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Comment by IGotThroughIt | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit this, I was wrong about Satya. I didn't think Microsoft was salvageable but he's been doing a stellar job. He's a great CEO and embracing open source was a really good move.

I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github) due to atom's memory hogging issues a while back. Haven't regretted the choice. For my private repos, I used to only use the free version of bitbucket but Microsoft introduced free private repos to github so I've been trying that out lately. If I like it, I'll stick with it.

Also, all my code is hosted on Azure now from AWS since late last year.

I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving, it too might improve and I might find myself using only Microsoft for my work. Would not have predicted that if you asked me a few years back when I couldn't run away from Ms/Windows environment fast enough.

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> I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github)

It just hit me that since GitHub was bought, both VSCode and Atom are owned by Microsoft.

And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...

Well it's getting less awful at least

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-insider/at-home/wha...

Installing atom or Vscode is ridiculously easy, what’s with this obsession that things need to be available out of the box? Perhaps it’s just my conditioning, but I automatically trust software that ships with a windows machine less than any binary I install myself.

>Installing atom or Vscode is ridiculously easy, what’s with this obsession that things need to be available out of the box?

What if your enterprise customer staged a VM for you with no access to the internet and a highly restricted environment? You know what happens in that case? You're editing configuration files in notepad. You'll never run into it because you're just working on your home workstation but a good set of defaults will have an impact on these kinds of use-cases.

Seems like you're solving political problems with technical solutions. One could similarly argue a USB stick or shared drive with infinite vetted piece of software is superior to a single additional text editor pre-installed in the OS (which only solves a single, niche, use-case).

>> USB stick or shared drive

You have limited experience in a huge piece of the enterprise / government world if you think this would ever fly - and they all run windows

This may sound callous, but you're talking out of ignorance.

Windows relies on text editors for common operations significantly less than some other OSs.

But when you need to edit text the only thing you can be guaranteed to have is notepad, which (a) has no features and (b) does the basics of text editing terribly

How often does that really happen though, in terms of needing it for general system usage? I have worked in Windows all day for my entire career and it hasn't come up much. When it has, notepad is almost always sufficient to deal with the edge case.

For other kinds of text editing, just download and use whatever text editor has the features you want for the task at hand. If notepad had to be all things to all people it would be bloated and not particularly good at anything anyway, so it's better that it remain a lightweight simple text editor in my opinion.

In their defense, that wasn't Notepad's original purpose in life, hence it's name.

Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to supplant Notepad and Paint but met harsh resistance because there is a disconnect between what these Apps were originally intended for and how people actually use them day to day.

Snip & Sketch comes really close to replacing Paint for 80% of my needs, but I often use Paint to quickly mockup UI, something you can't easily do in S&S yet.

There's nothing from Microsoft that even approaches replacing Notepad for me. Notepad++ is my preferred editor but even it is overkill.

> And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...

What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or something else?

Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of the box?

Something like Notepad++. VSCode is too heavy. It’s a real pain to edit text and configure files with Notepad in environments where you can’t install additional editors.

Notepad++ is unnecessarily complicated for end users. It’s not only developers who use Windows.

I am sure if someone actually cared they could add more functionality to their built in editor without confusing people. They could also increase its performance so it’s possible to edit large files.

Having developer tools preinstalled is awesome. When you can launch editor, write some HTML/CSS/JavaScript with proper highlighting, launch it in browser, it greatly reduces gap to start programming and it'll increase number of people who're doing that. Those days I think preinstalling python would be very useful. And that python will be much more valuable than 90% of junk shipped with OS. It's only 25 MB. Sure, it's not about professional-level IDEs but it's not required for useful work. Now typing programming code in notepad.exe is what's terrible.

Back in the DOS days Microsoft shiped with a decent editor and a programming environment, alas from DOS 5 onwards.

Was that EDLIN? I have some very vague memories

No one liked EDLIN.

I assumed the poster meant EDIT.COM and QBASIC. I'd also argue that Notepad has about as much editing capability as EDIT.COM, even if nostalgia does seem to want to color EDIT.COM as a more capable IDE than it really was simply because I too spent a lot of time building dumb apps in QBASIC.

Apple ships Python with OS X, which ended up becoming a big problem because they wrote system utilities that depended on Python2.7, and 9/10 people would want python3 (especially now), so they'd have to go install it anyway and make sure to put it in the right place so that the system uses it's version of python instead of the version the user wants for their applications. (This may have changed in Catalina, but I don't have a Mac at the moment to check). Granted, the Python installer corrects for this, but more versions of python on your system means you have to tell all of your python files that python==python3 or run them in virtualenvs (which you might not want to do in production).

