Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11

blogs.windows.com

164 pointssendilkumarn297 comments

I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason.

I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.

For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.

Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.

It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.

I suspect it's a mindset change. Not heeding demand and staying stuck in the past was how Windows became a punchline, although I'm sure enterprise customers loved it. At some point it did begin to change -- I suspect it hasn't changed enough for HN readers.

For instance, Unix LF support was added to Notepad back in 2018 (at last!) with a few registry switches for compatibility.[1]

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

They tried about one-and-a-half times to do a big compatibility break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT and Windows Phone. It was a failure, of course.

I'm not entirely clear whether the "current" API set called "WinRT" is the continuation of "Windows RT". It sounds plausible but it could just be Microsoft being terrible at naming.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

> you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break

Wait what, external software calls into notepad?

Surprisingly I actually deal with a fairly hefty integration that does some horrible win32 shit I don’t understand after opening notepad to integrate it into their app. There’s so much of that out there it’s unreal.

Microsoft's win32 moat is looking more like an anchor.

Yep - read some of the awesome / horrific horror stories from having too large an API surface area from Raymond Chen here: https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplec...

Patching other people's binaries, turning off features if the app making the request is "problematic-app", re-introducing bugs, fixing should-be-impossible-to-happen calls from programs that were written by hand, it's all there!

> one useful shim is known as HeapPadAllocation; it is applied to programs that have heap buffer overrun bugs. The shim intercepts calls to the HeapAllocate function and adds a specified amount to the requested size. That way, when the program overruns a buffer, it merely corrupts the padding rather than corrupting the next heap block.

Oh good grief.

Wow, amazing how they bent over backwards to keep customers up and running. I wish they cared that deeply about their users today.

(Not saying the approach should be the same, just wish the attitude and motivation were as intense and that Win 10+ were less user-hostile.)

It was different when your typical application came on ten floppy disks. Not being able to use it on the next version of Windows might hinder the adoption of Windows.

Going to have to buy this book now. Enjoyed this extract. I wonder what font was used? whatthefont thinks it might be Adobe Jenson Display, and I don't currently have any PDF tools to inspect the document. The 'y' looks so pretty, with it's rightward curve.

:) http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep...

Calvin: This is so cool!

Hobbes: This is so stupid.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/01/01

There's some fun projects that launch a notepad.exe and dump win32 messages into its wndProc to use it as a console logger

> Wait what, external software calls into notepad?

External software calls into everything. Welcome to Windows development.

It's extremely difficult to implement even "obvious" changes like a dark-mode Notepad when it could potentially break customers who have been depending on specific behavior for decades.

This is why they've had to write shim-specific code for certain vendors. The desire to move forward versus the awful prospect of having to keep those shims in place.

I imagine then at least 80% of Excel's bug tracker must have WONTFIX as a designation, cause I tell you, the same fucking bugs seem to come with every release.

I think if they fix them the global finance sector will crash overnight.

Like when zoom causes text lengths to appear inconsistently?

Or when page resize based on different printers breaks page appearances?

Wow, still a thing?

Not to mention Excel inherited bugs from Lotus 1-2-3 for the sake of compatibility, and therefore incorrectly treats the year 1900 as a leap year: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/w...

I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10. It now doesn't work in Windows 11 because they didn't reimplement the IDeskBand interface for the taskbar that my app uses to show remaining battery time.

My app is even part of their compatibility test suite (they asked me for permission and a license).

I understand the need to move forward and that BW compatibility can be hinder that, but it's really frustrating for me to 1) respond to thousands of people asking why it doesn't work after they upgrade, and 2) lose income because there's nothing I can do to make it work the same in Windows 11.

Breaking backwards compatibility is one thing.

Removing functionality is a bigger problem.

And there's no supported way to show info in the taskbar?

Are you the author of the BatteryBar pro by any chance?

Yes, check their profile ;)

Tell your users to vote with their money and stay on Windows 10. If enough people do so and get enough of a "Windows 11 breaks all your software" sentiment going, MS may start to reconsider.

There is no "need to move forward".

So how does the little turd that shows news and weather work?

It's not in Windows 11. That seems to be even more evidence that 11 was quite rushed for some reason. They rewrote the taskbar but didn't finish reimplementing much of the existing functionality.

Latest Windows 11 insider build added something new on taskbar, maybe you should do a look if they added the API or similar again...

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/12/08/announc...

>I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10

Well, it had a good run. Should such compatibility forever hold Windows back from making breaking changes to those APIs though? 20 years is an eternity in computing...

Nitpick: Unix line endings and UTF-8 have been supported in Notepad for the last few years.

See: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2018/12/10/announc... and https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

Years ago I reported a bug in a VB function, something to do with date calculations. I spent quite a while on the phone with them, feeling like I was banging my head against a wall. They readily admitted that the output of their function was wrong, yet steadfastly maintained that they would not fix it because other programs might depend on that incorrect output.

If the answer to any bug report is that the buggy behavior is now the baseline standard, what's the point in reporting any bugs?

Excel famously has a date calculator bug that cannot be fixed without breaking spreadsheets everywhere (which of course now expect the bug).

This all can be worked around given enough will. Excel files do have a format version number in them somewhere, right? I'm sure they do. So support the old behavior for older files, and the new one for the newer ones. All files created with the new version of Excel won't be affected by that bug, but the older ones, that might rely on it, won't break either.

It gets worse. This workaround is also in VBA, which has an enormous install base.

Books on Excel programming explicitly call out this issue. This is one thing I definitely would not want fixed.

You will break countless workflows that have operated for decades.

And even better non-excel spreadsheets have to know the bug and imitate it when opening excel docs.

The way to break free of this is to create Notepad2, leaving Notepad as it is.

I've always liked Apple's approach more. There are public APIs that are mostly guaranteed to work across system versions. Then there are private ones. You can reverse engineer them. You can use them in your apps. They might even do what you wanted. But you're on your own with them, as Apple rightfully considers itself free to break anything that isn't part of the public SDK.

Microsoft, on the other hand, sees that some app calls an undocumented internal function, or has a bug that causes it to misuse an API call that just happens to still work correctly, or even worse, hooks into a system library or something, and considers that now to be a part of the public SDK that is to be maintained and made compatible with everything that might use it, forever.

How do the various Linux flavors handle this kind of thing?

I did a bit of cross-platform development in C++, and I'm glad to report that Linux is an API clusterfuck in regard to anything going beyond system calls. None of the desktop-related stuff is part of the system and there's always more than one way to do something, and you have to support all of them because else someone would complain that your thing doesn't work on their particular configuration.

They just break everything and tell users/devs to suck on it.

I worked on macOS for many years. Apple's policy is more like Microsoft's than you describe. It was commonplace to have to revert changes that broke a "must-not-break" application that was dependent on undocumented APIs or behavior, and the source of certain projects is littered with app-specific workarounds.

Maybe that’s part of why Windows owns the enterprise and Apple isn’t really a thing in that market.

I've never understood this desire to run everything 100% natively all the time AND keep your system up to date. Just put a Windows 95/98/2000/XP VM into Windows 11, integrate its window manager with the host desktop, and be done with it forever. Start it transparently for apps that need it. IIRC Apple did a similar thing when transitioning from classic Mac OS to OS X, and it worked pretty well.

