
Microsoft is updating Notepad - cstorres
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563704/microsoft-windows-notepad-app-update
======
jcfrei
On a semi-related note: You know what would really get me excited? A GPU
accelerated, highly optimized text editor, that could display several
gigabytes of text with several thousand columns wide rows, smooth scrolling,
zooming and text-highlighting. That would be a real step up from current text
editors. The only thing that comes close (that I know of) is still Vim minus
the smooth scrolling and zooming. Meanwhile system default text editors often
crawl to a near halt when selecting several rows which are a few thousand
columns wide.

~~~
jolmg
What do you mean by zooming? Increasing the font size?

    
    
        :nmap + :let &guifont=substitute(&guifont, '\d\+$', '\=submatch(0) + 1', '')<cr>
        :nmap - :let &guifont=substitute(&guifont, '\d\+$', '\=submatch(0) - 1', '')<cr>
        :nmap _ -
    

With that, you can increase the font size with normal mode +, and decrease it
with - or _.

EDIT: By the way, what are you doing that requires handling text files with
thousands of columns and gigabytes of text? That sounds very unusual.

~~~
jcfrei
It's something I would get excited about - not something I absolutely need. In
the past decades so much effort has gone into optimizing rendering speeds for
computer games or page rendering on browsers while text editors appear to have
pretty much stayed the same (rendering wise).

~~~
jolmg
Well, I can understand optimizing rendering speeds for computer games because
the general trend has always been wanting ever more realistic graphics.

However, it's surprising to see people want more rendering speed on their text
editors, especially to the point that it would excite them. It's something
I've never considered them lacking for their purpose. However, that's probably
because I've (nearly) never had the need to handle text files with such
characteristics (I usually use it for code and configuration files; none get
even close to 1MB), and so to me the text editor is among the fastest,
lightest programs I typically run.

rch mentioned scientific data. I guess it's a valid point that there are
people working with huge datasets in a practical text file format, and if
there are people that can work with huge images or videos on their editors,
then why can't text editors do the same.

------
ben509
Having been playing with Windows 10 recently since not using it more than an
hour or two at a time since Windows 2K, it was pretty amazing how much of
Windows really hadn't changed, and how much old chrome there is in there.

I'm not sure if that's more due to a "don't fix what isn't broke" attitude,
that Microsoft is obsessed with features rather than fixing things, or simply
the sheer size of Windows.

~~~
netsharc
The best is this dialog, which is the exact same layout as in Windows 3.1:
[http://www.intelliot.com/2008/08/windows-vista-install-
font-...](http://www.intelliot.com/2008/08/windows-vista-install-font-
crashes/)

The dialog in 3.1: [http://notebooks.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/...](http://notebooks.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/Install-font-31.jpg)

~~~
Someone
It likely has exactly the same layout because sometime, long ago, some program
(e.g. Adobe Type Manager) extended that UI, either by patching its code or by
overlaying part of the window with frameless windows containing new controls.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t only apply to APIs.

~~~
ygra
It also got used less and less. You had to really try hard to install fonts
that way and why bother changing something that (a) works, and (b) only a tiny
fraction of your users are ever going to see.

------
Rondom
"You can now even search for words on Bing through Notepad by simply right
clicking on them to get a new option"

That's what the world waited for... I am curious about the politics involved
in the prioritization of this feature...

~~~
OskarS
I dunno, that doesn't sound like a crazy feature. The purpose of Notepad is
many times to look through gigantic log files. When you find the error, you
can just select it and then Bing it.

~~~
kalleboo
As a Mac user it seems crazy that it's an app feature. On the Mac, any app
using the system text field automatically gets features like that (spellcheck,
dictionary, google, text-to-speech, etc), and as I understand it, Notepad is
just a basic wrapper around the Windows text control (hence the 32K limit etc)

~~~
harrygeez
That's the difference. Apple had an actual opportunity to restart from scratch
and design it right but Microsoft never did

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KwanEsq
I think the line endings support is going to be the most valuable addition,
that's definitely bitten me when I used to use Windows.

~~~
stephengillie
Parsing can be "fun", trying to figure out if text is ended with \n, \r, or
both.

~~~
marcosdumay
Unix's \n, Windows' \r\n, and older Mac's \n\r.

Deciding whether a line-end terminated when reading from a network is kinda
hard...

