Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)
answers.microsoft.com
answers.microsoft.com
> This answer is not helpful. There is no start button.
Because it's just a little windows icon now - easy to forget that that doesn't just make sense to some people.
> Thank you, Brian- I would surely never have looked there, for anything, never mind notepad! It is on my start box now.
Some people just haven't/won't learned the grammar and vocabulary of computer literacy. I think this person means "start menu?" But it looks like a box to them so that's how they described it.
A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer. Reading that experience was fascinating.
I missed that article. It sounds fascinating -- I don't suppose you have a link?
Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
What did you find when you opened the Start menu (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Windows_95_St...)? Programs (click on one to start the program), Documents (click to start a program handling the file), Settings (click to start a Control Panel applet), Find (click to start a find dialog), Help (click to start the help viewer), Run (click to start an executable by name), ...
> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer!
You are, after all, starting the shutdown procedure.
No, the point of the Start menu was to provide a root node to a navigable hierarchy of all of Window's available functionality. Calling it "Start" makes sense from the perspective of the act of navigation - it is the user's "start point". While logical, I think this metaphor was subverted in many ways even when it was new; the hierarchy afforded by the Start menu was neither particularly well structured nor even the easiest way to access much of its functionality (it seemed to compete with "My Computer" for the title of "blessed root node").
Nowadays it seems that it is not even possible to navigate to all Windows functionality through the "Start menu".
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120213-00/?p=83...
This was before the advent of "windows keyboards" and the menu key on them.
EDIT changed link to a better one
they fixed it some way through Win98 I thought...
Ah yes, because the competition's UI of having you click on an icon of a literal piece of fruit to shutdown the computer makes more sense!
You can of course push the power button and Windows will go ahead and gracefully shut down, been that way since at least XP, if not 98 on computers that supported it!
Shutting down become a rather destructive option, putting it as a first level item on the task bar would lead to accidental clicks. Putting it as a first level menu item on the most prominent UI feature of the entire OS seems like a decent alternative!
> Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
Eh, and we still say we save stuff to "disk". Never mind that it probably isn't even remotely disk shaped.
If I am writing instructions for a website, should I tell people to tap or click on things?
The pantomime for talking on the telephone is to stick thumb and pinky finger out to make it look like a device that a lot of people under 20 have possibly never even seen.
Starting the shutdown process is hardly the worst English faux pas the technology industry has made!
It was a different time. The Windows 95 team had this idea of a "beginner's UI" to make computers more approachable -- an idea they subsequently shelved. But their research told them that:
> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training
Ironically newer UI designers have forgotten that 'visible cues' lesson -- both on Windows 10's Flat UI and on touch interfaces such as iPad OS, which imho suffers from really poor discoverability.
> Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.
(Here's a picture of what earlier iterations of the UI looked like: https://imgur.com/IWCGPzU)
These extracts and image are from Kent Sullivan's very readable "The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering": https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=238611 (previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899)
The upshot is: "Start" is just a label that worked well during UX testing, what mattered more was the anchored, affordance-rich, highly consistent button that let you interact with the GUI in a predictable way.
Not only this, but the icon style is different from when they last looked at it just different enough to probably confuse them.
Old entertainment content however, I'm afraid that it might be pretty much lost to those growing up with on demand streaming. In the age of linear TV, back catalog content wasn't just available to consume in lieu of something new, it was actively fed to us by the fixed schedule on failure to tune in when the new stuff was aired. This introduced us to a lot of content from before our time. But with streaming, I just don't see how it would happen, not in culturally relevant volume. Nostalgia is an acquired taste. Just like so many of my generation I madly binged Friends when it appeared on Netflix, but how many streamed Friends who completely missed it's original run?
23 year old here. I had never seen Friends, thus I never had any nostalgic interest in visiting it.
One weekend last year I had an onsite interview in Denver just before a blizzard hit, snowing me into a Motel 6 for 2 days. No wifi, so I did nothing but watch Friends and Seinfeld reruns on the TV. Probably the first time I'd used a television in my adult life.