> For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them

Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember those?) had a cow and my lead pulled out all of the changes.

I'm still at MSFT, now as an architect, so it turned out not to be a career limiting move, but I certainly should have discussed my plans more broadly rather than just "cowboying" those changes in.

Why not releasing it as NewNotepad or something? This way it keeps the old one working but provides a newer alternative. Like Paint and 3DPaint or whatever it is called.

Yestepad.

People always complain about the new apps. Microsoft in fact had like, 3 paints. Now they gave up on that idea and refreshed the main Paint.

If I could upvote you ten points, I would.

I love Notepad. I love the .LOG feature. I hit F5 for fun.

For some reason, the dead-simple text editors have always fascinated me. It's damn near good enough.

First thing I do on any windows machine is replace notepad with notepad2 [0], there are installs of it that hides original notepad and uses notepad2 in all the "Edit" context menus etc.

https://notepad2.com

Hey Jeff,

Small world, I worked with you on the Windows Update team. Hope you are doing well. Good to see you here on the HN forum. I also remember the notepad incident!

I would be have been pretty sad to hear that so much enthusiasm to improve the product resulted in problems regarding your career. That's promotion material, in my book. Glad it worked out.

10 minute QA because they don't seem to have done it:

- It consistently starts slower than Notepad3 while having substantially fewer features to load (and also slower than the old Notepad of course)

- THEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS (especially when grabbing the scroll bar handle). Any amount of delay is too much in notepad

- the animation runs at 60Hz even on a high refresh rate screen, so it looks choppy

- the animation has to "catch up" when grabbing the scroll bar handle and moving it quickly

- 215k lines loaded, moving the window itself is choppy now? HOW

- another first party piece of software that ignores the "no animations" setting in windows

- I've grabbed a notepad.exe from Windows XP SP3 in comparison, no problems there, scrolling and editing is instant. Both have SIGNIFICANT lag in the new one.

- Don't even try to resize the window with a big file open (< 1 FPS)

EDIT: Note that I haven't even complained about new features or anything, just the previous, basic features still working correctly.

Did they end up hiring back QA or have they stuck to their strategy of customers and analytics being QA?

I still use notepad to try to avoid all the crap software tries to cram down my throat these days. Sad to see they've managed to mess with this too. I wonder how long it'll be before tracking and dark patterns are shoved into this notepad version (if it hasn't happened already).

The only way to avoid dark patterns in software these days is to use Linux.

Please tell me you forgot to add /s

Windows is stuffed full of anti-patterns. You can't avoid them just by using notepad.

Yes, but modern Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma have also similarly regressed.

Fortunately, using Linux doesn't necessarily entail installing or using either.

What dark patterns can you find in Plasma today?

Windows is garbage. I’m not disagreeing with that part, butdesktop Linux is hot garbage too. The audio stack is garbage. X is decades old and Wyland is a meme.

> X is decades old

As are HN (1.something decades) and Notepad.exes that aren’t as hot garbage as the newest one. X still works fine and IME is only improved by the new things (eg. sxmo, the smartphone UI I’m typing this in) still being built on its well settled, stable foundation.

Uh, okay.

We're talking about dark patterns, which are anti-consumer and anti-user design decisions to pursue profit over user experience. Like stuffing candy crush into windows by default or making it incredibly difficult to switch default browser, or berating the user with popups when he tries to download Firefox.

Interesting how X being decades old is a con, while the glorious Notepad hasn’t really changed since the Windows 1.0 days.

> HEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS

That's always the first feature I turn off if I start a clean web browser profile. I'm not even sure why "smooth" scrolling is a thing...

I like smooth scrolling in browsers. Easier to track things with eyes. (though OP complains about "when grabbing the scroll bar handle", which sounds horrible)

For the record, I also dislike smooth scrolling in the Start menu, settings app etc. With Edge, they lowered the animation speed from baseline Chromium to match that I think.

In Chrome it's nice at high refresh rates and looks buttery smooth, but at 60Hz it's too choppy so I turn it off there. It seems that the Edge devs have opted for a slower (=smoother) animation, optimized for 60Hz screens, whereas Chrome has opted for more responsiveness.

(giving the user the ability to tweak the scroll animation speed would be too much to ask I guess)

(disabling smooth scrolling with the "disable animations" setting in Windows is too much to ask as well I guess)

There are flags for this. There is a flag to toggle “Microsoft Edge scrolling personality” in Edge and there is a flag to toggle smooth scrolling overall.

I am aware of these, yeah - "Microsoft Edge scrolling personality" is only for touch scrolling gestures as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect scroll wheel scrolling for me.

I've disabled smooth scrolling in Edge because of this, yes.

> as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect scroll wheel scrolling for me

Nor scroll to top/bottom via the Home/End keys. In Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) it's quick enough that I don't mind the smooth scrolling, but in Edge it's comparatively and disconcertingly slow.

I had to turn it on because Edge cannot render a normal HTML file without it (Slackware linux changelog). Is is just sad.

The problem is that Microsoft is still pretending that UWP/WinUI isn't a complete mistake. All those issues are inherent to that technology.

Doesn't UWP/WinUI render using DirectX? What makes it so slow?

I'd like to know this too-- my music player has a few different rendering options for one on screen view, GDI has always used fewer gpu and cpu resources than direct2d and direct3d in 7 and 10 so far?

When I tried to do some Direct2D a few years ago it was a disastrous API and far slower than old GDI.

The "Disable hardware acceleration" setting, when present, still frequently makes all sorts of desktop software run faster and less buggy.

Prevailing reason for the speed of ms code:

>I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

Didn't someone then implement a terminal emulator with colors, unicode support, fonts etc and it wasn't a doctoral research project?

So rendering glyphs (with textures?) is slow, vs GDI.

And I guess DirectDraw lacks a fast API to do colored text?

Just take a look at the last 25+ years of GUI development.

In all that time, as computers have got blindingly fast, the one and only constant is the guarantee GUIs continue to get get slower.

The same Microsoft who said UWP was not the future only two years ago, is still continuing to rewrite applications in it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883351

Well, who said it? Where are they on this org chart: https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201...

Yes, because WinUI is a clusterfuck so they need to keep using what they have.

Currently 2307 issues open, https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues

And this is just one repo, then you can hop into C#/WinRT, AppSDK, C++/WinRT ones as well.

Hence why they keep releasing WinUI 2.x series, although 2.6 was supposed to be the very last one before WinUI 3.0 goes stable.

However if you go to the community meetings everything is rosy and we should all be jumping into WinUI 3.0.

I came back to Windows Gui development this autumn, and we thought we'd try jumping in to WinUI3 as newer == better, right? Really hasn't worked out that way. It's literally only just hit 1.0. The prerelease versions had problems with "unpackaged" deployment (which is one of the key things we want, so we don't have to wrestle with the Windows store).

I just got an internal email saying "MS has a very convoluted process for getting a developer account just to publish apps to the Microsoft store and not even our MS rep knows the correct answer" from the person trying to set that up, so that's going well too.

Yeah, I really don't want to be on their shoes, and if we on the outside don't make our pain points clearly visible, I have the feeling that management will never change course.

