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 like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.
For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.
Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.
It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.
> 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 those?) had a cow and my lead pulled out all of the changes.
I'm still at MSFT, now as an architect, so it turned out not to be a career limiting move, but I certainly should have discussed my plans more broadly rather than just "cowboying" those changes in.
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!
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.
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.
First thing I do on any windows machine is replace notepad with notepad2 [0], there are installs of it that hides original notepad and uses notepad2 in all the "Edit" context menus etc.
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 that, but it's really frustrating for me to 1) respond to thousands of people asking why it doesn't work after they upgrade, and 2) lose income because there's nothing I can do to make it work the same in Windows 11.
>I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10
Well, it had a good run. Should such compatibility forever hold Windows back from making breaking changes to those APIs though? 20 years is an eternity in computing...
Tell your users to vote with their money and stay on Windows 10. If enough people do so and get enough of a "Windows 11 breaks all your software" sentiment going, MS may start to reconsider.
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.
Years ago I reported a bug in a VB function, something to do with date calculations. I spent quite a while on the phone with them, feeling like I was banging my head against a wall. They readily admitted that the output of their function was wrong, yet steadfastly maintained that they would not fix it because other programs might depend on that incorrect output.
If the answer to any bug report is that the buggy behavior is now the baseline standard, what's the point in reporting any bugs?
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.
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]
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.
Patching other people's binaries, turning off features if the app making the request is "problematic-app", re-introducing bugs, fixing should-be-impossible-to-happen calls from programs that were written by hand, it's all there!
> one useful shim is known as HeapPadAllocation; it is applied to programs that have heap buffer overrun bugs. The shim intercepts calls to the HeapAllocate function and adds a specified amount to the requested size. That way, when the program overruns a buffer, it merely corrupts the padding rather than corrupting the next heap block.
It was different when your typical application came on ten floppy disks. Not being able to use it on the next version of Windows might hinder the adoption of Windows.
Going to have to buy this book now. Enjoyed this extract. I wonder what font was used? whatthefont thinks it might be Adobe Jenson Display, and I don't currently have any PDF tools to inspect the document. The 'y' looks so pretty, with it's rightward curve.
> Wait what, external software calls into notepad?
External software calls into everything. Welcome to Windows development.
It's extremely difficult to implement even "obvious" changes like a dark-mode Notepad when it could potentially break customers who have been depending on specific behavior for decades.
This is why they've had to write shim-specific code for certain vendors. The desire to move forward versus the awful prospect of having to keep those shims in place.
Surprisingly I actually deal with a fairly hefty integration that does some horrible win32 shit I don’t understand after opening notepad to integrate it into their app. There’s so much of that out there it’s unreal.
I imagine then at least 80% of Excel's bug tracker must have WONTFIX as a designation, cause I tell you, the same fucking bugs seem to come with every release.
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 some app calls an undocumented internal function, or has a bug that causes it to misuse an API call that just happens to still work correctly, or even worse, hooks into a system library or something, and considers that now to be a part of the public SDK that is to be maintained and made compatible with everything that might use it, forever.
I worked on macOS for many years. Apple's policy is more like Microsoft's than you describe. It was commonplace to have to revert changes that broke a "must-not-break" application that was dependent on undocumented APIs or behavior, and the source of certain projects is littered with app-specific workarounds.
I've never understood this desire to run everything 100% natively all the time AND keep your system up to date. Just put a Windows 95/98/2000/XP VM into Windows 11, integrate its window manager with the host desktop, and be done with it forever. Start it transparently for apps that need it. IIRC Apple did a similar thing when transitioning from classic Mac OS to OS X, and it worked pretty well.
I did a bit of cross-platform development in C++, and I'm glad to report that Linux is an API clusterfuck in regard to anything going beyond system calls. None of the desktop-related stuff is part of the system and there's always more than one way to do something, and you have to support all of them because else someone would complain that your thing doesn't work on their particular configuration.