I also caught Forrest Gump for the first time late that night. Not a bad film.
Anecdote time: I surely did not learn anything about the Korea war from MASH reruns other than "the time depicted is too recent for ww2 and too long ago for Vietnam, so apparently America had yet another war in Asia". But that was enough to create a gathering place inside my mind for all those tiny information scraps about this part of history that would otherwise new lost, surprisingly helpful.
I believe that this approach to UX testing is to blame for some of the most infuriating UI changes: when you design UI experiments with actual users you do that because you want objectivity. And what could be more objective than selecting "perfect blanks" as you test subjects?
The problem with this approach is that everything you gain in objectivity is lost many times over in relevancy. Those people are not representative of your actual users, not even when you are building a geriatry self-serve kiosk.
Unfortunately, once that kind of experiment has taken place, it inevitably dominates all other concerns. Every critical voice will reliably get shouted down with "We have the numbers to prove it. We did science, you didn't. You are just a grumpy old power-user disrespecting the needs of the weak".
To further this point, imagine testing HN with people that can't read. Do we rebuild it for children under 6 or do we wait they learn to read and grow to an age that let them make sense of the contents of the site?
And a car analogy/tale. If you drive different models of different makers you find many little differences and unobvius ways to operate some controls. I remember I had to read the manual of a rental car 25 years ago to figure how to reverse. I had to lift a ring on the stick and I never saw something like that in my life as a passenger or as a driver before (and I barely saw automatic gears by then.) That was not very discoverable. However one shouldn't bother to design car controls for elderly people like my mother. She never got a driving license, she'll never will and yet she had no problems living their life. Not everybody needs computers.
Well put. What's the counterargument? There has to be a way to solve this problem.
Yep and sometimes it happens in unexpected places. I just went to the dentist the other day.
The receptionist accidentally moved her task bar to be oriented vertically on the left and couldn't get it back to the horizontal bottom position.
We're on very friendly terms so she asked if I could show her how to fix it which involved going around the desk. Naturally I requested she hides any windows that might violate HIPAA compliance before I swung around.
It was interesting to see her facial expressions and "whoa!" reactions when I mentioned how you can left click and drag the task bar to different spots and how to prevent this from happening in the future by right clicking and locking the task bar.
What was really interesting to me was when I said right click on the mouse, her eyes immediately looked at my hand on the mouse so you can't take left and right clicking as granted knowledge that everyone has as muscle memory.
This is someone who has been using that computer for years to manage appointments and whatever else, but things like right clicking the task bar is a move that very few people do out in the wild unless they are approaching enthusiast levels. She's not out of the loop with tech either. She has a smartphone and does a lot of things with it.
Today it’s interesting to see the favored device at both kindergartens and retirement homes: iPads.
Yet iPad’s also fine as my daily driver.
Computing is entering its appliance age.
https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/right-click-3610351
I don't own a Mac so I don't know how new Mac users discover how to do it. I remember there is something like a right click on Macs and I asked how to do it last time I had to use one for a few minutes. But if there are people that don't explore a UI with a visible right button, what are they doing with invisible controls?
One would always let go of the mouse to click. He would position the mouse, lift his hand a few centimeters above the mouse button and then press down on it fast. Sometimes worked, mostly didn't because the mouse would move during the click. Now imagine him trying double clicks..
Another guy would make extremely detailed notes. I would show him some setting in a dropdown menu of Word, and he would perfectly draw these menues in his notebook. By the end, he probably hat 20 pages of beautiful notes, it was actually quite impressive.
A lot of people hate the lack of features in gnome, but this is why I think KDE's style of configurability is a terrible idea. I can give my dad a gnome desktop and it just works, give him a KDE one and 3 hours later there will be six menus bar taking up half the vertical area of the screen, and that's from a locked config. As a power user I'd prefer text configuration or to use the separate tweak-ui app anyway.
This kind of exposure tends to generate a lot of empathy towards the user, as well as to the demands of the designers and user experience specialists. It also helps engender the right kind of intuition as to the level of UX complexity and cognitive load non-engineer users are prepared to tolerate. And that level is very, very low indeed.