On the outside it looks they have made a mess across teams, and now everyone is competing for our attention regarding Forms, WPF, WinUI 2.x on UWP (XBox, HoloLens, Windows until WinUI 3.0 catches up), WinUI 3.0 (some day), MFC (WinUI with C++/WinRT is a mess except for ATL/WRL fans with their deep IDL/COM love), MAUI, PWAs, or better yet, just wrap Blazor everywhere.

So I can't belive they are like the dog on a burning house, rather not allowed to fix the mess that Windows 8 brought into Windows development, and talk publicly how they actually think about all of this.

They've absolutely lost their roadmap, and I think they've also lost the distinction between solving a problem that Microsoft has versus a problem the users have.

And they've never quite dealt with having their platform be eaten by the web and the Apple Store / Google Play Store. See https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/10/20/introdu...

There's also the tension between dotnet core trying to be properly cross-platform vs having it actually support the various Windows toolkits. They've historically been welded into the build system as first-class citizens, rather than optional packages, which causes trouble as soon as you do a cross-platform build. WinUI3 goes halfway to fixing that by being installable as a package, but still relies on "<UseWinUI>true".

Yes, I can clearly see that point of view.

They should just go back to pure Win32. First thing to port: Teams.

Win32/Winforms (can't really cope with DPI scaling) or WPF?

As pjlmp says, that would be an admission of failure.

Tons of politics, and not wanting to lose their face.

I lost count of how many PMs I got to see on comunity meetings since the Windows 8 days.

They also pretend that all the rewrites that keep being requested since WinRT was introduced, and rebooted on the process, aren't a big deal.

When faced with these questions they always ask for us to explain our viewpoint, as if it wasn't clear for them to start with, of course it is clear, but they cannot say it live.

That sounds disturbingly similar to what they did to the Calculator in Windows 10.

I'm curious what the difference in binary size is between the two, and with the one in Windows 10 (which does have some enhancements compared to previous versions, but the same good old UI.)

But they forgot to include "Clippy". Looks like you are writting a letter...

Always the same crap with MS redesigns those days (like the Terminal one): there is fancy useless shit like Dark Theme but the basics like a functional IME are broken. What the point of a text editor if it well, can't input text?

Does it append .txt when you don't want it to? `Notepad config.rc` ends up saving as config.rc.txt?

The greatest thing about Notepad is that it runs and displays a blinking cursor ready for typing in much less than a second for a new document. On my Windows 11 machine it appears to be around 200 msec. I've tried setting my text file handler to other text editors but nothing else comes close to this speed of utility. I'm very glad they are not messing with that.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It's not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It's more of a nicety to upgrade. It's better looking but functionally not much different afaik

TextEdit on macOS is this fast when set to plain text and not reopening previous windows. The entire app is 2.6mb.

Launching with rich text as the default is a bit slower. But hey, rich text.

Sublime Text, god bless its soul, is right there with it.

And TextEdit is less than half that size if you strip out the translation dicts!

Sublime Text wasn’t as fast to launch on my 12” MacBook (RIP), which is why didn’t mention it. TextEdit still pretty much instant.

On my intel 16”, Sublime Text 4 is amazingly fast, even with a dozen medium-to-large rails apps open.

> TextEdit on macOS is this fast when set to plain text

Not for me.

Opening textedit on macbook 13, with plaintext mode takes noticeable time to animate the window before I can start typing.

Opening notepad.exe on Win11 is instant. The window is on-screen and ready to take input, before my finger has lifted off the enter key.

Not to mention the silly bugs and lack of attention to detail.

Open a new file. Don't type anything, it will prompt you to save the file on close. Why?

Have you tried Notepad++? I just tested it on my system after reading your comment and the difference between Notepad++ and Notepad was barely perceptible (the former being slower by ~0.1 seconds, at a guess). It also has a lot of quality of life features that notepad is missing - my favorite is that it auto-saves a cached copy of unsaved documents during shutdown and presents them to you on next open for saving (this doesn't seem to slow start up by any noticeable amount, for the small files I just tested).

Yes, Notepad++ is really great. In my case, I would tend to have a bunch of text files in tabs that slowed loading, so associating 'txt' with it meant I'd have to wait to jot a note down. I could have fixed this by closing all tabs before putting it away, but I'm happier using VS Code for my larger text file needs and good old notepad.exe for quick notes.

FYI notepad++ has a setting to open a separate instance for each file. It drives me crazy when I install on a new machine and it defaults to the behavior you’ve described.

>I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers.

They are pushing developers to it as well. See new WSL features as an example.

Can you explain how? I'm inexperienced in this field but found wsl to be a great quick way to run Linux software in Windows

WSLg for example. This was a windows 10 feature in beta. Windows 11 only at release.

Can I still configure the Taskbar to show small icons, ungrouped, with title (win95/2k look and feel)? That would be decisive for me...

I was expecting a ribbon or other fluff (like write.exe / WordPad), perhaps even ads (two days ago I saw at a friend's that a Windows built-in game now has ads). Honestly I'm very impressed they kept the simple look. It's just a larger-than-necessary menu bar and some unobtrusive theming and that's it. The toggleable dark mode is also a welcome change for me.

I do assume we can open files larger than a few megabytes now and there were some more functionality issues that seemed very 90s, could it be that there was only one undo step or did they already fix that in a previous release? I truly haven't used Windows in, dare I say, too long.

Edit: yes I did remember the undo problem correctly and that's finally fixed: "adding support for multi-level undo".

They added much more whitespace. In line with modern UI fashion trends.

Please can we stop this trend? It's ridiculous. It universally makes the user experience worse by reducing the effective screen real estate for actual work. Nobody cares about the aesthetic, they get used to it after a few session.

More whitespace and even worse, no borders. It looks incomplete and empty.

It's crazy to me that Windows 11 has already been released and yet they're still adding what should be core functionality to the OS as an after thought.

If they are so set on redesigning Notepad and/or all system apps to use the new design style, why would those not be prioritized and included in the original release from day 1?

I'm not sure a slight refresh of the Notepad UI is core functionality of the OS. I don't like Windows, I actually quite despise it, but I think the rolling release approach is far better than, say, macOS' yearly dump. You end up with features that are half-baked or pushed to the next year. Microsoft is taking a saner approach with Windows releases, IMHO.

I thought Microsoft had announced they are switching to an annual release cycle.

I don't think it makes much difference to the quality, some features are too big to fit in a single cycle anyway. The question is whether they have enough discipline to hold back projects that aren't ready. In this respect neither Apple nor Microsoft seem able to say no.

Better notepad then controlpanel ;)

Notepad is core OS functionality? I think not.

For Windows I would say it is. Windows doesn't come with vi, nano, or any other terminal text editor, and some kind of text editor is needed for pretty much anything you would do with a computer.

I doubt this is the paradigm that Microsoft would like to promote. Interestingly, my limited interactions will Windows 10 I haven't had the chance or need to use a text editor.

Err but powershell ISE ships with it.

True, but Windows 11 did not ship without a text editor in October. It shipped with the old version of Notepad.