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 looks choppy
- the animation has to "catch up" when grabbing the scroll bar handle and moving it quickly
- 215k lines loaded, moving the window itself is choppy now? HOW
- another first party piece of software that ignores the "no animations" setting in windows
- I've grabbed a notepad.exe from Windows XP SP3 in comparison, no problems there, scrolling and editing is instant. Both have SIGNIFICANT lag in the new one.
- Don't even try to resize the window with a big file open (< 1 FPS)
EDIT: Note that I haven't even complained about new features or anything, just the previous, basic features still working correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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 "<UseWinUI>true".
Tons of politics, and not wanting to lose their face.
I lost count of how many PMs I got to see on comunity meetings since the Windows 8 days.
They also pretend that all the rewrites that keep being requested since WinRT was introduced, and rebooted on the process, aren't a big deal.
When faced with these questions they always ask for us to explain our viewpoint, as if it wasn't clear for them to start with, of course it is clear, but they cannot say it live.
>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.
I'd like to know this too-- my music player has a few different rendering options for one on screen view, GDI has always used fewer gpu and cpu resources than direct2d and direct3d in 7 and 10 so far?
I still use notepad to try to avoid all the crap software tries to cram down my throat these days. Sad to see they've managed to mess with this too. I wonder how long it'll be before tracking and dark patterns are shoved into this notepad version (if it hasn't happened already).
Windows is garbage. I’m not disagreeing with that part, butdesktop Linux is hot garbage too. The audio stack is garbage. X is decades old and Wyland is a meme.
We're talking about dark patterns, which are anti-consumer and anti-user design decisions to pursue profit over user experience. Like stuffing candy crush into windows by default or making it incredibly difficult to switch default browser, or berating the user with popups when he tries to download Firefox.
As are HN (1.something decades) and Notepad.exes that aren’t as hot garbage as the newest one. X still works fine and IME is only improved by the new things (eg. sxmo, the smartphone UI I’m typing this in) still being built on its well settled, stable foundation.
I like smooth scrolling in browsers. Easier to track things with eyes. (though OP complains about "when grabbing the scroll bar handle", which sounds horrible)
For the record, I also dislike smooth scrolling in the Start menu, settings app etc. With Edge, they lowered the animation speed from baseline Chromium to match that I think.
In Chrome it's nice at high refresh rates and looks buttery smooth, but at 60Hz it's too choppy so I turn it off there. It seems that the Edge devs have opted for a slower (=smoother) animation, optimized for 60Hz screens, whereas Chrome has opted for more responsiveness.
(giving the user the ability to tweak the scroll animation speed would be too much to ask I guess)
(disabling smooth scrolling with the "disable animations" setting in Windows is too much to ask as well I guess)
There are flags for this. There is a flag to toggle “Microsoft Edge scrolling personality” in Edge and there is a flag to toggle smooth scrolling overall.
I am aware of these, yeah - "Microsoft Edge scrolling personality" is only for touch scrolling gestures as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect scroll wheel scrolling for me.
I've disabled smooth scrolling in Edge because of this, yes.
> as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect scroll wheel scrolling for me
Nor scroll to top/bottom via the Home/End keys. In Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) it's quick enough that I don't mind the smooth scrolling, but in Edge it's comparatively and disconcertingly slow.
That sounds disturbingly similar to what they did to the Calculator in Windows 10.
I'm curious what the difference in binary size is between the two, and with the one in Windows 10 (which does have some enhancements compared to previous versions, but the same good old UI.)
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?
The greatest thing about Notepad is that it runs and displays a blinking cursor ready for typing in much less than a second for a new document. On my Windows 11 machine it appears to be around 200 msec. I've tried setting my text file handler to other text editors but nothing else comes close to this speed of utility. I'm very glad they are not messing with that.
Overall, I'm very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It's not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It's more of a nicety to upgrade. It's better looking but functionally not much different afaik
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 (this doesn't seem to slow start up by any noticeable amount, for the small files I just tested).
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.
