I've never understood why they don't license something like notepad++ for $1 a copy, or build their own internal version. The value add creating good default tools instead of paint/notepad/calc/space-cadet is pretty huge.
I think the ship on built in apps has sailed. Everybody expects to open a web browser or app store to get anything of any use now. Heck, they even stuck ads in Minesweeper.
It made more sense when downloading software was slow or you might not even have an internet connection. I'm sure many Mac owners enjoyed playing Chess before going out and buying some software.
It is a bit overblown for editing your /etc/hosts file and a bit underweight as an IDE.
People get stuck using Notepad++ and never give themselves the opportunity to invest that time in a tool that best suits development. This could be a grown up IDE, vi(m) or Wordpress's admin editor.
Being lightweight is all well and good if you have a 486/DX33 running Windows 3.11 but most computers have Pentium chips inside them now.
One thing that will probably remain just as useless with Windows Notepad 2018 is use case number one - editing your /etc/hosts file. What else is Notepad really for?
In the rebooted edition of the classic text editor they will still make /etc/hosts only save if you are an administrator, or 'root' user as it is on more conventional operating systems. This is fine and good for security but it does not let you just type in the 'admin' password after you have opened the file and made your changes. With Vista they got the UAC mostly right but not for Notepad and /etc/hosts.
They also hide the /etc/hosts file in some subdirectory that only a young person could possibly remember the file path for. It is not in the conventional place that is expected. c:\wwindows\system32 is as far as I can remember. Then, when you have found the magic folder, it requires a change of the file type in the file dialog window before you can see it, and that is presuming you have file extensions enabled. There is a confusing hosts.isam file in the same folder. Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.
Really the line endings problem should have been fixed a long time ago, actually with Windows 95 as it was apparent even that far back that users might want to open files created on systems that were not 'Wintel' (as it was known then as everything else used different processors).
With Windows 2000 - no winsock.dll needed - they should have made efforts to make /etc/hosts editable that bit more easily. That would have sorted out 90% of real world use of Notepad.
Unix philosophy should apply to Notepad - do just one thing - and the Windows Write product should have been where to go for fancy line numbers and such like. That could have made a neat and basic Notepad++ style product with a print view and raw text mode like what early versions of Word had.
The #1 useful feature is just multiple tabs. Sure, syntax highlighting is also great for reading files and simple edits, but need not be part of windows.
If you need your gradma to edit her host file, you are doing something wrong.
Get a $3.99 domain during development, and point it to the IP you need. Problem solved.
If you map Notepad, Vim, Emacs, and heavyweight IDE's on a spectrum, I use Notepad++ as a replacement for Notepad and the simpler half of Vim/Emacs, and I use VSCode for the heavier half of Vim/Emacs and typical web dev, and I use heavyweight IDE's for heavyweight dev work (C#/Java/C++ mostly).
> Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.
These days with how easy it is to load a container into a publicly accessible site, I feel like that's a solved problem in most cases?
If I need anything more then I'll use VS Code, but for single file viewing and editing it's perfect for me.
Everytime you read about some sysadmin person that still uses plain old vi because "it's everywhere" or who actually prefers more unreadable syntax in shell scripts because the nice(r) alternative wouldn't be POSIX compliant, it's basically the same effect. Except that on Windows, you're usually screwed, because there's absolutely no useful tool that does the job you want and ships with the OS (as opposed to some no-pixie-dust tool that's been around for decades and has a bit of a steeper learning curve).
I realize this isn't ideal...ever...but sometimes the needs of our department--our immediate needs--didn't align with the time require to navigate the massive corporate and IT bureaucracy.
I battle this every day. Our systems are so locked down for "security" that we in R&D can't do our job without hacking around IT. Thank God they are not very good so there are plenty of loopholes for circumventing the "security" measures.
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