I have never seen non techie users open notepad or edit config files. In fact I've heard people say that Notepad sucks and that MS Word is better, meaning they are so non techie they can't imagine a use case for notepad.

I think so. How else are you supposed to edit a config file?

There is also write.exe or, just a suggestion, buy MS Office Word in a package deal for like ninety nine bucks. I can see why notepad might be deemed unimportant by Microsoft with both a commercial alternative to push and a more powerful editor also built in. (Assuming write.exe is still in W11, last I used was 7 I think.)

Those applications are absolutely not suitable for text editing because they have a tendency to mangle the text encoding and other CR/LF characters.

(I generally don't think it's too odd for an OS to ship with a text editor of some kind. I don't use notepad much but there are a few times that it's been a life saver.)

So Notepad is not core OS functionality because you can buy Word for only $99 to edit your config files? Am I getting this right?

You edit config files in Windows? Registry is all the rage there, unless you use tools made to be cross-platform (which, for devs, is obviously a lot, but I can see an argument that notepad isn't that important to the OS).

Of course, it would be nice if every program ever were nearly perfect upon release, but that isn't necessarily a realistic expectation in every scenario. If it can be updated via the Store (which is the case with Notepad and many other utilities), it doesn't have to be tied to the OS release cadence. In this aspect, modern Windows is more like rolling-release desktop Linux distros than macOS.

It's not crazy. We don't live in age of physical distribution.

When fix or feature is ready, it's moment to distribute it.

It's way better than Apple style feature hoarding to pad yearly OS release changelog with application fluff.

Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years and for most common tasks it would make no difference if work would be done on Windows, macOS or some Linux distribution. Perhaps the preexisting familiarity with a particular OS would be the only factor determining how comfortably user get the job done. But it can be done anywhere.

Emoji or gif support in desktop OS, sidebars or notification centers, all sorts of content or tasks suggestions, virtual assistants that are limited to only few languages, countless GUI changes or application redesigns that makes no sense or make the workflow worse. All of this is often presented as some breakthrough "experiences" that are about to fundamentally change user life - forever. And for quite some time I'm having a feeling that all of this is being done only to provide an illusion that someone does something, so the all decision-making people, CEOs would be satisfied that a product was improved. Maybe there are people who are impressed with such things or expect that these should be here but I'm definitely not.

> Emoji support in desktop OS

Are you suggesting that a desktop OS shouldn’t support an input method for standardized Unicode characters? That would be incredibly annoying. Especially if you’re a developer working on programs that are supposed to handle said characters.

> Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years

(Good) UI scaling support? Dynamic refresh-rate support? eGPU support? Thunderbolt? Support for modern biometric authenticators like Windows Hello? Support for booting off a portable volume? Handwriting recognition in arbitrary apps? Basically 80% of accessibility features being finally pushed down into older software (with “dark mode” as a side effect)?

Yes, none of these things are from Windows 11, but none of them are more than 10 years old, either. People forget how many extremely recent OS features have immediately become table stakes to be taken completely for granted. (And this process is continuous. I’m sure there’s some accessibility feature being added to computers only today, that will enable people who never were able to use computers before to do so.)

Try using a modern Bluetooth gamepad with Windows XP / OSX10.6 / Linux 2.6 / other “perfect” OS versions some time. Even if you can get it to connect, it won’t even recognize all the buttons, because old APIs had hard limits on assumed number of buttons!

The key term is “inbox apps.” Notepad is now one of them. An inbox app is a Microsoft Store app that happens to be pre-installed (it ships “in-box.”)

As such, Notepad, like other inbox apps, is now decoupled from the release cycle of Windows. It’s just some arbitrary app, that happens to be made by Microsoft, and happens to come with Windows.

What happened to UI customizablity since windows 7/8?

Windows XP use to have software to make shell look like anything. Only ever felt the need for skinning since windows 8 to go back to old UI which has clear borders and boundaries for everything including windows, buttons, menu bars, menus taskbar buttons...and lots of other things.

Is it harder to skin now? Why there aren't any software to give windows its classic look back?

Designers happened.

To be precise, authoritarian designers who must feel some sort of pleasure in forcing everyone to conform to their ideas. There were certainly designers involved in Windows UI since the beginning, but their purpose seemed to be more of deciding on good defaults (and allowing those who didn't like them for whatever reason to change things like fonts, sizes, colours, etc.)

I recall some of the marketing wankery around Windows 11 advertised it as being the "most diverse and inclusive". Maybe the designers were.

Stardock Curtains can do some light skinning of Windows:

https://www.stardock.com/products/curtains/

From the Linux side of the fence;

Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial? Why encourage or tolerate an operating system (slash ecosystem of apps) with such a limited view of choice? Announcements like this really lay bare the collective dumbing down that these centralized ecosystems encourage.

Someone's going to respond with "people don't like thinking about choices for things and just want simplicity," and I will point you to an American grocery store to remind you what utter BS that is. This is monopoly(ish) leveraging, perhaps not at its most harmful, but it's really silly.

I strongly encourage you to occasionally view the world through more than one lens.

No matter what the OS, the default editor is important. Changes to the default editor that address long standing demands by the community are important. Communicating those changes to a wide audience is important as well. (And the Linux side of the fence could stand to learn a bit about communicating with the wider community)

And that's why that article exists - because a tool used by a large user population just got significantly better. And that user population is mostly happy about the improvement. If you're not the audience, skipping it is an option.

Oh please.

So what I'm hearing is, there are changes in software that a lot of people wanted for a long time, but weren't allowed to have for some reason?

If only there were a model of software creation that let you fix that?

What you're hearing is clearly what you want to hear, and nothing else.

How many people use Microsoft windows 10? Latest: 1.3 Billion

https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsdevices

That, along with the tendency towards Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's law of triviality, means a lot of people care.

Android has a comparable number of users, but I think we should compare desktop PC systems here and in this case, Linux users have much lower expectations of Linux Desktop along with not being nearly as many users.

What I'm suggesting is that insiders in IT are perhaps overestimating how much people care, as part of the general argument that Microsoft and Apple often dumb down the whole computer experience for everyone.

Specifically: Okay, bikeshedding. Bikeshedding is what it is for individuals and their own environments; I do it, sometimes it's a waste of time, sometimes not.

But this feels like bikeshedding on behalf of others, which is WEIRD for a tool like this. If you're an insider, than you probably have moved beyond, way beyond "Notepad for everything." If you're a non-techie, you likely don't use notepad at all, and if you do, not extensively in a way that makes this update interesting.

If you're in the middle (first, who is this even?) old Notepad or new Notepad is still probably something transitory.

The broad version of this is: IT generally does far too much in terms of trying to think about and creating dumb, unmodifiable and heavy handed entrenched interface designs for people who are not themselves.

When you buy a car are you concerned that it came with manufacturer monopoly provided radio, GPS, seats, tires and a jack? I mean you can go out and get third party versions of all of these things with improved functionality so why should they even include basic versions?

Now how many people actually replace the radio in their car? Or the rims? Or the seats? A vast percentage of owners are very happy with the included version as they don't desire / require anything beyond that. It's not a monopoly, it's just including the basic features most users will be content with.