I was expecting a ribbon or other fluff (like write.exe / WordPad), perhaps even ads (two days ago I saw at a friend's that a Windows built-in game now has ads). Honestly I'm very impressed they kept the simple look. It's just a larger-than-necessary menu bar and some unobtrusive theming and that's it. The toggleable dark mode is also a welcome change for me.
I do assume we can open files larger than a few megabytes now and there were some more functionality issues that seemed very 90s, could it be that there was only one undo step or did they already fix that in a previous release? I truly haven't used Windows in, dare I say, too long.
Edit: yes I did remember the undo problem correctly and that's finally fixed: "adding support for multi-level undo".
They added much more whitespace. In line with modern UI fashion trends.
Please can we stop this trend? It's ridiculous. It universally makes the user experience worse by reducing the effective screen real estate for actual work. Nobody cares about the aesthetic, they get used to it after a few session.
It's crazy to me that Windows 11 has already been released and yet they're still adding what should be core functionality to the OS as an after thought.
If they are so set on redesigning Notepad and/or all system apps to use the new design style, why would those not be prioritized and included in the original release from day 1?
I'm not sure a slight refresh of the Notepad UI is core functionality of the OS. I don't like Windows, I actually quite despise it, but I think the rolling release approach is far better than, say, macOS' yearly dump. You end up with features that are half-baked or pushed to the next year. Microsoft is taking a saner approach with Windows releases, IMHO.
I thought Microsoft had announced they are switching to an annual release cycle.
I don't think it makes much difference to the quality, some features are too big to fit in a single cycle anyway. The question is whether they have enough discipline to hold back projects that aren't ready. In this respect neither Apple nor Microsoft seem able to say no.
Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years and for most common tasks it would make no difference if work would be done on Windows, macOS or some Linux distribution. Perhaps the preexisting familiarity with a particular OS would be the only factor determining how comfortably user get the job done. But it can be done anywhere.
Emoji or gif support in desktop OS, sidebars or notification centers, all sorts of content or tasks suggestions, virtual assistants that are limited to only few languages, countless GUI changes or application redesigns that makes no sense or make the workflow worse. All of this is often presented as some breakthrough "experiences" that are about to fundamentally change user life - forever. And for quite some time I'm having a feeling that all of this is being done only to provide an illusion that someone does something, so the all decision-making people, CEOs would be satisfied that a product was improved. Maybe there are people who are impressed with such things or expect that these should be here but I'm definitely not.
Are you suggesting that a desktop OS shouldn’t support an input method for standardized Unicode characters? That would be incredibly annoying. Especially if you’re a developer working on programs that are supposed to handle said characters.
> Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years
(Good) UI scaling support? Dynamic refresh-rate support? eGPU support? Thunderbolt? Support for modern biometric authenticators like Windows Hello? Support for booting off a portable volume? Handwriting recognition in arbitrary apps? Basically 80% of accessibility features being finally pushed down into older software (with “dark mode” as a side effect)?
Yes, none of these things are from Windows 11, but none of them are more than 10 years old, either. People forget how many extremely recent OS features have immediately become table stakes to be taken completely for granted. (And this process is continuous. I’m sure there’s some accessibility feature being added to computers only today, that will enable people who never were able to use computers before to do so.)
Try using a modern Bluetooth gamepad with Windows XP / OSX10.6 / Linux 2.6 / other “perfect” OS versions some time. Even if you can get it to connect, it won’t even recognize all the buttons, because old APIs had hard limits on assumed number of buttons!
The key term is “inbox apps.” Notepad is now one of them. An inbox app is a Microsoft Store app that happens to be pre-installed (it ships “in-box.”)
As such, Notepad, like other inbox apps, is now decoupled from the release cycle of Windows. It’s just some arbitrary app, that happens to be made by Microsoft, and happens to come with Windows.
Of course, it would be nice if every program ever were nearly perfect upon release, but that isn't necessarily a realistic expectation in every scenario. If it can be updated via the Store (which is the case with Notepad and many other utilities), it doesn't have to be tied to the OS release cadence. In this aspect, modern Windows is more like rolling-release desktop Linux distros than macOS.
