Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jiggawatts

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI.

It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.

Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned.

They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font!

This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328

Notepad can also no longer open large text files in under a minute, whereas the Electron-based VS Code does it nearly instantly!

Where is Raymond Chen when you need him? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...

View on HN

Notepad used to really just be a Windows edit control.

And I could swear RaymondC owned it at some point.

Yep, it was just a barest-bones user32.dll API app--essentially a demo.

> It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.

The same is true of the snipping tool, which I find truly astounding.

Microsoft is really staying on track for alternating good and bad OSes.

So has Microsoft ever gotten around adding tabs to the Explorer?

They are deployed now yes

4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.

In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use?

100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (category of) tools. But then you hear about stuff like this or the Terminal debacle and it's like they're not even trying.

I think that in when using a fixed-width font in a text-only editing program, the assumption is that a tab is "made" (visually) of a number of spaces. That number is a frequent ... debatable setting, in software development teams, but at least it's a number of spaces.

Not being able to visually line up indents made out of spaces vs tabs (in any mix) breaks a very basic usability/interaction pattern, and is really rather bad. :(

What usability/interaction pattern is that?

The number of spaces in tabs is not a debate, that's just personal preference in your editor. The debate is if tabs should be used at all.

That tabs are not a multiple of the character width in a fixed width font is insane of course. But if any character should have that property as a feature, it would be the tab.

Each line starts at the same place, right?

Each pipe character is the same width, right?

Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.

The only possible way for "\t|" on consecutive lines to be misaligned is either for tab not to have a constant width, or any of the axioms above to be wrong.

I don't get how is this defensible. You don't have to be Steve Jobs to see this and ask "what is this crap?"

I am not defending them. If a programmer makes the mistake of having any character in a monospace font be anything other than a multiple of the monospace character width.. sure revoke their programming licence. Straight back to kindergarten, have them make a turtle draw lines on a blank canvas for a couple years.

But that's not a very interesting discussion. If any editor I ever would write would have a fancy feature to mess with the sort of idiot that would use tabs for alignment, maybe I'd make tabs be off by a couple pixels. If it was intentional I would applaud them.

> Each line starts at the same place, right?

> Each pipe character is the same width, right?

> Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.

Yes, but not in Microsoft products.

> The debate is if tabs should be used at all.

You are trying to create your own debate. Nobody raised that here.

The parent is only asking why fixed-width fonts are not rendered with proper alignment (my assumption – on something that was probably already aligned before).

In most of the programming world tabs and 4 spaces are synonymous, and so should be displayed the same with a monospace font

Notepad uses a monospace font though. it should align.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com