Now if they forced you to keep Notepad associated with TXT files then we'd have an issue. (I'm looking at you Edge)

(adding a note to address in comments likely coming about how media systems aren't easily replacable in cars anymore but I'm a child of the DIN radio era)

If I could literally change any of those things in my FOR FREE, INSTANTLY, AT NO MARGINAL COST, AT THE PRESS OF A BUTTON, WITH EASY UNDO then yes I would.

I would also be happy to always help out other people and share my changes with my friends.

And I do this when I can. Guess why I can't, now.

Come ON people.

The more you configure stuff, the less it interoperates. That's my experience. Defaults for life.

I'm sorry you're bad at interoperating things? Works fine for me.

Apology accepted. But for what it's worth, I definitely wasn't blaming you.

Not disagreeing with you (often have to preface internet comments with that :) but instead discussing. The grocery store example is quite revealing. Yes, you can point to the American grocery store, but what has been well studied there is that presenting people with choices creates its own form of stress. I certainly feel the stress of going to Whole Foods and wanting cocoa powder and seeing what seems like a thousand variations, versus going to Trader Joe's where there's almost always one brand per item (and often it's the Trader Joe's brand). Whole Foods can be good if there's some niche thing I want, but Trader Joe's is quite relaxing to just have a shopping list and pick up stuff not worrying about comparing each item to a whole bunch of other ones. I believe this was also part of the thinking behind most stores introducing house brands over the last several decades.

Anyhow, this is not some huge announcement. I'm assuming it got voted up in hacker news because there's a humorous element to the whole thing, notepad being one of the more glacially-iterated-but-still-around software systems in existence.

One quote I've kept around for years is:

"But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them." -- [which I didn't keep a source for, and searched back to http://www.garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html "The Command Line in 2004" but that looks like a more modern post about an earlier Neal Stephenson article]

> "Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial?"

It's a blog post on the "Insiders" blog[1], they seem to appear weekly. Why comment on this at all "from the Linux side" in one breath advocating freedom of choice, in the next breath condemning everyone who doesn't value what you value, or who does things differently to you?

Which is it, freedom of choice, or mandatory complexity? Freedom of opinion, or "that is trivial and I am correct"?

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/tag/windows-inside...

You're completely missing the point. I'm not saying that "It's bad for Microsoft to promote a new type of interface that they're trying to get out there."

I'm saying it's ridiculous that Microsoft gets so much "air-time" over it and that professional IT people are paying attention as if this were something special, when it's not particularly difficult to do a really good interface that the user can dig in and modify if they choose.

I'm reminded of the "addition" of Dark Modes to things, as if flippin' Windows 95 didn't let you change your theme way way way back when.

I assume it will be at least as slow to load as the redesigned Calculator, and bug me to rate it Microsoft Store every now and then.

Yeah, the changes seem ok otherwise, but based on every other application Microsoft has updated with a new look & feel I'd have to agree: it'll take longer to launch, use more resources, and have worse input response times.

Out of curiosity I just opened up the new Calculator. It took around 150ms to load (at a guess, it was pretty much instant).

How slow is it on your machine?? I've also not had it ask me to rate it on the store. I don't think it even exists on the store.

Since you guessed it instead of somehow measured it (i think you'd need a very high framerate camera to measure the time between click and app appearing to do that) perhaps it isn't that it is fast but you're just not sensitive to such small delays?

Possibly. Maybe I remember the 'good old days' too fondly: where opening any kind of application would take upwards of 5 seconds and often into the minutes for something large like Word :)

For me anything that loads before I even have the time to think about the fact that it's loading would not be considered 'slow'.

It opens much faster the second time of the day, but the first time is always over a few seconds. I'm probably including the slow feeling the Start menu obtained a few versions ago, I don't use it enough to pin it to the taskbar.

The rating thing was real at some point, they might have removed it by now.

My point is, important things are getting noticeably slower for almost zero gain, even though the machines have gotten WAY faster. Something is not right.

A friend complained about making mistakes on their mobile calculator nowadays because it has significant input lag since an update. Needs a third party calculator app now... I was happy that I could recommend Simple Mobile Tools' calculator, open source donationware and does only what it should. I only know of it because my phone didn't come with a calculator at all, which I found weird too. I use a bunch of their apps actually and they're all great, so this was an easy choice. Not sure what the equivalent for Windows would be, I never saw anyone use an alternative calculator -- unless Google counts but that's not because of problems with calc.exe.

> Simple Mobile Tools

For anyone who hasn't seen these, I recommend them as well. The default calculator works fine for me, but "Simple File Manager" and "Simple Gallery Pro" are fantastic apps that strip out the typical cruft of these tools, and unlike some alternatives (looking at you, Amaze), have no tracking scripts or nag screens.

https://simplemobiletools.com/

The calculator app opens instantly for me. Maybe something funky is going on?

That 'redesigned find and replace experience' covers the text in the same way the old notepad did, but the old notepad you could move the window.

I could have sworn it would have supported dark mode too. Was the old notepad using WHITE instead of the system window background color all that time?

I just hope the new version is fast and not like Paint 3D which sometimes spends multiple seconds "creating a new project" when opening a simple PNG on a 5950X.

"with a lot of effort, Microsoft succeeded in adding undo"

not 1987

If they replace the current high performance codebase inherited from the previous system with a much slower UI people will complain. Not to mention changes in bugs and behavior.

heh that is true. Even though I suspect notepad.exe to be so naive there's no performance, it's just a visual mmap

I understand it's reasonable to be cynical about Windows, but is it really appropriate here[1] when the changes of note are support for dark mode and multiple undo steps? At least wait for someone to find an actual problem.

[1] When I post this, the only other comments are complaints. The ones that are at least complaining about notepad are complaining that MS had the gall to change notepad without pointing to anything specific.

Multiple undo steps is noteworthy. I have definitely lost text when I forgot Notepad’s undo limitation.

I like the feature additions but dislike that there's no visual division between the menu bar and the title bar you can click and drag to manipulate the window. Windows 10 and 11 often make me feel as if I have some disorder of the nervous system as I'm forever clicking just to the side of the interface element I want to use.

Also, Windows 10 removed the window borders so now you have to resize windows by grabbing their shadow. Years later I still regularly misclick.

One of the things I've been rolling around in my mind for a while now is what would a "what's old is new again" reversion to the non-flat/minimalist style look like if done now.

One of the things that strikes me with 4k displays is that there's a lot more pixels to throw around at elaborate designs, along with the skeuomorphic/physical representation of interactivity. I'm thinking back to the winxp era uxstyles skins that while they demonstrated Sturgeon's law, also had a wide range of art and ways to make it approachable for people.

In the case of windows, changing UI approach again would add another layer of strata with inconsistency, but right now MS's approach comes across as resume led design with a new version of windows to launch with their stamp on it

It's probably only a matter of time.

I had a similar thought when I saw Mercedes new infotainment UI [0] -- the dark blue with heavy use of gradients is very reminiscent of vista-era design to my eyes.

[0] https://mediacloud.carbuyer.co.uk/image/private/s--av_nNtkN-...

I know there's a lot of different people with different priorities, but people (as a generalization) are complaining about things still being outdated and not supporting dark mode in Windows 11 while simultaneously (although probably a different set of people) are apparently appalled that Microsoft would dare update a legacy application.