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.
I doubt this is the paradigm that Microsoft would like to promote. Interestingly, my limited interactions will Windows 10 I haven't had the chance or need to use a text editor.
There is also write.exe or, just a suggestion, buy MS Office Word in a package deal for like ninety nine bucks. I can see why notepad might be deemed unimportant by Microsoft with both a commercial alternative to push and a more powerful editor also built in. (Assuming write.exe is still in W11, last I used was 7 I think.)
Those applications are absolutely not suitable for text editing because they have a tendency to mangle the text encoding and other CR/LF characters.
(I generally don't think it's too odd for an OS to ship with a text editor of some kind. I don't use notepad much but there are a few times that it's been a life saver.)
You edit config files in Windows? Registry is all the rage there, unless you use tools made to be cross-platform (which, for devs, is obviously a lot, but I can see an argument that notepad isn't that important to the OS).
What happened to UI customizablity since windows 7/8?
Windows XP use to have software to make shell look like anything. Only ever felt the need for skinning since windows 8 to go back to old UI which has clear borders and boundaries for everything including windows, buttons, menu bars, menus taskbar buttons...and lots of other things.
Is it harder to skin now? Why there aren't any software to give windows its classic look back?
To be precise, authoritarian designers who must feel some sort of pleasure in forcing everyone to conform to their ideas. There were certainly designers involved in Windows UI since the beginning, but their purpose seemed to be more of deciding on good defaults (and allowing those who didn't like them for whatever reason to change things like fonts, sizes, colours, etc.)
I recall some of the marketing wankery around Windows 11 advertised it as being the "most diverse and inclusive". Maybe the designers were.
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 choices for things and just want simplicity," and I will point you to an American grocery store to remind you what utter BS that is. This is monopoly(ish) leveraging, perhaps not at its most harmful, but it's really silly.
"But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them." -- [which I didn't keep a source for, and searched back to http://www.garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html "The Command Line in 2004" but that looks like a more modern post about an earlier Neal Stephenson article]
> "Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial?"
It's a blog post on the "Insiders" blog[1], they seem to appear weekly. Why comment on this at all "from the Linux side" in one breath advocating freedom of choice, in the next breath condemning everyone who doesn't value what you value, or who does things differently to you?
Which is it, freedom of choice, or mandatory complexity? Freedom of opinion, or "that is trivial and I am correct"?
You're completely missing the point. I'm not saying that "It's bad for Microsoft to promote a new type of interface that they're trying to get out there."
I'm saying it's ridiculous that Microsoft gets so much "air-time" over it and that professional IT people are paying attention as if this were something special, when it's not particularly difficult to do a really good interface that the user can dig in and modify if they choose.
I'm reminded of the "addition" of Dark Modes to things, as if flippin' Windows 95 didn't let you change your theme way way way back when.
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 being nearly as many users.
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.
Not disagreeing with you (often have to preface internet comments with that :) but instead discussing. The grocery store example is quite revealing. Yes, you can point to the American grocery store, but what has been well studied there is that presenting people with choices creates its own form of stress. I certainly feel the stress of going to Whole Foods and wanting cocoa powder and seeing what seems like a thousand variations, versus going to Trader Joe's where there's almost always one brand per item (and often it's the Trader Joe's brand). Whole Foods can be good if there's some niche thing I want, but Trader Joe's is quite relaxing to just have a shopping list and pick up stuff not worrying about comparing each item to a whole bunch of other ones. I believe this was also part of the thinking behind most stores introducing house brands over the last several decades.
Anyhow, this is not some huge announcement. I'm assuming it got voted up in hacker news because there's a humorous element to the whole thing, notepad being one of the more glacially-iterated-but-still-around software systems in existence.
When you buy a car are you concerned that it came with manufacturer monopoly provided radio, GPS, seats, tires and a jack? I mean you can go out and get third party versions of all of these things with improved functionality so why should they even include basic versions?
