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Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

And this W11 version of Notepad takes longer to open than Sublime Text and about equal to Firefox. On NVMe.

It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.

The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.

I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.

On my 5 year old work laptop it was so bad it was nearly unusable. I found that disabling the shell extensions they used to implement the new file explorer UI helped a lot with that.

Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)

All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.

Your clicks need a round-trip to Redmond so they can sign off on it. It's for the greater good you see.

> The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now

This is disgusting! Who even comes up with ideas like that?

intern supervised by copilot most likely.

Only the Recommended section is react. The rest is WinUI.

They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.

The only reason I use Notepad is that it opens instantly. A fancy think with loads of features that's slow to open should be a new product.

Notepad--

This made me spit out my coffee, thanks.

That was WordPad, right? Except it also loaded instantly, probably.

Wordpad was good for some stuff, I forget what, iirc it loaded in 0.1 seconds vs 0.01 for notepad.exe

> Wordpad was good for some stuff, I forget what

It was a proper WYSIWYG editor working with rich text, effectively a poor man's Word.

Microsoft should have turned it into a markdown editor, instead of killing it.

It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...

I often used it to convert unix style line endings to windows. Notepad choked on those, wordpad could load them easily, and just resaving them as a txt file converted them to windows line endings.

IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.

Opens instantly on my machine. It takes the same amount of time as neovim.

Now if you want to complain about something then vscode takes 12 seconds to load

Wait till you open the humble calculator.

It's an amazing technical feat how they managed to introduce a graphical delay to it in Windows 10. I feel it actually took planning to work out how to introduce friction into easily the simplest conceivable app for no reason. It is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with Windows today.

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