Personally I think the best thing Windows 11 has going for it to stand out from more than just being a nicer coat of paint on Windows 10 is removing as much legacy things as possible and update to "modern" standards given they've already put a hard line in the sand regarding modern CPU compatibility.

I think we're all a little nervous after various Edge and Windows updates have either introduced adverts to the UI or even buy-now-pay-later predatory lending. These updates look promising, but MS really should pay attention to the sentiment they're creating around "feature updates" recently.

> support for dark mode

You mean, a severely bastardized version of functionality that Windows had back in version 3.0?

http://toastytech.com/guis/win30color.png

Notepad had a dark mode (and light mode, and grey mode, and "eye-searing yellow with purple font" mode, if you want) as recently as Windows 7 with the system-wide theme settings, so it's understandable to be sceptical when they bring the dark mode as some sort of a triumph when it's a regression.

If you looked at the code for the old XP Notepad, it was the Windows standard text entry control resized to full screen.

Outside of Ctrl+Backspace not working inside Notepad until recently (Windows 10 I believe), I see no problem with that.

Pedantic: does anyone find the existence of the gear icon very odd (out of place)?

windows 10 + 11 is such a mess.

It's just a pretty skin on top of the same Windows NT Window chrome. The modern UI skin is baked in with a bunch of none-sensical UX decisions.

I also hate how Windows' happy-path setup, does not encourage use to create and operate with a low privileged local account. Instead, if you click through the setup process, you end up running the OS w/ an admin level account.

Isn't that how most operating systems are? macOS and most Linux distros direct the user to creating and living in an "Administrator" account, but require confirmation from the user (or extra steps) whenever invoking the privileges that comes with.

That is true on macos. I'm being prompted for any consequential actions.

In Windows 10 + 11, that prompt does not exist, if you are signed in with the admin account.

Windows absolutely does unless you turn User Account Control off. This has been part of the operating system since Vista.

There isn't any point in having a low-privilege account; all the important data is owned by the user, and system-level protection is gated behind UAC.

Instead they're trying to point people to sandboxed Windows Store apps, which is .. not going well.

It's interesting how a multibillion company can make a simple editor a little worse, while a single guy with a few contributors can make something so useful (Notepad++).

Of course it's important with backwards compatibility but.. is it worth the cost?

I use Notepad almost daily to "strip" formatting before pasting content. I hope they don't ever change that ability.

You might be interested in Pure Text. It’s in the Windows App Store and let’s you do the same using a shortcut key.

If you are pasting in a browser try Ctrl+Shift+V to remove formatting.

Ctrl+Shift+V does this as well in many programs.

Thanks! I'll try it out.

I wish paste as unformatted was just the default.

What I want to know is if they'll start sending what I type into Notepad as "telemetry".

I hope they put in some way to search Bing using Edge, with no way to change the search provider or browser I use.

The Windows 10 version of Notepad already has a Search with Bing feature in the edit menu with keyboard shortcut Control-E. However, it does respect the default browser choice.

It bugs me that the toolbar now takes up more vertical space than before. Not only does the padding just look funny, but vertical space is a premium in widescreen layouts! C'mon Microsoft!

Here's a few features I'd like to see for Notepad which I don't think would compromise its performance or minimalist design:

  - multi-cursor support
  - tab to indent selection
  - encoding selection
  - fully controllable with hotkeys
  - [optional] line numbers
  - [optional] visible whitespace characters
  - [optional] column ruler
  - [optional] spaces instead of tabs
  - [optional] unix-style line breaks

They should just open source the consumer level userland apps and outsource the dev work to third party contributors. It would save quite a bit of money.

I don't really see the selling point of upgrading to Windows 11 - what does it get me, a moderate power user who is moderately set in his ways

I consider myself moderate power user and I'm not going to upgrade until there's a native way of restoring the taskbar to what it used to be on the previous releases. And by that I mean left aligned tabs with text labels. It used to be that way for about 30 years and I can't stand the grouping icons (both the grouping and the icons).

Nothing. Windows has not fundamentally improved since Windows 7 for productivity. I use 10 but 7 was great. Well, Win 10’s virtual desktops are actually awesome.

I see zero benefit in 11. It breaks my workflow without additional apps. I have my taskbar with countless windows on the right side of my screens. This is not supported under Win 11 without 3rd party tools. All of power user tools are ever further obfuscated.

This is nice. I run dark mode everywhere and I used to use notepad for quick notes and stuff. Problem is that notepad is a giant wide window so it would burn my eyes out when opened, so I had to switch to something else. Now I can use it for that purpose again... Providing I move to Win11 that is. Still not a fan of the task bar lacking features I use a lot.

> including rounded corners

I have no idea how I got on all these years with square corners in my text editor.

Seriously Microsoft must be openly mocking users. I recently had an issue with Microsoft Edge reverting all my privacy settings. They are full on hostile at this point. If you sign into the Windows store then suddenly they revert your privacy settings even if you set it to disable sync.

I moved from Windows to Xubuntu recently, and the single thing that I miss most is this feeling of simple sturdy low latency applications that Windows once provided. Notepad, Paint, the whole Windows pre-Vista aesthetic. It was even present in IE6 - every website felt as a heavy paper form in it. Now everything went to Chrome-like weightless fragility. Microsoft should've fixed all the WPF issues (including blurry rendering, stupid lack of margins by default etc.) 12 years ago and made it ready for the cross-platform evolution of dotnet. That would've solidified their desktop presence for a decade at least. Now they are just putting more and more nails into the coffin.

Did they extend this popular feature?

  Edit -> Search with Bing... (Ctrl-E)

This is underwhelming. Textarea in any web application has more features, such as spellcheck, and now in Edge, even grammar check!

Multilevel undo/redo should have been delivered at least 20 years ago.

How about the ability to handle files with Mac or Linux style linebreaks? Wordpad can handle it but not Notepad.

How about showing recent files in File menu?

Really what Microsoft ought to do is to ship VSCode as the new text editor for Windows (after removing all coding features that might confuse end users). Retain the old Notepad for people who use it in established workflows, no point in updating it at this point because it is hopelessly obsolete.

It seems to me that the new OS arms race is about tooling, not just base UX, and Windows is starting to play catch up. The modern Mac OS and Linux desktop environments don't just match up to Windows, but surpass it in many respects.

I wouldn't be surprised to see many "new" functionalities being introduced to Windows tools in the near future, with the catch that you will lose out on performance for a multitude of reasons: like trying too hard on aesthetics, trying to emulate the tooling of entirely different systems, or maintaining backwards compatibility.

> modern Mac OS and Linux desktop environments don't just match up to Windows, but surpass it in many respects.

What are these "toolings" that are missing in Windows? I have found the opposite to be true. On Macos I need an app to properly snap windows, another app to make my mouse scroll properly, another app to have per-app volume control, another app to do poorly substitute paint.exe. Windows has all that and more, built-in.

Notepad is a decent editor, lacking only a good operating system to run on.

Was a decent editor.

I would love for Windows to ship with a command line text editor so that I could be guaranteed to have something when using a remote command line. The moral equivalent of knowing vi will be on any Linux system from a server to doorbell. Maybe I'll learn about one from the HN crowd. I've tried my old DOS go-tos (e.g. edit), but they're no longer around.