~~~
Avery3R
older macs are just \r not \n\r

~~~
nojvek
\r?\n regex?

~~~
marcosdumay
So, you take a `\r` from the network. So, do you wait for a `\n` before
returning the line?

~~~
rhencke
You wait to peek the next byte, or EOF, and then make the choice.

~~~
marcosdumay
Line protocols do not transmit EOF (and the problem is on each line anyway).
And the next byte may only come after you write something on the socket.

------
alexandercrohde
I've never understood why they don't license something like notepad++ for $1 a
copy, or build their own internal version. The value add creating good default
tools instead of paint/notepad/calc/space-cadet is pretty huge.

~~~
Theodores
Notepad++ has its fans but it falls between two stools.

It is a bit overblown for editing your /etc/hosts file and a bit underweight
as an IDE.

People get stuck using Notepad++ and never give themselves the opportunity to
invest that time in a tool that best suits development. This could be a grown
up IDE, vi(m) or Wordpress's admin editor.

Being lightweight is all well and good if you have a 486/DX33 running Windows
3.11 but most computers have Pentium chips inside them now.

One thing that will probably remain just as useless with Windows Notepad 2018
is use case number one - editing your /etc/hosts file. What else is Notepad
really for?

In the rebooted edition of the classic text editor they will still make
/etc/hosts only save if you are an administrator, or 'root' user as it is on
more conventional operating systems. This is fine and good for security but it
does not let you just type in the 'admin' password after you have opened the
file and made your changes. With Vista they got the UAC mostly right but not
for Notepad and /etc/hosts.

They also hide the /etc/hosts file in some subdirectory that only a young
person could possibly remember the file path for. It is not in the
conventional place that is expected. c:\wwindows\system32 is as far as I can
remember. Then, when you have found the magic folder, it requires a change of
the file type in the file dialog window before you can see it, and that is
presuming you have file extensions enabled. There is a confusing hosts.isam
file in the same folder. Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the
phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your
development site.

Really the line endings problem should have been fixed a long time ago,
actually with Windows 95 as it was apparent even that far back that users
might want to open files created on systems that were not 'Wintel' (as it was
known then as everything else used different processors).

With Windows 2000 - no winsock.dll needed - they should have made efforts to
make /etc/hosts editable that bit more easily. That would have sorted out 90%
of real world use of Notepad.

Unix philosophy should apply to Notepad - do just one thing - and the Windows
Write product should have been where to go for fancy line numbers and such
like. That could have made a neat and basic Notepad++ style product with a
print view and raw text mode like what early versions of Word had.

~~~
munchbunny
Notepad++ is great for handling config files and other miscellaneous files. I
seldom use it to write code other than one-off Python scripts - that's
VSCode's job. But it's pretty great for inspecting and making light edits. It
also has lightweight capabilities for regex search/replace, diffing, and other
batch capabilities. And multiple tabs are great.

If you map Notepad, Vim, Emacs, and heavyweight IDE's on a spectrum, I use
Notepad++ as a replacement for Notepad and the simpler half of Vim/Emacs, and
I use VSCode for the heavier half of Vim/Emacs and typical web dev, and I use
heavyweight IDE's for heavyweight dev work (C#/Java/C++ mostly).

> Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP
> address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.

These days with how easy it is to load a container into a publicly accessible
site, I feel like that's a solved problem in most cases?

------
yardshop
This sounds like useful updates and I'm glad they kept it small and simple.

I use Notepad many times a day, frequently on end-user machines as a quicky
binary file viewer.

Enter shell:sendto in the address bar or run dialog, then add a new shortcut
in there for Notepad. Then right-click a mysterious misbehaving file (like a
PDF with a DOCX extension) and Send To, Notepad.

Today though I was doing a bunch of RegEdit work with several remote
registries and was really wishing for a multi-tab Registry editor. Hope that
app gets an update some day.

------
onemoresoop
Thanks but as a windows user I prefer any other editor. My favorite is
notepad++

~~~
slantyyz
I usually have a half dozen windows of Sublime Text open, but I still
occasionally launch Notepad to hold some temporary throwaway text, even though
there's no need to.

For some reason I just like having something different open for that "scratch
data" that also is visibly differentiated in my taskbar.

