Hacker News Reader

Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

I personally feel like Windows in the past 3-4 years has been slowly unifying to at the very least be more consistent. Part of this was the introduction of Windows Terminal, the rebuild of Notepad, tweaks to Explorer, rebuild of Task Manager coming in 22H2, and the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly rendering Control Panel obsolete.

View on HN

That they have released any version of windows without 100% consistency is itself an abomination. We’re not even talking about a nit, there are literally completely different paradigms within Settings itself as you click around, and that’s just one example of many. Perhaps it’s my Apple-bias, but every time I go to use Windows I just go “wow how could they say yup ship it?!”

extreme backwards compatability is my guess. There is probably some ancient program a business is running somewhere out there which depends on the control panel, or that random button, being there for whatever reason.

Even System Preferences (Settings now?) in macOS is a complete mess.

It’s become more coherent with the rest of the platform and iOS, even if you don’t like the design.

notepad could be built by a smart 12 year old over a weekend

and a terminal is a pretty common single person open source project

meanwhile the shell has something like 7 different styles of context menu, with several new ones added with every major release

Notepad uses bare Win32 API calls. If a 12 year old can handle that in a weekend, I'm Rihanna.

it's an edit control inside a window

take the standard example of how to create a window and add one more CreateWindow() call

Ah, simple like this: https://github.com/genuinelucifer/mypad

I like that part:

       hEdit = CreateWindowEx (
            WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE,                   /* Extended possibilites for variation */
            "EDIT",         /* Classname */
            "",       /* Title Text */
            WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|WS_VSCROLL|WS_HSCROLL|ES_MULTILINE|ES_AUTOHSCROLL|ES_AUTOVSCROLL , /* default window */
            1,       /* Windows decides the position */
            1,       /* where the window ends up on the screen */
            100,                 /* The programs width */
            100,                 /* and height in pixels */
            hwnd,        /* The window is a child-window to hwnd */
            (HMENU) IDC_EDIT,                /* No menu */
            GetModuleHandle(NULL),       /* Program Instance handler */
            NULL                 /* No Window Creation data */
            );

yes?

notepad's entire front end is an edit control slapped onto the barebones minimal Win32 example

they wouldn't need to understand all of it, only to make small additions based on modifying what's already there:

    - adding the edit control (as discussed)
    - add Open/Save items to the existing example menu
    - a few lines in the event loop to implement that functionality

as a kid I had a "games programming" book that showed how to do everything necessary to do this

admittedly kids these days aren't going to be interested in programming for a dead API (Win32)

I taught myself coding Win32 API in C as a young teenager, nothing magic about it. And Notepad is a very basic app.

"the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly rendering Control Panel obsolete."

I bet we'll have nuclear fusion before the Control Panel is obsolete.

These things are pretty much just bike shedding though in the scale of the problems with Windows.

They are very easy to market as improvements though and MSFT is entirely driven by marketing now rather than quality and engineering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com