Notepad++ v8.4.3: Unhappy Users' Edition
notepad-plus-plus.org
notepad-plus-plus.org
Yeah yeah yeah, the cookies you made for me again last week are OK but honestly I'm sick of them. You're not getting any praise from me. Sorry dude.
I've been eating your home-made cookies for years and still can't figure out why you make them so dry. It's complete BS. All I want is a little moisture in the middle of my cookies. I do NOT understand why you have them crunchy. It makes no sense.
I have had it, and will move on from trying to understand your thinking. Your cookies used to be nice, but now they're a massive piece of garbage, maybe you should check out the cookies in a supermarket.
- Your neighbour
You simply needed to fill out the 12 page cookie preference form in the foyer and I would have made the cookies to your specification. I apologise for the misunderstanding, we do things differently back home in Europe.
- Yours lovingly, El Monstruo de las Galletas.
You have to store the biscuits separate from your crisps, in an on-premise flat; otherwise, the GDPR bobbies will be right on your full-stack bollocks in a lorry right soon. Good on ya!
Edit: I realize most folks won't get that, so https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_biscuit
The bread you gave me the other day is pumpernickel. I like pretzel bread. I don't understand, what were you thinking?
I have had it with you and your weak bread magic.
- Sermon attendee
---------------------------
I'm pretty sure that Jesus' reply would have been much snarkier than from the Notepad++ maintainer, who probably has a lot more to gain from being snarky in their reply than from trying to cater to this childish user's outburst.
Thanks for all you do and the support you give it, it's appreciated
Thanks for portableapps!
You're welcome!
Given that the sender didn't provide constructive feedback, is seemingly not contributing financially, and can simply choose to not use the application, I don't see why a response in kind shouldn't be given. To me, Don's response was mild.
Yes, they should've opted for a more civilised approach. No, it doesn't discard the issue that they (and possibly others) are experiencing.
>>>
Hey Don, thanks for all the hard work you've put into Notepad++ over the years. I've never paid you a cent, and yet I've personally made quite a bit of money from using the product.
Despite how obviously useful the product is overall for me, there's a niggle I've got, that I'd love you to solve. Let me know if I can do any hands-on work to help you fix it. I'm probably not good enough to write code, but maybe I could help with testing, writing documentation, or giving you more detail on the issue.
Or maybe I should, you know, give you some cash.
Anyway, the issue I'm having is around using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. This is probably me doing something wrong, but I can't work it out - I've searched on the internet, but can't find a solution. Here are the settings I'm using. [...] Let me know if I can provide more details that would help reproduce the problem.
Thanks again for all that you do to make Notepad++ the great product that it is.
Honestly, this looks like a troll's work. I personally would've ignored him/her because of the adage, "don't feed the trolls"
- Praises the product and the hard work
- Says that it is so useful to them [but it wasn’t for this user, though?]
- Volunteers to help with what they want to solve
- … and yet also chastises themselves for probably not being good enough to contribute the most holy CODE. More praise of the author by putting oneself down?
- Finally gets to the suggestion in the fourth and penultimate paragraph
- Oh silly me, it’s probably a user error on my part
- Praises the product again
You’re either taking the piss or are setting the bar so high that none of the “haters” are gonna feel inclined to send someone a matter-of-fact (not rude, and also not this submissive fanperson, either) constructive feedback.
> I'm having an issue using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. Here are the settings I’m using and a screenshot of the problem.
;)
What would constructive, unfriendly feedback look like?
I'm having an issue using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. Here are the settings I’m using and a screenshot of the problem.
So that is by definition 'unfriendly' - because it does not exude any friendliness.
Just because it is 'unfriendly' does not mean it is 'rude'.
To circle back to the point of the original comment, my point was "constructive" and "friendly" are describing different characteristics, and "rude" does not automatically imply "unconstructive" (and of course "constructive" does not imply "kind" either). That fact is precisely what necessitated your use of the word "friendly" in your own comment. You can see this if you Google too—the top result I get when I Google constructive criticism meaning [1] says constructive criticism is "a feedback method that offers specific, actionable recommendations". That's all it means.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=constructive+criticism+meani...
Maybe his wife just cheated on him, divorced him and took half his money, his kids don't want to have anything to do with him, his bank took his house and he just crashed the car. And he tried to use Notepad++ and the same old issue happened and he snapped and sent that email.
99 out of 100 times he would have send the email you mentioned here but he had a horrible day and vented in the email. Does it make it ok? No. Is it understandable? Yes. Should we discard the feedback because he was frustrated? No.
One's having a bad day does not excuse anti-social behavior. Ever.