Now how many people actually replace the radio in their car? Or the rims? Or the seats? A vast percentage of owners are very happy with the included version as they don't desire / require anything beyond that. It's not a monopoly, it's just including the basic features most users will be content with.
Now if they forced you to keep Notepad associated with TXT files then we'd have an issue. (I'm looking at you Edge)
(adding a note to address in comments likely coming about how media systems aren't easily replacable in cars anymore but I'm a child of the DIN radio era)
If I could literally change any of those things in my FOR FREE, INSTANTLY, AT NO MARGINAL COST, AT THE PRESS OF A BUTTON, WITH EASY UNDO then yes I would.
I would also be happy to always help out other people and share my changes with my friends.
I strongly encourage you to occasionally view the world through more than one lens.
No matter what the OS, the default editor is important. Changes to the default editor that address long standing demands by the community are important. Communicating those changes to a wide audience is important as well. (And the Linux side of the fence could stand to learn a bit about communicating with the wider community)
And that's why that article exists - because a tool used by a large user population just got significantly better. And that user population is mostly happy about the improvement. If you're not the audience, skipping it is an option.
A friend complained about making mistakes on their mobile calculator nowadays because it has significant input lag since an update. Needs a third party calculator app now... I was happy that I could recommend Simple Mobile Tools' calculator, open source donationware and does only what it should. I only know of it because my phone didn't come with a calculator at all, which I found weird too. I use a bunch of their apps actually and they're all great, so this was an easy choice. Not sure what the equivalent for Windows would be, I never saw anyone use an alternative calculator -- unless Google counts but that's not because of problems with calc.exe.
For anyone who hasn't seen these, I recommend them as well. The default calculator works fine for me, but "Simple File Manager" and "Simple Gallery Pro" are fantastic apps that strip out the typical cruft of these tools, and unlike some alternatives (looking at you, Amaze), have no tracking scripts or nag screens.
Since you guessed it instead of somehow measured it (i think you'd need a very high framerate camera to measure the time between click and app appearing to do that) perhaps it isn't that it is fast but you're just not sensitive to such small delays?
Possibly. Maybe I remember the 'good old days' too fondly: where opening any kind of application would take upwards of 5 seconds and often into the minutes for something large like Word :)
For me anything that loads before I even have the time to think about the fact that it's loading would not be considered 'slow'.
It opens much faster the second time of the day, but the first time is always over a few seconds. I'm probably including the slow feeling the Start menu obtained a few versions ago, I don't use it enough to pin it to the taskbar.
The rating thing was real at some point, they might have removed it by now.
My point is, important things are getting noticeably slower for almost zero gain, even though the machines have gotten WAY faster. Something is not right.
Yeah, the changes seem ok otherwise, but based on every other application Microsoft has updated with a new look & feel I'd have to agree: it'll take longer to launch, use more resources, and have worse input response times.
I just hope the new version is fast and not like Paint 3D which sometimes spends multiple seconds "creating a new project" when opening a simple PNG on a 5950X.
If they replace the current high performance codebase inherited from the previous system with a much slower UI people will complain. Not to mention changes in bugs and behavior.
I understand it's reasonable to be cynical about Windows, but is it really appropriate here[1] when the changes of note are support for dark mode and multiple undo steps? At least wait for someone to find an actual problem.
[1] When I post this, the only other comments are complaints. The ones that are at least complaining about notepad are complaining that MS had the gall to change notepad without pointing to anything specific.
I like the feature additions but dislike that there's no visual division between the menu bar and the title bar you can click and drag to manipulate the window. Windows 10 and 11 often make me feel as if I have some disorder of the nervous system as I'm forever clicking just to the side of the interface element I want to use.
One of the things I've been rolling around in my mind for a while now is what would a "what's old is new again" reversion to the non-flat/minimalist style look like if done now.
One of the things that strikes me with 4k displays is that there's a lot more pixels to throw around at elaborate designs, along with the skeuomorphic/physical representation of interactivity. I'm thinking back to the winxp era uxstyles skins that while they demonstrated Sturgeon's law, also had a wide range of art and ways to make it approachable for people.
