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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

I still say this is stupid AF, and that notepad should stay as simple as reasonable as a plain text editor and they should have resurrected "WordPad" for this purpose if they wanted it in Windows. I'm mixed on the enhancements to Paint... but this just feels a bit off.

Maybe I'd mind it less if they put the new MS Edit in Windows by default, so again, there's a minimal plain text editor in the box.

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I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Internally, the Notepad project existed to provide a minimal, shippable product that we could use as a testbed. We used it to validate everything from compiler changes to kernel32 loader behavior on beta versions of Windows. If Notepad didn’t run, your feature didn’t work.

This doesn't seem like a good idea.

Well, you see, they got rid of all the QA so those tests stopped adding value ;)

they have AI, they don't need QA or tests, come on man, aren't you a 9999999x engineer?

On a serious note... with AI, I feel I'm getting about a 5x improvement on average in terms of productivity.

Notepad was historically just a thin wrapper for the "EDIT" window class, along with file loading and saving.

And WordPad was built on top of the "RICHEDIT" window class, and exposed lots of the OLE features provided by the rich text control. "Insert Object" is a powerful and potentially dangerous feature with a lineage going back to the Windows 3.1 days. As long as your DLL is registered correctly, any document in an OLE-capable program can cause objects from that DLL to become instantiated and deserialized.

Getting rid of documents able to instantiate arbitrary OLE controls is a good reason to try to remove WordPad. It's not just some simple styled text editor.

You could still use the name Wordpad, without using the legacy code for it...

The minimal text editor shipped with Windows is now Edit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

I didn't remember that they'd shipped that. I remember reading about it but I ever tried it. My hot take, after 10 minutes, is that it's frustrating and not at all a replacement for Notepad. (Fortunately you can uninstall the shitty "Windows Notepad" and the real notepad.exe takes over.)

This new "Edit" is completely tone-deaf in that it doesn't keep the keybindings from Notepad (i.e. no CTRL-H for find/replace, no F5 for the current date/time). You can't turn off the status bar or the line numbers. It doesn't follow the OS theme (instead pretending to be a text-mode application). It tries to be "helpful" with indentation.

At least they bothered to get Find Next with F3 right.

It would have been immensely better if they'd just ported the old MS-DOS EDIT / QBASIC over to Windows.

It isn't minimal since it depends on a terminal

Wordpad presented a “free” tool that they couldn’t monetize anymore. They want you to use Office. Copilot is shoved into Notepad so they can monetize your data stream.

They could've shoved Copilot in Wordpad

And it would still compete with Word. They want you to switch to Office 365 (I mean, Copilot 365).

You jest but they did name change it to Microsoft 365.

Confused the hell out of me recently when I was looking for Office 365 on their website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_365

It's actually the Microsoft 365 Copilot App

That’s Microsoft 365 Copilot” to you, buddy.

https://www.office.com/

Of course it is.

If you think about it, Wordpad was always just the free "lite" edition of Word for people who didn't buy Office to use. Like Outlook Express was to Outlook.

But in the world we seem to be heading toward, where you can only log into Windows with a Microsoft account, and where your Microsoft 365 subscription state controls which "edition" or "desktop experience" of Windows you get as said logged-in user (regardless of which machine you're logged into)... there'd be no need for Wordpad.

In that world, Word the software package would always be pre-installed. (Why? Because even if you aren't paying for M365, someone who is could always log into your PC as a roaming user; and that person would want Word to work immediately without having to wait for it to download+install.)

And in a world where Word the software package is always preinstalled, then Microsoft could just let anyone launch Word (whether they have an M365 subscription or not); and then, at launch, rather than just putting a paywall in the face of anyone without an M365 subscription, Word could instead use the logged-in user's M365 licensing state to determine whether the spun-up Word process should run the full-fat Word UI, or some kind of degraded unpaid-mode Word UI.

And "Word running with some kind of degraded unpaid-mode UI" could be every bit the "Word lite" offering that Wordpad is. Which makes Wordpad itself redundant.

(The only weird part to me, is that they deprecated/removed Wordpad before pulling the trigger on all of this.)

they didn’t remove wordpad before pulling the trigger on this… you can use the online version of Word for free, effectively achieving what you are saying.

There is something in the toolbar that looks like an avatar in the screenshots on the page.

Do you need to log in to notepad now? What in the actual hell is going on?

I don't think I did anything special. I just uninstalled "Notepad", and that revealed the good old Notepad.

Wouldn’t VSCode be a better alternative to wordpad?

No, not at all.

vscode requires downloading all the plugins on top, which is bothersome

wordpad is all-included on its own

People using markdown are probably also using vscode. It’s not like vscode couldn’t come bundled with markdown support if it doesn’t already.

VSCode needs Electron which is too big IMO. It's also a specialised code editor instead of a general text editor, with features like builtin terminal and traditional menus instead of ribbons.

I mean, Microsoft is already using WebView and web technologies in Windows at this point. I agree electron is inefficient, but it's not particularly egregious when compared to what they're already doing

Isn’t notepad now react?

I was mostly meaning the Wordpad name, not the original incantation of the tool... the only legacy I might support if it was Wordpad as a markdown editor, would be to import RTF/Doc files only supporting what can cleanly adapt to markdown syntax support...

Then I'd probably have a decent print to pdf function as part of it.

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