In other words: Trying to punish rude users by not fixing the bugs they report is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
In other words: There exists roles and relationships, with attached obligations and expectations, other than those involving money. Free software development is such a relationship, as is this debate.
There are obligations other than money, but none of those exist here. There’s no contractual obligation. He put out something for free and doesn’t need to take an iota of criticism on it by people freeloading. He obviously can, and if he wants certain goals like increasing his user base it might be the smart move to respond to these type of people, but there are no obligations.
That sounds like a social and/or cultural obligation to me.
If the only issue my application ever had was reported in such a rude manner, there might be a case to be made to fix it, even though it was reported in a hostile or rude manner. It might make the application better for people who didn't report the issue. But maybe it is more valuable to just spend that time on something fun or enjoyable like coding on something else or eating cake. There is no reason to waste your free time on rude people, when they have the option to just be nice and save you all the anger.
That’s a value judgement man. Not everyone values turning everything into a productivity improvement over all other values
To be excruciatingly explicit: Bugs (and confusing UI/UX) experienced and reported by rude users also affect many non-rude users. If one wants one’s software to be the best it can be, then one should listen to all bug reports; the attitude of the reporting users are irrelevant.
I agree that he’d be under an ethical obligation to listen to a rude security report. But it doesn’t follow that he must therefore listen to all rude bug reports.
No Jerks cuts many different ways...
Loose analogy, I don't watch videos of retail workers being abused and think, that customer is providing constructive feedback.
"You suck and your software is a piece of crap" is not constructive feedback because there's no details to act on.
"Fuck you the submit button is obscured by the footer" is constructive even if the message has a personal attack.
You might choose not to act on comments due to emotions, but I don't think it invalidates any constructive feedback contained within.
Loose analogy, I don't watch videos with people buying a bike with no breaks, fall and get hurt, then go to the vendor and calmly explain to them that they should modify their bike design so the breaks function and think, that customer is behaving like a human being.
See what I did there? :) My analogy might not be great, I give you that. But frustration is a normal human behavior. Granted I strongly believe you should try to vent a different way and then give clam feedback, you can't discard feedback just because the person giving it is frustrated.
We should be able to distinguish between frustrated good feedback and just abuse. I know I was able to get feedback from very hostile messages. And last time I checked I'm not a robot. So it's as skill you can gain.
But I'm just wondering, is it possible to ignore the form of the message and listen to the content? Looking back the stoics were very good at controlling their own emotions and dealing with insults. Insults would just not get to them, they would bounce right off them. Is this a skill we've lost as a society?
It seems that nowadays we're focusing external, not internal. Instead of developing a thick skin we're focusing on changing the behavior of the people who's insulting us. To me that seems like a pointless endeavor. You can't change someone else behavior if they don't want to cooperate. And without a thick skin, all it takes is one jerk to ruin your day. With thick skin the insults from a jerk bounces off you and your day is still a good day. So, it seems to me that we should focus inwards instead of outwards. Not saying it's easy. Just saying humans were capable of that in the past, nowadays I don't hear anybody talking about it.
I think we should have universal single character symbol for responding to assenine communications (trolling, entitlement, stupidity and such).
I propose
k
Vertical line sybolises the barrier behind which trolling, entitlement and stupidity remains and the rest sybmolises me propping the barrier with my butt while being completely uninterested.
You may see it also as last step of evolution that brought us such responses as Ok and kthxbye.
...You don't have to. You can write mail filters that send stuff like this straight to spam. I even did it at a workplace. Admittedly, that is a bit more hairy but now I atleast understand why passive aggressiveness was invented.
I used to agonize when I'd get feedback like this, rude or not. It is emotionally draining, but I always tried to extract something from it. As mentioned elsewhere, I've reacted poorly in the past and really regret it.
I will point out that this really isn't "in kind." The email response was, but publicly posting it and letting other users know how similar emails will be treated is an escalation.
That's an escalation?
Nobody knows to Tom is so he's all good. Everyone else now knows what the dev puts up with and how they feel about it. Maybe someone knows now that being a jerk over email won't get them what they want?
I don't really see any escalation here.
There are a lot of people here who work in a business setting and are conflating the sorts of behaviors that can be expected in a paid setting with those more appropriate to a gratis effort.
Yes but what else should you do? Just let it bottle up inside you? Why? Because you were dumb enough to release software as open source? Does publishing software as open source mean that you have to stop having any emotions?
Please. If you email me - regardless of content - the expectation is we're having private communication.
These days I take every opportunity to fill it out with ‘FIRE YOUR UX TEAMS’
Well, it feels good in the moment, but crazy people like this always engage, so you get dragged into an argument that drains your emotional reserves for no benefit.
