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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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Better notepad then controlpanel ;)

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