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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

The examples of what changed seem useful. Default save to UTF8, a "dirty" flag to indicate the file has changed and some new keyboard shortcuts are welcome changes. I don't see current line number in the status bar which I feel is sorely missing.

But other than that I really hope they don't change it too much more. I like the plain vanilla aspect of Notepad. If I need something fancier I have a lot of choices - the system I am using at work has GVim, MS Word, Wordpad and Notepad++ installed.

But if I just want to leave a note on my desktop, make a quick change to a simple text file or print some quick notes for a meeting or something I will always reach for Notepad first.

They "upgraded" calc in Windows 10 and I think it's kind of crap now. The interface is clunky and it's visibly slower than the old one. I hope they don't do the same to Notepad!

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> I don't see current line number in the status bar which I feel is sorely missing.

The status bar line/column display has existed since at least Windows XP.

It's even included in the screenshot[0] from the blog post this Ars article is referencing.

[0]: https://blogs.windows.com/uploads/mswbprod/sites/2/2018/12/4...

Yeah, you are correct. I played around with it last night and it seems I just had the status bar turned off. I can't remember if I did that at some point or if that's the default and I just never noticed.

Anyway, thanks, I stand corrected and will add this to the list of small, useful enhancements I mentioned in my previous post.

Calc is a metro app now, or whatever that style of program is supposed to be called.

I like when it starts fullscreen, with just a small button pad in the middle and an enormous obscuring border, like 99% of the time we aren't firing it up to so some calculation about an article we're reading on the web...

The best part about notepad is that it's always there. Hop on a Windows box and you know it will have notepad. The same can't be said for Notepad++ or GVim or whatever else, especially if the machine you are on doesn't have Internet access. I'm totally behind modest improvements to Notepad to bring it into this century.

There is also the upgrade to MS Paint to Paint 3D.

I tried to like it ... it isn’t horrible but it hasn’t exactly grown on me either.

Lots of (to me) useless features clogging up the UI. Can’t remember where various functions are, on the rare occasions I need to use it, half the time.

> I like the plain vanilla aspect of Notepad.

Not a Windows user (anymore) but didn't they also add support for "Search with Bing.." (a while back?) that was hard-coded to work only with Edge[0]?

I agree that the changes seem useful. The other highlights from the link below: (1) zoom into text (2) extended line ending support and (3) ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled (this last one speaks to a point you made)

Notepad was also a usb-friendly portable application (years ago when I used it). I wonder if this has changed...

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563704/microsoft-window...

The "Search with Bing..." feature will open in whatever the default browser is.

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