In the case of windows, changing UI approach again would add another layer of strata with inconsistency, but right now MS's approach comes across as resume led design with a new version of windows to launch with their stamp on it
I had a similar thought when I saw Mercedes new infotainment UI [0] -- the dark blue with heavy use of gradients is very reminiscent of vista-era design to my eyes.
I think we're all a little nervous after various Edge and Windows updates have either introduced adverts to the UI or even buy-now-pay-later predatory lending. These updates look promising, but MS really should pay attention to the sentiment they're creating around "feature updates" recently.
Notepad had a dark mode (and light mode, and grey mode, and "eye-searing yellow with purple font" mode, if you want) as recently as Windows 7 with the system-wide theme settings, so it's understandable to be sceptical when they bring the dark mode as some sort of a triumph when it's a regression.
I know there's a lot of different people with different priorities, but people (as a generalization) are complaining about things still being outdated and not supporting dark mode in Windows 11 while simultaneously (although probably a different set of people) are apparently appalled that Microsoft would dare update a legacy application.
Personally I think the best thing Windows 11 has going for it to stand out from more than just being a nicer coat of paint on Windows 10 is removing as much legacy things as possible and update to "modern" standards given they've already put a hard line in the sand regarding modern CPU compatibility.
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.
It's interesting how a multibillion company can make a simple editor a little worse, while a single guy with a few contributors can make something so useful (Notepad++).
Of course it's important with backwards compatibility but.. is it worth the cost?
The Windows 10 version of Notepad already has a Search with Bing feature in the edit menu with keyboard shortcut Control-E. However, it does respect the default browser choice.
It bugs me that the toolbar now takes up more vertical space than before. Not only does the padding just look funny, but vertical space is a premium in widescreen layouts! C'mon Microsoft!
They should just open source the consumer level userland apps and outsource the dev work to third party contributors. It would save quite a bit of money.
Nothing. Windows has not fundamentally improved since Windows 7 for productivity. I use 10 but 7 was great. Well, Win 10’s virtual desktops are actually awesome.
I see zero benefit in 11. It breaks my workflow without additional apps. I have my taskbar with countless windows on the right side of my screens. This is not supported under Win 11 without 3rd party tools. All of power user tools are ever further obfuscated.
I consider myself moderate power user and I'm not going to upgrade until there's a native way of restoring the taskbar to what it used to be on the previous releases. And by that I mean left aligned tabs with text labels. It used to be that way for about 30 years and I can't stand the grouping icons (both the grouping and the icons).
This is nice. I run dark mode everywhere and I used to use notepad for quick notes and stuff. Problem is that notepad is a giant wide window so it would burn my eyes out when opened, so I had to switch to something else. Now I can use it for that purpose again...
Providing I move to Win11 that is. Still not a fan of the task bar lacking features I use a lot.
Seriously Microsoft must be openly mocking users. I recently had an issue with Microsoft Edge reverting all my privacy settings. They are full on hostile at this point. If you sign into the Windows store then suddenly they revert your privacy settings even if you set it to disable sync.
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.
This is underwhelming. Textarea in any web application has more features, such as spellcheck, and now in Edge, even grammar check!
Multilevel undo/redo should have been delivered at least 20 years ago.
How about the ability to handle files with Mac or Linux style linebreaks? Wordpad can handle it but not Notepad.
How about showing recent files in File menu?
Really what Microsoft ought to do is to ship VSCode as the new text editor for Windows (after removing all coding features that might confuse end users). Retain the old Notepad for people who use it in established workflows, no point in updating it at this point because it is hopelessly obsolete.
It seems to me that the new OS arms race is about tooling, not just base UX, and Windows is starting to play catch up. The modern Mac OS and Linux desktop environments don't just match up to Windows, but surpass it in many respects.
I wouldn't be surprised to see many "new" functionalities being introduced to Windows tools in the near future, with the catch that you will lose out on performance for a multitude of reasons: like trying too hard on aesthetics, trying to emulate the tooling of entirely different systems, or maintaining backwards compatibility.