Techie snobs scoff at the iPad but without its simplicity some of the older people in my family would have never used a computing device.
It wasn't something they ever needed – having done without computers for so long just fine – but it did bring them joy and entertainment and even helped them with some tasks, like notes and contacts.
And yes, abstracting away the file system played a big role in the iPad's accessibility.
Just vanishing the keyboard and mouse alone greatly lowers the intimidating barriers for some tech-averse people.
Then Microsoft comes along and changes everything. The Ribbon instead of the pull down menus. Now which office suite works more like what users have used for a couple decades?
Windows 8 comes along with a totally different UI. So different that ordinary users don't know how to do the most basic tasks like print, or even how to shut down the computer.
Windows 8 UI (no matter what you call it) "fixes" things by adding back a start menu, but not calling it start.
No search box in the start menu -- you just have to magically know that you can start typing.
And magical key combinations to type in commands.
IMO, it really is change for the sake of change. And generally change for the worse. The interface we had with classic Mac, and Win 95 was pretty usable. And stable. (Nevermind the underlying tech it ran on top of, no real kernel, etc.)
After 9 more years, let's change to steering pedals and use hand controls for acceleration and breaking. (pun)
After 9 more years . . .
Maybe you see a problem with this progression?
I still hate that change.
The search button in Office apps is super useful. Type in a vague suggestion of what you want and it'll pop up a button for the appropriate feature!
The ribbon is very nice for some things. It is meh for others. In Excel I'd argue it was a dramatic improvement. I remember spending forever digging through Excel menus trying to find out where some feature had been crammed in 10+ years prior before the concept of good UI even existed. The ribbon was a nice opportunity to reorganize things into more meaningful categories.
But yeah, there are still some things I can never remember quite were they are at.
On the other hand, the built in help system before 2007 or so worked out pretty well (maybe it was slightly dying by 2003. I remember the vba help worked well and maybe the rest didn’t work so well), whereas the help system in 2007 was completely awful and I think it was getting worse. I haven’t used office recently enough to know if they ever fixed it or if it was just replaced by incomplete documentation, google searches, and obscure forums.
Sometimes I wonder if UI design matters at all beyond what users are already acclimated to.
Let me put it this way - I am qualified to write a book about Microsoft Outlook. One of my presentation interaction points when talking about Outlook was to tell the person asking the question "This was already a feature introduced in Outlook __".
Outlook got especially destroyed by Ribbon. It is capable of so much more than is exposed by the UI. The same is true for Excel, especially once you add various add-ons.
Ribbon made it easier for novices to learn a handful of shortcuts using multiple key strokes (press alt and follow the letters that appear). It also destroyed workflows of countless power users.
I get what another commenter said, who grew up with the Ribbon, but it's very difficult to adapt to if you've memorized the old menus and dialogue boxes. Thus, Libre Office now feels like a much more familiar and accessible tool.
Similarly, when Windows pivoted in v. 8 to a tiled interface, the more traditional UI's like KDE and Mac remained familiar and comfortable. Now Win10 is okay; it feels like Win7, only slicker and with lots of hidden power features (such as power shell, Linux subsystem, better copy-and-paste in cmd, etc.).
Putting back the things that worked was the right thing to do, and clearly someone with some sense of listening to the users is still in charge there.
the one thing i thought was nice about the ribbon is that they remind me of the old 123 / commands. as you slash through the 123 menus they popped up where the input box is, changing across the screen. the ribbon is sort of like that? if you type out the ribbon shortcuts the ribbon changes across the screen.
To apply that extreme to this case, I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to find and start apps.
It is when you provide icons for most applications, but only provide text search for others (which has a confusing interface that sometimes displays webpages and local documents). There are limits to blaming the designer, but inconsistent, half implemented, with few affordances, that uses mixed metaphores is neither good programming or good design. It's not always the fault of the design, but this design is the fault in this case.