If I don't plan on helping to make it better, I stay quiet.
I think this is quite good rule. The author is working to provide something for free. If you don't plan on helping, do not waste any time -- you are not entitled to it.
I have found that a lot of open source projects really don't want any form of feedback or contribution at all and you sometimes just get abuse for even trying to help. I usually check the history of issues and pull requests to see if there is any chance its worthwhile doing them, more often than not it isn't. Definitely check beforehand how the project usually behaves before applying any effort because the bulk of them are not going to accept anything you might do if you aren't a committer.
I send a few words of encouragement describing how awesome the author's software is, and how it made my life (easier). Most seem to be happy to receive such feedback, some don't care. It hurts no-one either way and only takes a couple of minutes.
Not that the original email was that, necessarily. But in general.
We have such a code-obsessive—and elitist too—view of “contributing”. Oh so you are not gonna learn a new build system, a new programming language, our code guideline, and how to use our pull request checklist? Tsk tsk, then it’s not interesting to us that people with astigmatism can’t read the texts in our popups.
Granted, not all open source developer might be good at interacting with users. But expectations should be very low since volunteer developers only have limited resoures to spend per user. And companies behind open source projects obviously prioritize their paying customers.
Most user won't recognize a (possible) bug. Of those a small percentage will consider mentioning it. Even fewer will actually follow through.
If you find a bug or think that something could really be improved it's fine, and in fact helpful, to give feedback. The key is always the phrasing and tone.
Modal dialogs should be the exception. Windows explorer is doing the same, modal dialog if anything went wrong, including things that happen all the time (losing network connectivity on a network drive, happens basically every time the computer goes to sleep or wifi gets disconnected, and then you have to click click click for every open folder).
— Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...>
┌[ATTENTION!]────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ DISK WIPE INITIATED - PRESS HERE TO CANCEL --> [X] │
│ │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Edit: No box drawings allowed ... :(
For a lot of things you do actually want modals: file open dialog, yes/no dialog and similar so that is styled uniformly across the UI and comes from OS you trust so that the program has access only to the file[s] you explicitly gave access over OS dialog. These are the good modals.
However, modals are designed to take away the focus, interrupt you mid typing and what not. In absolute majority of the cases (and I cannot think of exceptions from the top of my head) you do not want the program to take the focus without explicit user action.
I would probably be ok if it happened very rarely but it happens all the time. I don't know what to replace it with though. We need to convey the user some way that their clicks and keypresses won't do anything because the application is unresponsive but as a user I dislike the dialog window that comes up and goes away after a few seconds.
https://kate-editor.org/2016/09/07/embedded-notifications-fo...
This made me laugh out loud. I guess one of the perks of not needing to sell your product is that you can freely speak your mind (see also: SQLite CoC)
Wait... is your name Tom?
--
EDIT: Yeah, I missed the point myself. I feel dumb. My apologies to the original poster.
Also want to note, do not use a highlighter to censor peoples names and emails, its a little too visible in the second screenshot. Seriously the amount of people doing self-doxing I've seen online that use highlighter to "censor" is astounding. Even when you think its not visible all someone has to do is invert the image colors. Just use a solid non-transparent brush on the thing you want to censor.
If you have a small open source project, absolutely.
In the case of Notepad++ I would say this would be a very fast path to burnout. I don't believe anyone has the mental power to deal with the ammount of assholes out there, you will just crash and burn.
It's important to separate your work from yourself. The user was frustrated by the software, not by you.
Well...
> You have made what used to be a good editor into a massive pile of garbage.
I’d say the person is frustrated by both.
Yes but why should the maintainer be obligated to endure that? Just because it's a _human_ thing to do doesn't mean that it's a correct thing to do.
As someone who works in open source professionally, if I took every email and bug report I got like this to heart, I would have quit software years ago. (Some of my users apparently wish I would.)
Sure, glean some actionable information from it if you want, but if you let every frustrated or angry bug report and email impinge on you emotionally, it will destroy your soul.
So Notepad++ does gets my praise: it does what I want of it: quickly edits text configs and serves as a stick-it board.
One of my favourite editors for years, which I regularly donate to.
But that's entirely my opinion, as much as I dislike it, the author can do whatever he wants as long as it is legal, and I don't think he did anything illegal regarding Notepad++. I owe him nothing, and I have no reason to complain, it is not like the world is lacking text editors anyways.