Sometimes I just copy and paste file contents to local, edit, and write it to out with command line utilities or powershell.

Indeed. And not only that, but for it to work remotely, via for example PSSession.

I thought the reason for putting apps into windows store was to make them easily upgradable across versions of windows.

It is here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-notepad/9msmlrh6lz... so where did that go and why it is not updated on Windows 10? Why is this exclusive to crappy windows 11?

30 years on and now we have rounded corners.

> also adding support for multi-level undo

To think that this feature is "new"...

I know notepad is supposed to be as simple as possible, a very fast default and always available text editor. But single undo is for me the single reason I always install notepad++ if I plan to use the computer in the future, or use Wordpad if not.

Ever since I started using a macbook for work, I have searched far and wide for a notepad.exe replacement and every single app has come up short. Let's hope this revamped version retains the snappiness, simplicity that made the original great, unlike calc.exe's replacement.

Notepad has been an annoyance for decades. Before I clicked the link I thought there might be enhanced features and reworked usability. Unfortunately the new features fall short. The one they seem proudest of is a dark mode.

When I saw this, I was really scared that they'd ruined Notepad by adding features. But fortunately it looks like this update is acceptable. I am still worried they won't have the sense to stop, though

Does this mean Microsoft have re-written Notepad to use something like Electron?

As the original Notepad was written in Win32 app, doesn't that also signed the death sentence for Win32 on Windows?

It still doesn't have half of Kate's (Plasma's default editor) functionalities. The only addition seems to be the dark mode, which is very opinionated and unchangeable

It's controversial, for quick/temp notes Notepad works perfectly. In my opinion it does not need to have a lot of features.

Well that’s the one decent remaining bit of windows fucked up.

What about this updates fucks it up?

It's 2028.

You're done writing a text file and go to save.

It's not there. Where's the save button? Oh, there has been another automatic update. You wonder what you have to do this time. You press Ctrl+S.

The screen locks.

"Microsoft Account is signed out"

Sigh. You enter your password.

"Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is Great!'"

Sigh. "Microsoft Edge is Great!"

A Sarcasm Error Has Occurred. Please Say It With Conviction!

"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAt!"

An acceptable performance! Please rate Notepad in the Microsoft Store to continue!

"1 star"

Why do you hate excellent products? Don't you want a fresh and modern editor? Hypothesis: Did you mean 5 stars? Please don't press the second yes option if you don't not mean this isn't your choice: No, Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes.

Uuh... Third Yes.

Great! Your rating has been corrected to 5 stars! Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is The Greatest And I will Name My Children Microsoft And Edge!'

"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAtEst And I Will NaMe my ChIlDrEn MiCroSofT AnD EdgE!"

Processing accounts and personal information. Security Alert! Inferior non-microsoft software detected on computer! Do you wish to replace them all with modern microsoft products? [ Yes ] [ Options ]

Options

* [x] Don't Replace The Other Software

* [_] Reverse The Above Option

* [x] Really Keep Other Software

* [x] I'm a cheating bastard

* [x] I'm aware Hitler didn't use Microsoft Edge either

* Security Options *

* [x] Remove browsers not developed by Microsoft

It sounds like you’ve tried to save a file in Microsoft word recently!

This must be inspired by “we see you have Acrobat DC installed so we upgraded your experience to open PDFs in Microsoft Edge”.

This thing is responsible for a lot of helpdesk tickets.

Yep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29478878

Well shit that’s even more horrible than I had dreamed about.

" are also adding support for multi-level undo"

Wow, how advanced. For those of you who did not know, Notepad allowed exactly ONE undo step. ONE! In a frickin text editor.

Could it be rewritten in Electron? Out of bazillion words they could have chosen they used "electron" to show a find and replace feature.

It's UWP. Perhaps it's a joke, i.e "we don't need no stinkin electron like those kids on the VSCode team".

Or their sample text was about chemistry and electron appeared in it.

can you choose line endings as LF not CRLF in Notepad?

That would be a great win for improving linux compatibility!

You can already do that in Win10 today.

I wish they would just notify us when this Windows 10X v.2 cadaver will reach feature parity with Windows 10.

Bummer, they didn't add tabs :(

Binary Fortress’s Notepad Replacer no longer works in Win11 to set Notepad++

Microsoft has not added any functionality to their operating system or applications since 1998–only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors. I can’t think of one thing I can do in the Microsoft Office suite I couldn’t do 20 years ago. It’s just slower.

There is a chance that your use case is basic and hasn’t changed in 20 years, but I think there is a higher chance of it’s a case of general hatred for Microsoft.

> only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors.

Do people not see what their feelings towards Microsoft turns them into?

Why hate? I don't hate, Microsoft or Office, or anything like that. Those are choices, things. You can't hate things. I agree with this OP that office had all the functionality almost everyone needed twenty years ago. Most of the changes to office have been cosmetic and frustrating to established users. Perhaps their could have been add ons - like in browsers, for more functionality that certain users need, without messing with established work flows and ease of use, which are also important.

List one feature from Word that didn’t exist in 2003 that you depend on.

I don’t use Word at all, there are many other pieces of software in the Office suite, many which simply did not exist 20 years ago. If you think nothing has changed then it is very likely you don’t need Office.

Word’s modern Equation Editor.

Fair enough, I do like Latex input.

Collaborative editing?

What have the Romans given us?

Wasn't collaborative editing provided by other platforms before Office?

But GGP comment was about what Microsoft added to Office in these 20 years? Why would other platforms matter?

> Microsoft has not added any functionality to their operating system or applications since 1998

This is simply absolute nonsense. Are you really contending that no real functionality has been added to Windows since Windows NT? I know HN loves to hate Microsoft but are we really upvoting this crap?

He’s wrong about the OS, but it’s not far from the truth with Office.

> We know how important Notepad is to so many of your daily workflows…

Perhaps the single funniest line ever penned by Microsoft.

Cannot imagine any “Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel” who use, let alone rely on, Notepad for any serious work.

EDIT: I stand corrected - mea culpa!

I use it for taking quick notes fairly regularly - it's just a blank text input window and it opens immediately.

I use it all the time as a temporary scratchpad or clipboard. It opens very quickly, it doesn’t have anything else other than a text area. Not sure what else should I use :) VSC? Opens too slow. Sticky notes? Not sure, slow and too complex for the task. Also it’s an advantage that it doesn’t save the state anywhere so I can just force quit and everything disappears.

I am missing Paint and Notepad on MacOS when I just need something that opens in a millisecond and I can paste in something temporarily.

notepad++ is a far superior product imo. so many useful features out of the box, and has plugins also.

* search in all opened docs * find/replace with regex * tabs to space * line operations etc

Very useful, and for my workflows on Windows, indispensible (even alongside wsl or powershell)

I use notepad++, but it nags me for updates more often than I would like. If I only need a quick dirty note, notepad is still better.

lol almost EVERY FREAKING DAY.

I still love it as a tool though.

There is a setting to turn that off.

Tie any text editor to a hotkey.

Most devs I've met use it, it's an excellent tool for getting rid of formatting or just having an instant window open where you can temporarily store some plaintext.