Your search was good, and got you straight to the old Control Panel version. But the fact that the settings are split over two not-fully-overlapping systems is a bit ridiculous, and confusing.
To the topic, I agree fully. In swedish, it's even worse. Wanted to change some environment variables yesterday (golang path) and tried to find the "system" dialog that is opened through windows + break key that is found on non-laptop keyboards
Search for system? You get system information, system configuration, etc, but not the classic control-panel "app" called system.
Also, remote desktop (the tsclient) isn't anywhere to be found except by typing the improbable and kinda arcane translation "fjärrskrivbord"
also the "windows" key argument was kinda moot because most keyboard have a key that isn't a "windows" key but works similar...
But did it get moved? The article is from 2015 and I didn't start using 10 until 2018 so I don't know where it was then but as of today I can find Notepad on the Start Menu under Windows Accessories. I feel like that's where it's always been. It's called Windows Accessories now instead of just Accessories but surely that's not enough to confuse people so much?
As with most everyone here of course I don't launch it from there, I do Win^R, notepad, enter just like I do for calc, excel and winword. But if I never learned how to do that and always relied on the menu shortcut I feel like it never really moved that far from where it's always been.
In Windows 10, the start menu button doesn't have any affordances, there's no border, just a white on black icon. On a desktop, the start menu has a uniform dark grey background, the user has to work out that there is a strip down the middle that can be scrolled. The only clue is that the bottom entry may be clipped and on mouse move a 2px wide scroll bar thumb is shown near the top. After working out that this is a scrollable pane, they need to know to scroll down near the bottom of the alphabetically grouped list of entries to "W". Rather than just moving the mouse over the entry in the 95-style start menu, the user needs to work out that "windows accessories" is clickable to show more entries, indicated only by the small grey arrow to the right of the button. Finally notepad is one of the entries once the list is expanded.
So yes, I'd say it has moved. It used to be accessed through the top entries in the start menu, now it is accessed through one near the bottom that is inside a scrollable panel with no clear indication that it can be scrolled.
[1] https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/windows-95-start...
https://winaero.com/blog/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-w...
> Go to Start menu.
> Type notepad and press Enter.
>I tried Step 1 prior to posting here. It doesn't work!
Works for me on the latest windows. Granted, there's no textbox to type into, but it appears when you start typing.
Step 2. Move the search box to an annoying position on the task bar.
Step 3. Give users the ability to hide the search box.
This is a shockingly common problem for people. I can tell they feel uncomfortable just typing without a place "where" the typing will go. Many people will click the magnifying glass and then again place the cursor into the search field. Same with google, they will click the search field, then the cursor moves to the address bar, they feel surprise, and then place the cursor in the address bar a second time.
Alt+Left arrow makes _loads_ more sense than "Backspace, but conditionally, only when not engaged in a text entry field."
He also refuses to learn shortcut keys because he never learned to touch type, and refuses to type even 1 character more than he has to, so he has a lot of common things he would type stored on a virtual clipboard that he recalls with ctrl+`, and will paste from that to avoid typing.
I'm sure it's a mess for less tech savvy people trying to do searches on companies that have .com or .net suffixes on their names.
I change my Firefox copies to have separate boxes, and no search from url bar. I don’t recall offhand as it’s muscle memory, and I’m on a phone, but I think it’s ctrl-k for location and ctrl-l for search.
You should probably say to go to click on the windows icon. Somebody new to Windows would have no idea that used to be labelled "Start".
When I start typing N-O-T, this is what it does:
I have no complaints.
I'd wonder what MS is smoking, but I think I know. Windows is such a low priority to them these days that they put all their most inexperienced or terrible coders to work on it. That's why it's full of webdev-flavor awfulness.
The UX on default Windows 10 Start Menu is unacceptable.
"Hold down the windows key on the keyboard and press the S key while the windows key is held down, and then type notepad and press enter".
And if they get hung up finding the windows key on the keyboard you can explain it by saying it's likely near the bottom left in between the ctrl and alt keys and has the 4 squares.