Microsoft, in newer releases of Windows, includes a shim that'll grab python3 from the Microsoft Store if you type python into a terminal, which is a lot nicer, and since they don't have code that requires python2, you can't accidentally break the system if you want a newer version of python around.

So then they can use MS Word or Wordpad (for a built-in and free option).

Notepad++ is still too heavy. I prefer Notepad2. It doesn't need to be installed and there is a portable version that saves its options in a file instead of the registry.

Fine with me :).

I don't think people would complain about a decent text editor vs. adding yet another text-like editor. I appreciate the new calculator...

notepad++ is one of the first apps I install on a new windows machine. VS Code is great for when you move into coding tasks but not as snappy and quick as notepad++ for texty things

Notepad++ is one of the first things I install as well, and I think it is even a little more than necessary at times. Unsaved file persistence, Regex, File Encoding, Syntax coloring, and Tabs are about all I truly need from Notepad++. The other 80% of it is excess in my opinion.

How about dropping notepad for a simplified version of VSCode. Or maybe just VSCode.

I'm on a Mac, and I love the app - never even use the built-in Mac text editor.

Really? I love TextEdit for making quick changes or viewing a file when I don't want to wait for VSCode or Sublime to start up. I just wish it had regex find/replace support.

> I don't want to wait for VSCode or Sublime to start up

How long does it take for you to load VSCode or Sublime?

On my 2014 Mac Mini, it takes the same amount of time to startup for VS Code as it does for TextEditor.

What kind of Mac are you on?

A decent text editor doesn't mean VS Code, or anything like that complicated. Just something not as teeth grindingly sucky as Notepad. It wouldn't even have to be all that much better. An 'advanced mode' in the same way that calculator has a scientific mode might be nice as an extra. To be fair Notepad is gradually improving, but this has been an issue for literally decades.

You seem to be describing WordPad, tbf.

Notepad looks exactly the same as the one in Windows XP :D

That’s why I said this has been an issue for decades.

Multiple people have mentioned it, and you're not responding to it: There is WordPad, separate from Notepad, that seems to be what you're looking for.

Have you ever used WordPad? WordPad is a lightweight "word processor" not a text editor. It is not really an option.

Wordpad is a completely different thing, it’s a basic word processor. I’d be quite happy with a slightly better text editor, though as I pointed out Notepad has improved recently and isn’t far off a reasonable set of basic features.

WordPad isn't a text editor, it's a "Word Processor".

Notepad may look the same, but it has seen some small feature updates in Windows 10. The biggest: it finally understands Unix-style line feed only (\n) files.

Something with block indent and regex.

> What would that look like?

Line numbers, file tabs, syntax highlighting, visible whitespace, a better find/replace with support for patterns, etc. Multiple cursors would be nice too.

I don't think it needs to have plugin support, a file explorer, VCS features, or any featurs that involve analyzing, building, or debugging code.

Really the need for a decent text editor out of the box isn't necessary if support for chocolatey repos is the first thing installed.

Having a simple/sane package management either out of the box or within a single step is really the right pattern to enable ease of installing whatever your text editor/customisation of choice is.

My prediction since windows 8:

- windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements

- embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development - slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)

- move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)

- stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure

We will see if Satya is stellar or just devil. I have moved after 20 years of system developmeny on Windows to Linux. We will see what will happen.

> windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements

Tried in 8, met with utter failure, reverted by 10.

> embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development

...and throwing out pretty much everything that makes Windows better for a Desktop? Including their driver model, their backwards compatibility, etc? Unlikely. Replicating all of that to an appreciable standard would be significantly costly.

> slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)

This does seem to be happening, much to the chagrin of many, many smaller business that don't like to pay rent on their tools.

> move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)

Possible. Microsoft already has some kind of Windows Desktop as a Service, and RDP is damned good.

> stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure

They can try, but at best that just means that a whole lot of people will just stick with the last version of non-subscription-only Windows (as many did with 7 instead of moving to 8-10). I imagine it will be a large enough group that third parties pick up the slack and provide solutions to things MS is no longer fixing. At worst, there will be lynchings.

I can see them stopping the sale of windows, but not really using an online OS. I think they've just given up on the OS war and will try to get users to subscribe to their walled environment (office, azure, onenote, etc).

They're already doing that on mobile, they stopped fighting android and are now trying to be there in the form of apps and services for both android and ios.

