So, they went from not updating in forever, to finally updating it in some meaningful ways a couple years ago, to adding crap that no one wants pretty much right away. Too much, MS. Shoulda quit while you were ahead with tabs.
Paint.Net (v3), Notepad++, IrfanViewer, Foobar2000 & VLC
Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
[1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
This is true for all complex software, though. People who have never used Apple's software also struggle with it until they become more familiar.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.
I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
VLC is simple as pie. open folder, click music or video, it plays. drag files to it, it adds them to the playlist. same functionality as WinAmp, etc.
I had to watch three (3) youtube tutorials to figure out how to import a pdf and copy-paste a signature to it.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
Also, please tell me you are not trying to take the standard IBM desktop Interface (File, Edit...) away ?
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.
In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.
[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters
Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.
Never had this issues for notepad++.
For text it's fine.
- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory
- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each
- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs
- colors
- allows tail -f (the eye icon)
- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)
- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments
- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)
- lets you see and change encoding very easily
There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.
I don't understand how the editor has regressed to the point that 15 year old software performs better than the modern equivalent.
(And cute: it spins when I click it. Blech.)
That said, I'm not sure notepad benefits from it.
A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).
The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening the file to verify that they remembered to save the information will be fooled into thinking its there.
This AI thing is dumb for it though, should've kept Wordpad for that.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the content and the ad.
There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain somehow.
Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.
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https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/218596/70s-or-earl... for those not in the know.
* soda pop <--- consider replacing this with Coke Zero, on sale at a Kroger's near you this week