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Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#481
post #367

Ironic how Notepad used to be too simple, making it useless as a text editor in many cases. In particular, it didn't support UNIX line endings and files larger than a few MB. The there was a brief moment where it became decent. Still a barebones text editor, but it could actually edit text, what I think most people expected Notepad to be. And now, it is going the other way, with "AI" features no one wanted, and also…

I haven't used Windows in years. I remember needing to use WordPad to even open a Unix line ending file, even though it was counter-intuitive.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old notepad would still open instantly so that can't be it. The updated machines with the new notepad are just as infuriating. Reminds me of the shitty gamer laptop manufacturer apps that would take over a minute to display a glorified rectangle on the screen. All this to configure keyboard LEDs. I reverse engineered that garbage and made a Linux version that works instantly , proving their incompetence.

If your work computer is taking 10 seconds to open the calculator something is very odd since my windows 11 work computer opens it just fine.

All I know is it's an infuriating experience that I basically have to speedrun through almost every single day before I can actually get work done. My Linux laptop must be over a decade old by now and it just doesn't have this problem. The Windows 98 computer I had as a child didn't have this problem.

Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing they should probably stop. A goddamn calculator application shouldn't require a high performance workstation to even launch. It worked fine before, now it takes ages and can't even handle input properly. That's stupid and there's really no excuse for it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator . It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network. The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sor…

Off-topic, but do you know Mozilla Firefox has a builtin calculator and unit conversion in the URL bar? For my personal use I rather use python and GNU units, but I guess for most users that live in the browser instead of the terminal, this could become their default calculator. browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator = true I don't know if you need to restore the urlbar first, before that works.

I didn't know. That's pretty amazing. Thank you.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows computer I have to use at work takes over ten seconds to open the calculator . It literally is faster to type the calculation I want into a search engine and get the results back over the network. The new calculator even manages to screw up basic input. The old calculator accepted both commas and periods as decimal separator inputs. It just worked no matter what I typed in. The new calculator has some sor…

One of the first projects I made while learning to code was a calculator. It wasn't very sophisticated. But it was fast and it handled commas and periods. It wasn't localized, but it could be. Sad to think that me having a month of coding experience made a better product than MSFT, yet whoever coded the calculator is probably making ten times what I am right now.

The new calculator isn't just slow to open, it seems to have actual input lag too. God I miss the old calculator.

To me it's not sad, it's infuriating. This corporation is worth a trillion dollars. Why can't they do their jobs? I'm sure the old calculator could be maintained and improved without screwing it up beyond belief. Send us some fat stacks and we'll do it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#485
post #459
post #405

> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account. Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it doesn't run locally, whic…

Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found. (I found an odd one: for some reason I can't log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)

The best way is to set up samba on a Linux machine, even a raspberry pi, and create a domain. Then you can create group policy to turn off a lot of nonsense and set up your computer by connecting to the domain. No MS account required, although you can associate one of you like.

Windows feels like it has a lot of attrition from home users now and perhaps it is only a matter of time before it's no longer worth writing exclusive software for it.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1] Step 6: GOTO 1. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it. Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682

Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume?

Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight.

Hilarious comment by the way https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussion...

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor” Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features. Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.

Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows. What are these horrible takes?

RTF is not binary encoded though? It's plain text with commands, not unlike TeX.

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#488
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more likely that Microsoft is vibe coding slop garbage to replace their core apps that were literally better. Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close. It also signals the death knell for Windows native apps. Microsoft can't make them anymore. It won't be long until even Excel is a Electron sloplication.

> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close. I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extensi…

There are a ton of posts and bug reports about the Windows 11 File Explorer being slow. Personally, after a few minutes of use, changing directories can take on the order of 20-30 seconds!

The slowdown appears to be due to XAML Islands, which allow legacy code to use modern MS UI stuff.

https://www.techindeep.com/why-is-windows-explorer-slow-7289...

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#489
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile TextEdit on Mac always rendered HTML. Which seems useless until you realize it can also edit and save as HTML. So there's casually a wysiwyg web editor built into macOS that idk how many people use.

If it also allowed me to type what I want instead of changing every single word due to "spell check" it would actually be a useful tool!

Spell check is fine - highlight misspelled words, offer corrections when asked. What's incredibly harmful is autocorrect, as it slowly but surely causes vast majority of computer users to become partly illiterate. And nobody gives a damn, because hey, we're efficiently saving time!

Re: Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

#490
When MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move.

When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS...

When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts...

When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it...

When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history...

When their updates refused to install cleanly and bricked people's computer to the point of hardware damage...

Seriously thinking I might have Stockholm syndrome at this point. To me the best windows would be Windows 11's kernel and libraries with Windows 7's UI and apps. Because it's been all down hill (generally) since there.

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