Let me blow your mind: you can use CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste text without formatting.

My mind isn't blown, this doesn't seem to work properly across all applications.

I just tested it now pasting some text from a website into Slack and it retained hyperlinks (I don't mean plaintext https:// ones, but <a href='..> ones) and all that junk. When you cleanse it through notepad you have a guarantee that none of that is left.

I thought the Ctrl+Shit+V paste trick worked in Outlook, but I'll be damned if I could make it work today...

Redesigned search/replace? OK, I want regex support.

can't wait for the next version which will have an annual subscription cost (or ads)

just like solitaire: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs...

…and telemetry!

If it doesn't collect "telemetry" about every keystroke, mouse movement, and cough, I don't want it.

Does it have freaking linewrap?

Word Wrap has been in Notepad for some time, in the Format menu.

It has been there since atleast windows 95.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/vCJF5UW.png

Gosh… that has always annoyed me :)

Tech-debt-shockwave incomming!

They are really into breaking things that didn't need fixing over the past year or so.

marginally less suck-ish.

why this late?

when was windows 11 released?

why do they act a small indie company working on a week-end school project?

this is so fishy..

Nothing fishy about it, its proper Quality Assurance using the initial release of Windows 11 as an MVP.

If they’d build preview versions of all tools that Windows (11) contains, then release a new Windows 11 preview build any time a tool receives updates (after community feedback) and ask for more community feedback on all of these releases (probably talking a new Windows 11 version every single day) and release Windows only when all the tools and their changes have been deemed worthy/bug-free it will be 2029.

There is something pathologically dysfunctional about a trillion-dollar organization that thinks a few imperceptible improvements to decades-old programs that individual programmers have created far superior versions of for free are worth announcing like it’s a marvel of engineering. We saw the same thing with Windows Terminal—they even made a trailer for it.

Like, these are the kinds of updates that would take one person a weekend to accomplish. Nor would that individual think to brag about implementing rounded corners. But the bureaucracy inside Microsoft is so sclerotic and hostile to excellence that even these changes require heroic allocations of effort.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way is that they have a marketing problem: everyone knows that Windows has ignored the basics for decades in favor of all kinds of random crap like rewriting their web browser 3 or 4 times, putting adverts in the start menu and so on. But the foundational stuff an operating system is expected to do, like open text files or provide a calculator or a working terminal app, has been rotting away unloved and unowned.

So now they're finally (!) fixing some of these issues. They have a terminal that isn't a total embarrassment now. OK it's slow but at least the features are there. They are upgrade Notepad. They upgraded the Calculator. These projects are revealing weaknesses in their new round of Windows APIs but fine, whatever, at least they're dogfooding stuff now and it's not like the original Windows APIs smelled of roses either.

As a result, yes, they seem to be making a big deal about stupidly small stuff. But, whatever. I can forgive them for that. They all do it: GNOME makes fancy marketing material for changing icon themes or adding a dark mode to their settings app or whatever, Apple promote lots of trivial stuff as well. It's still better than the status quo of Windows development for the last 20 years.

I was a little surprised to learn that my four-year-old processor (i7-7700) was locked out of running windows 11. It's certainly not processor speed issue, it's still plenty fast for games today. It's not TPM either, which it supports. The best I can tell, Microsoft drew a line and said "too bad," for everything before a certain generation.

I really only play games on my computer--I have no idea when I'll upgrade the CPU. The last one lasted nearly a decade before I replaced it. I guess it'll be a while before I see Windows 11. I'm not too mad though--Windows 10 is a fine Operating System.

Maybe it has something to do with Meltdown/Spectre mitigations.

You can still install windows 11 straight from an image and it’ll ignore the processor and TPM requirements - they’re considered ‘soft’ requirements even if Microsoft doesn’t say so outright. I currently have it running on my desktop with an i7-6700k and my laptop as well with an even older i7 and TPM 1.2.

You’re absolutely correct in that they ‘drew a line’. They have a specific set of guidelines[0,1] they want CPUs to meet going forward, and it’s more of a matter of ceremony and certification rather than anything concrete nor technical.

0. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...

You also can install it by putting the win11 payload onto a win10 install USB stick. Just don't let it have access to the net while it installs or it'll "download install updates" that stop it from continuing. This is how I installed it on my machine that doesn't support TPM.

I wonder if this is because there is a lot of old legacy code in the codebase, specifically for these older processors, they want to remove?

I can see the logic in wanting to make the Windows codebase smaller/leaner/etc by wanting to get rid of the legacy stuff.

It works on my older CPU (i7-4790K) - I only tried in a VM, however.

I would guess it's TPM based on what I have read, even though you say it is not. It's weird the ark page[0] doesn't specify it.

[0]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97128/i...

"Productivity, performance, and reliability are paramount in Notepad. Regardless of how you incorporate Notepad into your workflows, we will ensure that Notepad continues to excel in those areas."

Is this from Microsoft? Is this real?

I don't know why you are being downvoted. I used to use Notepad years ago as it's practically guaranteed to exist on every Windows machine. I can't say much about productivity, but performance was abysmal for larger files. As for reliability, the main reason I never use Notepad now, even for most trivial things, is that Notepad++ will always bring my session back, with all open tabs, regardless of whether I saved the file or not. It doesn't matter if my battery died or Windows decided it's now time to restart the system after updating - Notepad++ will keep my work safe and Notepad will not. So speaking about reliability is probably a bigger joke than productivity.

They could say "We always wanted to keep the tool light, fast to start and reasonably efficient for small files, and we have managed to do that" - and this would be OK. There is no need to serve bullshit to a technical community.

I'm sure the editor is fine for a basic editor that comes with the desktop environment, it looks functional enough, but the language in that article is just weird to me. It reads like some kind of prank.

It's a "you probably never worked in a corporation" type of thing. Someone is trained to write things like this, and it's impossible for that person to do it differently, plus no one is in a position/capacity/incentive to affect that.

Hacker News: Windows is terrible because the user interface is inconsistent

Microsoft: Okay, we've made a small visual refresh of Notepad so that it's more visually consistent with Windows 11

Hacker News: Stop breaking my childhood!

There's literally only one poster complaining about the new notepad UI (a brand new account).

It's as much of a meme to see the top post on an HN story is "OMG why are all the top posts such toxic whiners" and scroll down to not see any.

also for some reason, people really like to complain about HN as though it's a monolith even though a tiny percentage ever comment, let alone complain.

Also it's possible that two separate complainers have different things to complain about!

Preemptively calling complainers complainers helps quell complaints from fence sitters. It's PR.

Or maybe when I posted this initially there were 5 comments, all but one having a moan about the UI.

Nope, must be paid shills.

Whether or not you're paid PR, the act of preemptively complaining about complainers is PR.

As previously noted, 80% of the comments were negative when I posted it. I was reacting to the 'I hate change brigade' that got in early.

I mean, I don't even use Windows or any Microsoft devices. MacOS is vastly superior to Windows and Bill Gates sexually harassed women in the 90s (not that it factored into my operating system choice).

Real PR machine over here.

No, you're right, I shouldn't have suggested that. My apologies.

As if Hacker News is a single homogeneous unit

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