Personally I think it makes sense: An OS is becoming more and more a layer to access the web. Most people use just a web browser and a couple other apps. It makes sense for their focus to be not in that layer, but in being the app/web that the user searches for.

> I think they've just given up on the OS war

That's an odd way of putting "have been winning so hard for so long that they probably can't even lose now if they tried".

...unless of course you mean the server OS wars, in which case that statement is a lot less wrong.

Also on cloud level, azure is so much better than amazon (google is outclassed by both). Microsoft is not as loud as it was but still there is no replacement. If they manage to put windows desktop to the cloud, there is not much left for the others.

> I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving

Docker Desktop for Windows seems to still be a bit iffy and WSL is sometimes painfully slow (especially when compiling native code) but overall I'm quite happy with it now thanks to the Remote VSCode extensions.

I'm really looking forward to WSL2 though.

> couldn't run away from Ms/Windows environment fast enough.

My condolences about living with

* spending ~20% of traffic for telemetry

* bloatware/low quality updates

* unexpected reboots after system upgrade

* non-removable Sugar Bob game in Windows Pro(!) edition

Sorry, but all this crap doesn't makes MS "good" in any sense.

The updates are a bit ridiculous. I did a clean install, and like I used to do before, I installed all updates right away so I can take my mind off it for a while. But no, Windows 10 kept finding restart-worthy updates for a week. Seems to have stopped now. Is that normal?

Telemetry can be blocked through a firewall.

That might be a decent approach. I went with blocking some Windows 10 functionality via the hosts file. Many months later, I wanted to download the new Windows Terminal from the Microsoft store and I just could not figure out why the MS store wasn't working properly. After hours and hours I vaguely remembered messing with the hosts file (probably via a Powershell script). I opened it and the evidence was plain to see. I removed all the non-default entries and MS store was working again. But I saw so many people suffering from the same problem on online forums. Really makes you think as to how many people ran some questionable script, made no backups, and had to reinstall the OS because they didn't know how to revert the changes.

I have much longer lists of issues for Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Chrome but I still use all of them because the benefits outweigh the problems.

What platform is perfect?

Exactly my sentiments. Every time I use a different OS - any of those that you mentioned - I find tons of things to complain about that Windows does not suffer from. At the end of the day, most of these operating systems are awesome. But they each have different strengths and weaknesses.

A couple of cherry picked examples also don't make them "bad" though. Not sure how cherry picked they are, but I seem to be able to counter all those points just from experiences on the machine I'm typing this on; 20% is easy if there's hardly any traffic, isn't it? No seriously, where does this come from? I've never seen this Sugar Bob thing you talk about, and it's also not on my machine currently. All in all, I don't see many of these and similar things people complain about. Any idea why? The reboots aren't exactly unexpected, are they? And I haven't had updates break things for me either so unsure about the quality. I have seen them fix things though.

Then again, which OS is much better on all fronts? Still have to see it, and I tried/use a lot of them.

Do you have a source for the 20% claim?

In fairness the reboots after updates is kind of expected these days. I'm always surprised when I don't have to reboot.

I don't have a Sugar Bob game on my pro edition.

> I don't have a Sugar Bob game on my pro edition.

I don't even know what that is.

Candy Crush Saga, a game Windows 10 Home used to bundle with major upgrades.

> spending ~20% of traffic for telemetry

Maybe don't lie if you want to be taken seriously?

I've got 6 different Windows 10 machines active on my home network at any given time and I'm blocking Microsoft Telemetry via Pi-Hole. Microsoft Telemetry doesn't even account for 20% of the blocked traffic.

Pi-Hole is blocking about 10% of traffic overall.

While the business software and development side seems to go to the right direction, the consumer product side is basically series of incompetent and/or anti-customer decision/catastrophes. IMO You were right about Satya, all the positive things happening, because there is someone who can hold against him. (because if he would be the origin of the positive changes, than everything would be improving)

> due to electrons memory hogging issues a while back. You realise VSCode is also electron based, right?

Noticed it almost instantly and edited. You probably didn't see the edit due to hn's caching.

There’s no caching for logged-in users. Not that it takes away from your point, I just love how the codebase is designed.

> There’s no caching for logged-in users.

Was not aware of this. Very good to know.

What you perceived as caching was just this particular user loading the page at the right time :).

Have you posted/upvoted issues regarding these path problems? If so can you link to some?

No I haven't due to time constraints. I was just disappointed and uninstalled to free up space. I will be getting some time off soon so I will reinstall and log the issues.

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