And don't blame me, you didn't say anything about closing it :P
I recognize that this is a failing of mine.
You should probably work on this.
I have a similar problem: I'm so goddamned intelligent that this world seems like the movie "Idiocracy" to me. ( I can't watch it: it's too painful. )
When I was younger, this advice from the Book of the Subgenius helped me a lot to get by, "Act like a dumbass and they'll treat you like an equal."
Eventually, I calculated the existence of God, called out "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free", and He showed up and Shook my hand.
Since then my intelligence has been idling: there's nothing further to compute. That, combined with diligent administration of THC, has brought my general intelligence level down to that of an average smart person.
Here's the thing: now that I experience it for myself, normal intelligence is terrifying. It's no wonder everyone is always so stressed out and worried. Their brains are not adequate to the complex artificial world we have built for ourselves. (Are you familiar with the "Peter Principle"? That's what we've done: not promoting people to level their level of incompetence, rather the world has grown complex to the point where most people are now incompetent, through no fault of their own.)
Robert Anton Wilson points out, "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being."
What I'm saying is, pity them, they know not what they do.
Just because you have a different skillset to other people doesn't make them beneath you.
Design is how it works...
In other words: StartMenu -> Windows Accessories -> Notepad
This may have something to do with that people don't learn to use Windows since they are mostly using their Android phones anyway.
Probably best to shoot videos nowadays.
I looked at the screen "globally", and would identify elements of interest within it. So you could tell me to find something on the screen, and I'd look at the whole screen to spot it.
They had a small mental "viewport" (maybe 2"x2") whilst looking up through their bifocals, that they would only be able to notice elements within. So you first had to steer their viewport to the right region of the screen, and only then could tell them what to look for within it. This gets especially frustrating when dealing with a windowed UI that could ostensibly pop up a dialog box anywhere.
Start menu -> Windows Accessories -> Notepad
Am I missing something?
The story is about how regular people deal with computers, as can be read in the comments.
It's like that story about how one day the google search 'facebook login' took people to a forum page that let people comment using their facebook credentials, and we got to find out how many users just type 'facebook login' to whatever text field they run across, type their username and password in, and then get really confused when it's a random forum page and they can't see their normal feed.
> Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work...
> The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.
> I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!
> EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!1111
> I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111
> This is such a mess I can't do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can't even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!
> Seams like all of the comets i read agree with me you people messed up royal i was enjoying facebook now i am thinking of getting rid of it all
https://web.archive.org/web/20100303073613/http://www.readwr...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
The whole of the linked article, apparently.
because its just absurd that Windows doesn't ship with a premium text editor.
its not like Microsoft doesn't make one or anything... /s
I almost dropped dead in shock to see they updated MS paint to Paint 3D, but then I realized that Its still intentionally limited and severely clunky to encourage you to spend money on Photoshop. :/
I also use notepad as my goto “paste without formatting” as it’s typically faster to wash the clipboard through notepad than use whatever “paste special” ui an app has.
Formatting isn't the only reason to use it. I never bother to try notepad.
It’s a similar preference to how I like vim. Vim is ubiquitous on *nix systems. Lots of better stuff, but I’m ok enough with vim.
I turn on the address toolbar on the taskbar (underneath all the icons); it's great to navigate to files/directories by typing (especially with auto-complete, which wasn't there on Windows 9x!), and I also use it for "clipboard washing".
It has a use for READING text-files
It's really nice to have a plain text editor that doesn't help them in any way, produces files that will work in the browser and they get to learn better I think. Maybe a small use case but one that makes me glad the tools exist.
I often find myself also just pasting old bits of text in there similar to how some people might leave old versions of code commented out while working on a replacement - its a sort of shelf/sidebar to place things that I might need later.
Then again, it does have some strange little features. Like if you put the string ".LOG" at the top of a .txt file and open it again in Notepad, Notepad will insert the current date/time at the bottom of the file and move the cursor to the bottom.
I can get that being a useful feature, kinda. It's like someone snuck an extra feature into Notepad and it never got caught.