However, I don't believe in the idea that because you didn't pay, you have no right to complain. The author of Notepad++ makes money out of it through donations, maybe in other ways, I think that how he makes a living. And even if you don't pay, you are making the software popular, which helps him getting more donations. Furthermore, if you are committed to it, switching is not easy, "just use something else" is not a great argument. You have the right to get your voice heard if you don't like the way it is going. What you have no right to is harass the author, but that's not because it is free, that's because you shouldn't harass people, no matter how much you paid.
"oh that is a good idea I will add it to my list of features to add"
Then pretty much never do it and work on whatever he wanted to do.
First, even when we do something for "free" we're usually deriving some value out of it. We enjoy the work. We like the feel of progress, or praise. It's very rarely as altruistic as we want to believe.
Finally, what does this tell users, past, present or future? Are we dealing with people who will take our feedback constructively?
I've been in positions like this and have had this impulse many times but it's not fair to work on something and then demand people kiss your ring for doing so. I've treated users like this and really regret it in retrospect.
The email from the user is more a rant than feedback. Granted some could define literally any response as feedback but to me it doesn't qualify, certainly not as constructive feedback.
If I'm a user who reads this I'm extremely unlikely to ever offer feedback in even the nicest possible tone.
I think the right move is to extract any possible useful feedback from the email and hit delete. Even if you send this email, publicly posting it seems an even less useful move.
When you have users you will have unsatisfied users. When you have unsatisfied users you will have rude users. If you're rude to your users you will eventually have no users.
It is often a thankless job to maintain a product or service like this but we do get pleasure and enjoyment from it. It's hard to get bad or rude feedback but it comes with the territory.
The personal joy is ours to treasure, not something we have to pay users for. Rather, if users want to have commercial grade "smile even though we're being told to go die in a fire for our shitty product" support, then they should pay actual money first. The trips to the psychologist required from that isn't free after all.
Oh I agree. Nobody has to care about this. Trash the email on sight.
This is more about the message being sent to other users. To me this feels very much like one's opinions carry as much weight as they pay for it and if the author doesn't like your feedback you might end up on that next release page.
N=1
In human communication escalating to rude language especially when someone else initiated the rude tone is perfectly normal and I would find the opposite to be wierd. People like that guy in the email are entitled pricks and they should be called out for it.
If it were really "take it or leave it," I'm sorry but that's just not a great attitude. I don't think that's what he was saying.
Notepad++ is a popular project, I bet he already gets plenty of feedback. Most people probably won't hear about this. Of those who do... some will decide to not send anything. Some will be more careful to produce a useful message and avoid this reaction. Reduce signal slightly while slightly improving SNR? It seems like a wash.
After reading this I’d still offer constructive feedback in a kind manner in a heartbeat. If, hypothetically, the author still sent me a rude response then I’d simply never contact them again for anything.
The stakes are super low here.
I have no doubt the author would be very receptive to constructive feedback. But it's hard to listen politely when someone sends a snotty email like that, and belies their own ignorance with questions like "what is a global override anyway???" (Hint: ask that nicely first, because then your other questions might become obvious).
I'm sure author has no shortage of constructive feedback to benefit from. This? This is trash. And that he's turned it into fodder for his own amusement and others, is just one more gift to us all, that yes, he happened to also derive his own pleasure from.
The users email did in fact contain several constructive complaints about the UX, including settings, user defined languages, styles, global overrides. They discussed difficulty in setting background color and highlight effects. They even provided a comparison to a different product (google search) to demonstrate alternative UX.
I think angry user emails can be some of the most enlightening ones with regards to learning about the real UX
Constructive would be something like: "I wanted to do X, so I tried doing Y, I expected Z to happen, but instead got W".
People who fix bugs, or who work in tech support, understand what is needed in a defect report. Most ordinary users don't; they expect the responder to ask them for the specific information they need. Anyone whose done tech support over the phone knows this.
Some bug-reporting forms nowadays require you to answer roughly those questions, which is a good thing.
End-user feedback doesn't have to be an actionable bug report. If a user contacts you to say simply "I don't like it", that's legitimate feedback; something about your product is annoying enough to cause this user to reach out, rather than silently abandoning your product. The snarky "we will refund your purchase price" response isn't going to elicit information about what caused the annoyance, given that everyone knows the vast majority of users don't pay for Notepad++.
This right here is how users tell us our UX sucks. We either listen or we don't, but how we treat our users is very core to how well our products do.
Can you deduce what went wrong from what he wrote?
> Your user feedback isn't going to be coming from the lead developer on a major product or a Comp Sci PhD or a highly talented software designer that can effortlessly (and for free) breakdown problems and suggest efficient and powerful solutions in a long-form report.
