Stop using Windows Notepad

So there is this character, the BOM, which is explicitly allowed by UTF-8 standard. And while it is not really necessary, nor recommended, you are still allowed to put it in your UTF-8 text files to signal that this text file is encoded in UTF-8. Then there are all of these *nix programs, which don't know how to deal with these BOM's, simply because the first character in the file they're reading from isn't the shebang or <?php or something like that, but is instead this completely allowable BOM. and everybody believes MS should be fixing their product? am i missing something?

This is like one of those moments where you are quickly brought back to a painful memory from a more troubled time in your life, so distant in mindset, if not time itself, that it has faded to be less a memory of life itself than that of a bad dream.

You shake it off, and it recedes back into the cobwebs, not to be jarred again until the next time something flies by in your RSS feed about a new Microsoft product or feature that is a poorly conceived sugar-coated re-implementation of cron, grep, sed, bash, vim, awk, ssh, unix pipes, or lisp.

Yes, I too was once a full-time Windows user.

Ok, but everything handles the UTF-8 "BOM" just fine. Adding it only causes problems when you ./file.sh that has a BOM, and haven't setup your binfmt_misc magic properly. Fix that, and it works fine.

Hmm. I am as bewildered by this as the author. Why would anyone edit shell scripts with notepad?

I agree with the author. Right or wrong, Notepad:

1: is on every Windows machine ever

2: just works

I leave it to you, critics, to select something, anything, that is a fundamental tool available on every *nix machine, and just stop using it.

Hint: nobody but a purist is going to stop using `cat` or `cd` because of a minor incompatibility with a small percentage of computers.

I love Linux, I love Unix, but I also love that Windows had and still has Notepad. One of Microsoft's most successful apps in my eyes, that honestly works. Hell, in any case if it didn't have at least one flaw I'd start getting suspicious wondering if M$ really did write it after all.

  A long time ago, someone decided that if your file was 100% ASCII and you chose to save it as UTF-8 and you opened the file up again and added some >0x007f character and later saved again that you should not be prompted

The author makes this sound like an unreasonable request, but I don't see the problem. All ASCII text is also UTF-8; if a file is valid ASCII, it should be opened and saved in UTF-8 mode.

  P.S. Isn't there some tool on UNIX that does this correctly?

Yes, nearly all of them.

I haven't been to his blog in a while, but Raymond Chen has made various elucidating comments pertaining to Notepad, over the years.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Ablog...

I must confess I never faced this problem. What annoys me no end is windows end-line CRLF pairs.

That insanity must end.

Oh.. And a simple solution to this problem is simply to ban Windows. It also solves a whole lot of other problems and creates an incentive for keeping sane corporate networks (with interoperable applications and so on).

I wonder if a crippled, totally brain-dead, but formally correct implementation is not Microsoft's way to discourage usage of a standard while adhering to it in order to get government business...

POSIX subsystem, anyone?

That dialog box is a linguistic nightmare. What's with the OK and Cancel buttons? I thought Windows was changing to "Save" and "Don't Save" like they should have done all along.