A straightforward tool for everyone is not "behind" a comprehensive tool for experts just because it does less.
Minimizing the probability of someone using Task Manager to shoot themselves in the foot is probably more challenging than adding an advanced feature to ProcExp.
The "Details" tab on the current task manager is plenty for shooting yourself in the foot but it lacks features for power users. I personally think they just don't care.
Unfortunately, ProcExp started breaking with Windows 10 (columns regularly got into a broken state, requiring reset of the registry settings), plus they ruined the color scheme for the tray icons, so I switched to Process Hacker instead.
Mark went work for MS, as I recall. This was some years ago; I don't know about currently.
MS sucked in the tools/pages onto its domain. Navigation to/of their pages and versions became somewhat shittier (per the... "canonical" MS web experience, I guess). I seem to recall a bit of public pushback on this point, and things improved somewhat. Maybe I mis-recollect; I've been mostly away from Windows for quite a number of years, now.
If they're integrated into the OS they have to be supported at the same level as the rest of the OS, which entails the same rigorous processes w.r.t. updates, bug fixes, etc...
By keeping them out-of-band, that support requirement doesn't apply, allowing the tools to be much more aggressively updated and released without the same degree of oversight. There's a reason they're licensed separately and effectively with no support or warranty. Doing so enables their rapid development without/less-of the usual bureaucracy.
I really hope they don't, because then their releases would be intertwined. Instead of getting the latest and greatest sysinternals tools all the time, I'd probably have to wait until the next Windows release.
That is not how it works these days, a lot of things can update separately from Windows itself, my current solution is to use Scoop an open source Windows CLI package manager which can update it whenever a new version comes out
It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.
I'm sorry for going off topic, but I keep seeing this kind of comment and I want to get an answer - how is Notepad not a good editor? It can take any ASCII/ANSI/UTF file and output it in plaintext. It has line-wrap as an option. It loads fast and can handle files of decent size without lag. Users can set display and print fonts, etc. I'm really lost as to why anyone says Notepad is not a good text editor for basic text.
I've written entire websites in Notepad, not to mention it being my go-to writing tool for anything that doesn't need to be visually impressive or which I can add formatting tags to. I prewrite emails, cover letters, and long forum posts in Notepad. Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.
On the other hand, Notepad++ takes much longer to load, has more UI elements, and generally makes it harder to do the one very simple thing I want it to do - allow me to create and edit plaintext. Notepad2 was better on the UI last time I used it, but still took longer to load.
- Line endings. It mauls anything not "windows line endings" format
- Crappy undo (it will occasionally eat 5 lines of text instead of one word)
- No redo
- Barfs on large files (on a modern machine) If by accident you double click on a 1GB file you better kill it.
Please note I did not mention anything which could be argued as "rather belonging in a professional editor". No syntax highlighting, brackets matching, collapsing code / paragraphs, diff'ing 2 documents, tabs, macros, etc etc.
I agree with you actually. Back in the day I coded almost exclusively in Notepad when writing lots of HTML code and Basic code, for example. For the first year of Java I used it for Java because I wanted to really know the language (and without the help of an IDE, you get really, really good at spotting syntax errors and memorizing APIs). The simplicity was impossible to beat, and its ubiquity made it always available.
Maybe that's why I use vim for everything now. It's like notepad but with much more efficient keybindings :-)
P.S. I do use Intellij for java now when I'm writing Java code, mostly because I have to. That said, the feature set is amazing and for doing Java I'd probably use it even if I didn't have to because I'm spoiled. Still use vim for everything else tho.
Only the first one is really a significant issue, but the second one can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Granted, yes, it's a pain in the ass primarily because *nix applications often treat a BOM as data, but it's still a pain in the ass.
> Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.
Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications.
>Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications.
I only use a 32-bit OS and a 32-bit processor for Win7. If it doesn't work in x64, you've just given me a reason to never "upgrade". Then again, if my computer didn't throw a hissy fit over it, I'd be using FreeDOS as my primary OS. Either that or just get an old MS-DOS 6.2 installed.
Actually, I'm just a teacher/office admin/etc for work - by passion and hobby I'm a writer but that hasn't turned into money and likely never will.
I don't do programming and never have, the closest I ever came was a brief scrape with BASIC back in the days before Windows. I do some web design, but not too much anymore because I don't do Javascript and I don't like off-page CSS (I sometimes use inline, but that's about it).
