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CivBase

> 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...

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> 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.

Well it's getting less awful at least

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

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.

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.

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.

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