~~~
agumonkey
same here, even with my light emacs running I still have the reflex to Win+R
notepad RET and paste..

then I run M-x doctor to talk about it because I'm conflicted

------
mcbits
While I welcome the line endings support, and text zoom makes sense for
accessibility, by far my favorite feature of Notepad is that it loads in
milliseconds. If new "features" like Bing integration push that startup time
into the deciseconds, I hope they will also make Notepad an optional Windows
component because installing it will be pointless.

------
pier25
I used to code in Notepad. For years. My god.

------
ghostbrainalpha
I use Notepad as a quick journal throughout the day, I appreciate its
simplicity.

But it really stinks they still don't have a basic "auto-recover" connected to
it. When your computer crashes or loses power, an unsaved notepad will NOT be
recovered like a Windows document, or Sublime, or Notepad++ file would.

~~~
gruez
Because notepad is meant to be... a notepad, not a full blown text editor.

~~~
wongarsu
A physical notepad doesn't get erased once I drop it. Sublime behaves much
closer to the analogy than notepad in this regard (I can just scribble stuff
down, forget about it for a month, and when I rediscover it I can still decide
how to file it)

------
JosephRedfern
There's a short but somewhat interesting post about notepad's maintenance
here:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795)

------
cabaalis
> You can now even search for words on Bing through Notepad by simply right
> clicking on them to get a new option.

That's great I suppose, for people who will use it. My bet is that this is the
biggest driver of the update to notepad.

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TheAceOfHearts
A bit tangentially related, but on macOS people might be interested to learn
that TextEdit [0] is open source [1]. It'd be interesting to see Microsoft
open sourcing a bunch of their core applications.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextEdit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextEdit)

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextEdit/Introduction/Intro.html)

------
JetSpiegel
There's much fuss about having a default text editor on Windows that can edit
\n line endings, but WordPad already ships with all versions and can do just
that.

------
Endy
I'll skip it thanks. Notepad, and EDIT.COM, work well for what they're meant
to do - be basic text editors on the Windows/MS-DOS platform.

~~~
sli
The new version just supports a few new features, like non-Windows line
endings. It's otherwise exactly the same simple text editor it always was,
except now it's not useless when you happen to get something with Unix line
endings.

If you want to talk about them adding a bunch of user tracking features to it,
you may have a proper complaint.

~~~
Endy
I mean, I respect that concept; but just for my lifestyle, if someone is
sending me .txt files with non-DOS/Windows line-endings, I'm talking to the
wrong people.

------
romdev
The Sets feature linked in the article sounds more interesting.
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17510344/microsoft-
window...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17510344/microsoft-
windows-10-tabs-sets-feature-update-removal)

------
josefresco
I use Notepad daily. Linked directly from my Win10 taskbar, I use it to take
small notes (duh), hold temporary information I can't retain in my brain,
strip formatting when copy+pasting and view-source actions where Notepad++ is
overkill.

------
nojvek
I’d call it a successful update even if they handle new lines well.

I really don’t know how windows works. Their cmd can’t still resize fluently
like the Mac one does.

I can see Mac was the OS liked by devs. Somethings are really well done. It’s
the small things that matter some times.

------
rb808
On a related note - I've started having gitattributes files to * text=auto
eol=lf, ie just LF everywhere. Works fine for us

Is there any possible reason in 2018 to keep CRLFs? Even bat files work with
LFs

------
jahabrewer
> Microsoft is also finally adding in ctrl+backspace support

#1 feature right there.

~~~
joshka
This is also one of the reasons that MacOS keyboard UX is objectively better
than Windows UX. Seeing this keyboard shortcuts like this not supported in an
application in MacOS would be surprising.

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nikbackm
Wonder if Notepad still just wraps the standard edit-control after these
changes.

I imagine the latter would have pretty strict backwards compatibility
requirements.

------
turblety
Notepad was probably the only remaining part of the operating system that
didn't spy on it's users to send personal information back to Microsoft and
it's advertisers.

I'm sure that will now change with the latest updates. I mean why shouldn't a
basic text editor send user data to the internet.

------
extralego
I have been using Notepad 3 for a while, and it works great in the meantime.