> modern Mac OS and Linux desktop environments don't just match up to Windows, but surpass it in many respects.
What are these "toolings" that are missing in Windows? I have found the opposite to be true. On Macos I need an app to properly snap windows, another app to make my mouse scroll properly, another app to have per-app volume control, another app to do poorly substitute paint.exe. Windows has all that and more, built-in.
I would love for Windows to ship with a command line text editor so that I could be guaranteed to have something when using a remote command line. The moral equivalent of knowing vi will be on any Linux system from a server to doorbell. Maybe I'll learn about one from the HN crowd. I've tried my old DOS go-tos (e.g. edit), but they're no longer around.
Sometimes I just copy and paste file contents to local, edit, and write it to out with command line utilities or powershell.
I know notepad is supposed to be as simple as possible, a very fast default and always available text editor. But single undo is for me the single reason I always install notepad++ if I plan to use the computer in the future, or use Wordpad if not.
Ever since I started using a macbook for work, I have searched far and wide for a notepad.exe replacement and every single app has come up short. Let's hope this revamped version retains the snappiness, simplicity that made the original great, unlike calc.exe's replacement.
Notepad has been an annoyance for decades. Before I clicked the link I thought there might be enhanced features and reworked usability. Unfortunately the new features fall short. The one they seem proudest of is a dark mode.
When I saw this, I was really scared that they'd ruined Notepad by adding features. But fortunately it looks like this update is acceptable. I am still worried they won't have the sense to stop, though
It still doesn't have half of Kate's (Plasma's default editor) functionalities.
The only addition seems to be the dark mode, which is very opinionated and unchangeable
It's not there. Where's the save button? Oh, there has been another automatic update. You wonder what you have to do this time. You press Ctrl+S.
The screen locks.
"Microsoft Account is signed out"
Sigh. You enter your password.
"Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is Great!'"
Sigh. "Microsoft Edge is Great!"
A Sarcasm Error Has Occurred. Please Say It With Conviction!
"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAt!"
An acceptable performance! Please rate Notepad in the Microsoft Store to continue!
"1 star"
Why do you hate excellent products? Don't you want a fresh and modern editor? Hypothesis: Did you mean 5 stars? Please don't press the second yes option if you don't not mean this isn't your choice: No, Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes.
Uuh... Third Yes.
Great! Your rating has been corrected to 5 stars! Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is The Greatest And I will Name My Children Microsoft And Edge!'
"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAtEst And I Will NaMe my ChIlDrEn MiCroSofT AnD EdgE!"
Processing accounts and personal information. Security Alert! Inferior non-microsoft software detected on computer! Do you wish to replace them all with modern microsoft products? [ Yes ] [ Options ]
Options
* [x] Don't Replace The Other Software
* [_] Reverse The Above Option
* [x] Really Keep Other Software
* [x] I'm a cheating bastard
* [x] I'm aware Hitler didn't use Microsoft Edge either
This was my observation as well. I haven't used Notepad in so long, I had to open it for comparison. Yes, they've doubled the amount of wasted space, changing one menu item from text to a gear icon.
It's also possible that this is a joke. Nobody that reads dev blogs uses Notepad as part of their mission critical process.
Assuming you're a Windows or WINE user that uses notepad somewhat regularly, I challenge you to use the new notepad for a month and then try switching back. I'm very curious whether you'll miss more features or be more happy about those five pixels.
I do agree, it's completely unnecessary, but I'm still surprised the "bullshit" is limited to those few pixels of menu bar and some actual problems were fixed instead. (This feeling and this thread really go to show what people expect from the brand.)
Microsoft has not added any functionality to their operating system or applications since 1998–only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors. I can’t think of one thing I can do in the Microsoft Office suite I couldn’t do 20 years ago. It’s just slower.
> Microsoft has not added any functionality to their operating system or applications since 1998
This is simply absolute nonsense. Are you really contending that no real functionality has been added to Windows since Windows NT? I know HN loves to hate Microsoft but are we really upvoting this crap?
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?
