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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I first hit the lack of LF line endings support at around age 11 on Windows 98. It’s genuinely pretty weird to realize it’s finally fixed

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Interesting. Wordpad could always handle LF-only well enough and came with Windows 95 and onwards so you could always use that. Not sure why that wasn’t more widely known. (Though on newly added lines it did add CR+LF rather than staying consistent to the source file).

The trouble with Wordpad was that it was not a good editor for plaintext. It was clearly designed for rich text. I preferred third party editors very greatly.

Kind of like TextEdit is on macOS is today (the one bundled with the OS).

It's slightly annoying that you have to twiddle a bunch of the preferences to make it a workable plaintext editor. Apple should just delete its rich text functionality, now that they bundle a real word processor (Pages) with the OS.

IMO, you have to twiddle exactly one preference, exactly once, to make TextEdit a workable plaintext editor.

In TextEdit -> Preferences..., select the "Plain text" radio button. New documents are created as plain text now.

Kind of, but to be safe you have to change 12 preferences from the defaults, IMO.

  New Document:
    Format: 
      Plain Text (select)
    Options:
      Check spelling as you type (disable)
      Correct spelling automatically (disable)
      Smart copy/paste (disable)
      Smart quotes (disable)
      Smart dashes (disable)
      Text replacement (disable)
  Open and Save:
    When Opening a File:
      Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text (enable)
      Display RTF files as RTF code instead of formatted text (enable)
    When Saving a File:
      Add ".txt" extension to plain text files (disable)
    Plain Text File Encoding:
      Opening files = Unicode (UTF-8)
      Saving files = Unicode (UTF-8)

I got sick of textedit and installed open source atom

Also, back in the day opening a 5MB logfile in Wordpad was a recipe for stalling your system.

Back in the day Notepad had a 32K file size limit as well. No stalling, but also no viewing your log file that way.

IIRC Wordpad could handle LF but not UTF-8 and Notepad could handle UTF-8 but not LF (^_^)

I was aware, but 3rd party editors like Notepad2 or Notepad++ were much better than Wordpad for lightweight program editing as they also had syntax highlighting, auto-indent, etc.

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