* Multi-window editing
* Restoring workspace on load
* Background, font, and default spacing options
* Source formatting by source type
These were just some basic things I used in the few times I used Notepad++ after hearing people talk highly of it; there are probably a ton more along with plug-ins but my usage was basic. It definitely made serious-ish development on Windows easier for me to do.
One the machines I'm using at home and at work (Windows 10 Desktop + laptop, Windows 7 latptop, Windows server 2012 running in VMware), I've found that notepad is way slower than notepadd++ to launch. And adding tab support, syntax coloring, sane undo, restoring workspace on load and reload the file without closing the app, there's no competition between the two.
> I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.
With the diverse and enormous install base that Notepad has, do you really think it would be that simple? There must be all kinds of localization concerns, legal concerns, trademark issues, patent concerns, design and Windows brand concerns, that must go into a core OS application update.
I agree that Notepad should be updated. But updating a text editor preinstalled on Windows should be no easy feat for one person over just a few days. The repercussions of each change are potentially huge, and going in especially with a cavalier attitude of "it would only be a few days work to substantially improve" a piece of software used by hundreds of millions of people daily, definitely sounds like it wouldn't work out as easily as you'd expect.
I was slightly facetious but compared to other changes this should be an easy one. It's probably one of the simplest changes you can make to Windows. I hope we can agree on that.
> It's probably one of the simplest changes you can make to Windows. I hope we can agree on that.
I certainly do not agree with that!
For example, Notepad has been one of the buggiest and weirdest pieces of software I used on stock Windows. It does weird things when saving files, like moving your cursor to another location, so if you are typing and saving and typing and saving you will end up with text misplaced all over and a bizarre file that has a weird back/undo history. With its large host of weird bugs I would not expect the current codebase to be simple to update, and surely you'd agree a rewrite of Notepad is more than a few days.
I in no way think that improving Notepad would be one of the easiest changes to make to Windows. Sure, there would be harder things to improve I'm sure, but I don't see why it's a contest at all. Updating Notepad sounds like the opposite of easy to me.
Improving Notepad for everyone who uses it, while not receiving millions of death threats for errors or bugs or unexpected, unwelcome changes in behaviour sounds nearly impossible to me, personally. Perhaps this is part of the reason it is so stagnant - MS sees little upside to making large improvements while seeing enormous risk. Just a guess.
Eh. The only thing I really miss in Notepad is the ability to easily view text files that have Linux line endings. That's really all I care about. For anything else I'll probably use Notepad++ or VS Code.
The reality is that Windows isn't a text-based operating system, so a text editor with features isn't a vital component.
I don't see why they would. Notepad is great if you want to do something really quickly w/ plaintext, and the fact that it doesn't really do anything else is the best part IMO.
If you want nicer formatting you can use WordPad. Beyond that, there are a million alternatives (including the MS office suite)
I think a system should come with a decent editor out of the box. I sometimes have to deal with locked down systems where I can't install Notepad++. So I have to choose between two bad options like notepad or Wordpad. Both at least 20 years old and unchanged since then.
Notepad is just for taking quick notes and viewing text files and for that it is perfectly fine. It is my most used default Windows accessory (i do not include explorer on that of course) and even on Linux i install Leafpad[1] which is basically a Gtk2-based clone of Notepad and i use for pretty much the same reasons (taking quick temporary notes, writing out stuff, viewing text files, etc). I use another text editor for editing code (Notepad++ on Windows, Geany on Linux) that has a more busy and heavyweight UI that i am ok when working for long sessions. Notepad/Leafpad/etc is supposed to be as minimal as it gets, launch instantly, etc.
The only things that i'd like is support for Unix line endings and perhaps autoindentation. But considering that Notepad is really just the `EDIT` window wrapped up in a toplevel window frame and i doubt Microsoft is going to touch `EDIT` anymore (which is sad but that is beyond the point and FWIW much harder than just improving Notepad itself) i'm fine with that.
Interesting to hear of someone using Geany for coding on Linux. I used it briefly maybe a decade ago when I was still a vim noob. Glad to hear it's still around and used by at least one person :-)
Looking back I can't understand how I coded in notepad for several years until I finally had enough and asked around for a better editor. Back then it didn't even have "goto line". So I often counted the lines, and write comments like "this is line 500".