Why hate?
I don't hate, Microsoft or Office, or anything like that. Those are choices, things. You can't hate things.
I agree with this OP that office had all the functionality almost everyone needed twenty years ago. Most of the changes to office have been cosmetic and frustrating to established users. Perhaps their could have been add ons - like in browsers, for more functionality that certain users need, without
messing with established work flows and ease of use, which are also important.
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.
I use it all the time as a temporary scratchpad or clipboard. It opens very quickly, it doesn’t have anything else other than a text area. Not sure what else should I use :) VSC? Opens too slow. Sticky notes? Not sure, slow and too complex for the task. Also it’s an advantage that it doesn’t save the state anywhere so I can just force quit and everything disappears.
I am missing Paint and Notepad on MacOS when I just need something that opens in a millisecond and I can paste in something temporarily.
Most devs I've met use it, it's an excellent tool for getting rid of formatting or just having an instant window open where you can temporarily store some plaintext.
My mind isn't blown, this doesn't seem to work properly across all applications.
I just tested it now pasting some text from a website into Slack and it retained hyperlinks (I don't mean plaintext https:// ones, but <a href='..> ones) and all that junk. When you cleanse it through notepad you have a guarantee that none of that is left.
Nothing fishy about it, its proper Quality Assurance using the initial release of Windows 11 as an MVP.
If they’d build preview versions of all tools that Windows (11) contains, then release a new Windows 11 preview build any time a tool receives updates (after community feedback) and ask for more community feedback on all of these releases (probably talking a new Windows 11 version every single day) and release Windows only when all the tools and their changes have been deemed worthy/bug-free it will be 2029.
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 person a weekend to accomplish. Nor would that individual think to brag about implementing rounded corners. But the bureaucracy inside Microsoft is so sclerotic and hostile to excellence that even these changes require heroic allocations of effort.
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.
I was a little surprised to learn that my four-year-old processor (i7-7700) was locked out of running windows 11. It's certainly not processor speed issue, it's still plenty fast for games today. It's not TPM either, which it supports. The best I can tell, Microsoft drew a line and said "too bad," for everything before a certain generation.
I really only play games on my computer--I have no idea when I'll upgrade the CPU. The last one lasted nearly a decade before I replaced it. I guess it'll be a while before I see Windows 11. I'm not too mad though--Windows 10 is a fine Operating System.
You can still install windows 11 straight from an image and it’ll ignore the processor and TPM requirements - they’re considered ‘soft’ requirements even if Microsoft doesn’t say so outright. I currently have it running on my desktop with an i7-6700k and my laptop as well with an even older i7 and TPM 1.2.
You’re absolutely correct in that they ‘drew a line’. They have a specific set of guidelines[0,1] they want CPUs to meet going forward, and it’s more of a matter of ceremony and certification rather than anything concrete nor technical.
You also can install it by putting the win11 payload onto a win10 install USB stick. Just don't let it have access to the net while it installs or it'll "download install updates" that stop it from continuing. This is how I installed it on my machine that doesn't support TPM.
"Productivity, performance, and reliability are paramount in Notepad. Regardless of how you incorporate Notepad into your workflows, we will ensure that Notepad continues to excel in those areas."
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 file or not. It doesn't matter if my battery died or Windows decided it's now time to restart the system after updating - Notepad++ will keep my work safe and Notepad will not. So speaking about reliability is probably a bigger joke than productivity.
They could say "We always wanted to keep the tool light, fast to start and reasonably efficient for small files, and we have managed to do that" - and this would be OK. There is no need to serve bullshit to a technical community.
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.
also for some reason, people really like to complain about HN as though it's a monolith even though a tiny percentage ever comment, let alone complain.
As previously noted, 80% of the comments were negative when I posted it. I was reacting to the 'I hate change brigade' that got in early.
I mean, I don't even use Windows or any Microsoft devices. MacOS is vastly superior to Windows and Bill Gates sexually harassed women in the 90s (not that it factored into my operating system choice).
I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.
For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.
Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.
It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.