He doesn't need to suggest solutions. He just needs to communicate what happened. There is nothing in this mail about what he tried doing with settings - where he clicked and what he expected to happen.
> (and for free)
Goes both ways in this case.
Am I getting a receptive audience?
If you are worried that even reasonable comments or suggestions might receive this sort of response, then, for your own sake, just move on.
Note that this sort of reply is not being put to task publicly, as the person in question has not ben identified.
True, but it is fair to expect that people who have paid nothing and have nothing constructive to add to quietly STFU.
Just upload your code and forget about it, then. Or keep the code to yourself. Because the social side of OSS doesn’t seem to be working for you.
The hard thing to keep in mind when you're a creator of free products like this is that the loud, annoying, insulting users are usually in the minority. The unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of people who use and enjoy the creator's stuff are just quiet about it and never tell the creator directly.
I've settled on a portable version of Notepad++ 8.3.3. after spending months trying everything from sublime to atom. I wish for so many things, none of the editors available today are customizable enough to fit my work flow.
It was my go to for big files but gets slow at 100mb or so.
GVim is king for big files it can open and search anything.
Yes I used my notepad++ refund towards getting gvim.
Sure, the author is free to put any text in the explanatory image. But I'd say his arrogance is going too far...
Variants of the confucianism culture are also developed in Japan and Korea.
So the maintainer may also insulted Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean unintentionally, apart from Chinese (as nationality this time).
* User presses ctrl+p
* Notepad++ searches all parent folders of the current open file until it finds a .git directory, then stops. If no .git file is found abort
* It creates an index of the files contained in the folder with the .git directory recursively (this may take some time when done for the first time but after the 1st time the index will be kept in memory and no time should be needed)
* It displays a box that the user can type parts of the file and moves focus to that box (i.e after the ctrl + p the user can write his query)
* It uses the index to present a list of files that match the user query; the user can navigate the list using the arrow keys
* The user selects a file and can open it in a new tab, optionally he could also replace the current tab or open it in a split pane
There is always time to get mad later.
And while it has nearly zero tech-ness if you will to it (sans the discussion of mobile devices on human relationships), I would recommend it to any who is in tech. Mainly because listening is as important as broadcasting (i.e., speaking, emails, etc.). We need to hear clients, users, managers, etc. It's a quick and easy read.
My only complaint about the book is I hoped for a chapter or two on how to improve your odds to be heard (especially when trying to communicate with someone with average or below listeing skills).
Darn, it is so hard to make me happy.
The sample image of the first feature is Confucianism surrounded by the fart character. The feature highlight only one found entry per line. That is what you get when you search for fart.
I've been writing software professionally for twenty years, and the worst thing that ever happened to the internet, in my mind, was making it essential to people's lives. I suspect if it started out as essential in the 90s, the free software movement would never have happened.
There are so many options!
That's how Android Studio works, for example. Ctrl+f brings up a find-replace subwindow at the top of the screen that works for that one file, but you can also do a "search across entire project" or "search across subdirectories" that comes up in a popup.
I need these options!
I would never send such an email though
And the reply of "I'll refund you your nothing" is just as bad as the first email, but I guess if you don't make money, you're not a professional and don't have to act like it lol. Still comes across as a bad look, even if you're donating your time, you should be receptive to the user experience and a frustrated user is a useful datapoint for a good PM/dev.
So no, even as a professional you're not obliged to handle such users. As others already have pointed out. If you have a problem with a free software (or any free product), but can't provide any value, just do not communicate.
It's the users job to explain the UX and problems with it. This user mentioned what, 5 or 6 different parts of the user experience that suck? And mentioned alternative user experiences that are superior.
I personally think the users email is raw and mean but still an extremely useful insight into the user experience with a lot of actionable stuff. I agree with the user. The programs settings, global overrides, styles, handling of user languages, etc are a nightmare for UX compared to modern products.
A good developer takes this email and empathizes with the UX problems, even if they won't redesign anything. A bad/petty developer gets snarky and mean and insults the user.
Good developers aren't robots either. You get that kind of email, the best course of action is to delete it and move on.
If it's a large enough project you'll get the same feedback sooner or later from other users anyway, and that will be users with whom you can (and want to) communicate with.
For real stuff I use IDE like VS Code and like.
My takeaway here is I am not using enough of its feature set.
Which I already knew. Occasionally I discover a feature that replaces scripts I have been using.
The sense of entitlement some people have, i usually just assume these are 14 year old kids, but who knows.
I miss it everyday on Macos. Every alternative I've tried is inadequate in some respect.
At the bottom of the scrolled page, after reading the entire page.
I want my money back.
If I can’t, it’s politics.