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Comment by pxoe | Hacker News Reader

I wanted dark mode, tabs, and autosave, and now I don't have to use a different app to get those, so that works out great for me. Not sure what "breaking changes" even means for that though. Did it suddenly stop being able to open text files? No, it still just works.

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IIRC they did make a breaking change by changing the default character encoding to UTF-8 without BOM.

They also started rendering and preserving Unix-style line endings (LF).

Very welcome breaking changes :)

That's a really fair point, but i'm not sure if that's what they meant by "breaking changes" if that was followed with "autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot"

"Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1].

The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words.

(Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.)

I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427

Words used to have meaning, now everything is "breaking" even if it's literally working and it's just "I don't like it"

No, I used it by the standard meaning. The fact that you prefer doesn't make it not a breaking change, or a good idea in general.

Notepad addresses a specific use case (dumb text editor). If you have a different use case, there are other applications that handle it.

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