their own environments; I do it, sometimes it's a waste of time, sometimes not.

But this feels like bikeshedding on behalf of others, which is WEIRD for a tool like this. If you're an insider, than you probably have moved beyond, way beyond "Notepad for everything." If you're a non-techie, you likely don't use notepad at all, and if you do, not extensively in a way that makes this update interesting.

If you're in the middle (first, who is this even?) old Notepad or new Notepad is still probably something transitory.

The broad version of this is: IT generally does far too much in terms of trying to think about and creating dumb, unmodifiable and heavy handed entrenched interface designs for people who are not themselves.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#297

Post by jordache » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #185

jordache wrote: post #174

windows 10 + 11 is such a mess. It's just a pretty skin on top of the same Windows NT Window chrome. The modern UI skin is baked in with a bunch of none-sensical UX decisions. I also hate how Windows' happy-path setup, does not encourage use to create and operate with a low privileged local account. Instead, if you click through the setup process, you end up running the OS w/ an admin level account.

Isn't that how most operating systems are? macOS and most Linux distros direct the user to creating and living in an "Administrator" account, but require confirmation from the user (or extra steps) whenever invoking the privileges that comes with.

That is true on macos. I'm being prompted for any consequential actions.

In Windows 10 + 11, that prompt does not exist, if you are signed in with the admin account.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#298

Post by ziml77 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #261

Osiris wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10. It now doesn't work in Windows 11 because they didn't reimplement the IDeskBand interface for the taskbar that my app uses to show remaining battery time. My app is even part of their compatibility test suite (they asked me for permission and a license). I understand the need to move forward and that BW compatibility can be hinder th…

So how does the little turd that shows news and weather work?

It's not in Windows 11. That seems to be even more evidence that 11 was quite rushed for some reason. They rewrote the taskbar but didn't finish reimplementing much of the existing functionality.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#299

Post by benhurmarcel » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #226

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'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…

Maybe that’s part of why Windows owns the enterprise and Apple isn’t really a thing in that market.

Re: Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

#300

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

valenaut wrote: post #82

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notepad is core OS functionality? I think not.

For Windows I would say it is. Windows doesn't come with vi, nano, or any other terminal text editor, and some kind of text editor is needed for pretty much anything you would do with a computer.

I have never seen non techie users open notepad or edit config files. In fact I've heard people say that Notepad sucks and that MS Word is better, meaning they are so non techie they can't imagine a use case for notepad.