Windows Notepad Finally Supports Unix, Mac OS Line Endings (theregister.co.uk)

Microsoft's text editing app, Notepad, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, now supports line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices. "This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community," Microsoft said in a blog post today. The Register reports: Notepad previously recognized only the Windows End of Line (EOL) characters, specifically Carriage Return (CR, \r, 0x0d) and Line Feed (LF, \n, 0x0a) together. For old-school Mac OS, the EOL character is just Carriage Return (CR, \r, 0x0d) and for Linux/Unix it's just Line Feed (LF, \n, 0x0a). Modern macOS, since Mac OS X, follows the Unix convention. Opening a file written on macOS, Mac OS, Linux, or Unix-flavored computers in Windows Notepad therefore looked like a long wall of text with no separation between paragraphs and lines. Relief arrives in the current Windows 10 Insider Build.

Notepad will continue to output CRLF as its EOL character by default. It's not changing its stripes entirely. But it will retain the formatting of the files it opens so users will be able to view, edit and print text files with non-Windows line ends. Microsoft has thoughtfully provided an out for Windows users counting on the app's past inflexibility: the new behavior can be undone with a registry key change.

Comments

too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares?

Re:too little, too late

[Freischutz]

who cares?

Millions upon millions of MS Windows admins 'stuck' with Linux systems? It's actually kind of funny to watch them work, they are so used to point-n-click snap-in GUI interfaces that most of them don't even know how to write a script. Recognise a Windows admin worth having a conversation with by the fact that he scripts most of his work using VB or C# rather than sitting there for hours pounding a mouse button working a GUI management tool to do stuff a script can do in 10 minutes.

Re:too little, too late

[DarkVader]

Exactly.

I'm not going to suddenly start editing text in Windoze. I mean, I'm not going to complain that they started actually ending lines properly, it only took forty-ish years, but they finally figured out how to do it.

Meanwhile, TeachText became SimpleText became TextEdit. The Macintosh user interface evolved through many generations. And now, finally, in 2018, MicroShit figures out how to do what they should have been able to do in 1984.

Idiots.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

2018 - 1985 = 33
Microsoft's devs are at minimum 30 years behind the curve.

Re:too little, too late

[Zaelath]

Yeah, but then.. Notepad++

Re:too little, too late

[arglebargle_xiv]

It's also Windows 10 Bleeding Edge Edition only, so it's still not going to help that many people.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, Most real admins in the enterprise have been scripting in power shell for years

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

We already knew this, but it became painfully obvious with various rags (including el reg) gushing about how "powershell" was teh bestest thing evar... conveniently forgetting it's only about as many years behind Unix, and even Unix was merely following in older systems' footsteps.

So if this isn't sheer head-up-butt incompetence, then it's malice: They're banking on having their users have no memory. But, you know, that's not quite how it works. Not with compatability features. But we can assume that the current crop of editors are indeed redmond fanbois, possibly paid shills, for finding ever newer ways to point out the fancy polished shine on this turd. It still doesn't really entice me, as the reasons I ran away from redmond and its crap software are still entirely too valid.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

call me when notepad supports vi navigation

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood why Microsoft didn't just throw some cash their way to compensate them for their hard work and start including notepad++ with the OS.

Re:too little, too late

[azcoyote]

Even better... EditPad!

Re:too little, too late

[Megol]

...ending lines properly ...

CR: return to first character of the line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

LF: jump to the next line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Perhaps you should read those articles (I've only verified the relevant parts so normal Wikipedia cautions apply), understand where the control characters came from, what they were used for and why there are different line endings out there? No "properly" about this.

That it have taken this long for MS to change something this trivial is strange though. Guess they always assumed nobody use notepad?

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of people use notepad. More likey they didn't want to accommodate Mac/Linux files, just like they have always done. This small change, to me, actually represents a hugh change in direction for MS especially on top of the Linux on Windows work they have done and their cloud linux stuff. Big changes ahead, lets just hope they don't get to the extinguish step.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

You're correct, but it's an old debate. You don't want a pure editor to parse display commands that control the cursor position, that should only be done in a viewer.

The bigger issue is that you have to change a goddamn registry key to revert the behavior. It ought to be a simple menu option, and have a command line argument.

Re:too little, too late

[Austerity Empowers]

who cares?

All they have to do now is replace the rest of their OS. And also get notepad to not output CRLF, because we don't need that in the world.

I mean if they want their OS to just be for games great, but anyone that can make a choice is selecting anything else. It's a horrible environment to get real work done on.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Notepad++ is a GPL open source project. It can't be bought.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

$50 for an inferior editor is even better?

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

vi is obsolete garbage. Get with the times.

Re:too little, too late

[MagicM]

Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Sublime Text?

Re:too little, too late

[MagicM]

If it's good enough for RFC 5321, it's good enough for me.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Vim is the fastest editor I know of. Sure, you need to learn some, but it's worth it.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit. How often do you really script something robust in 10 minutes? Do you have proper error handling, have you considered the edge cases, what about notifications of failure and logging output? It can take hours.

For one-off jobs a shitty little brittle 10 minute script is fine, but for something of high importance 10 minutes is usually not enough.

Personally, I don't see speed as the primary benefit... reproducibility is what I care about. I can spend 10 minutes doing a daily task... or I can spend an hour creating a script to automate that. After 6 days, the script will have paid for itself... after that it's all benefit to me.

So please... stop with the fucking dishonesty. It's not necessary.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

In the ancient days of UNIX the print head returned to position 0 of a line with 80 positions (0-79). To advance to the next line the print head moved down one line hence the term line feed. This is in contrast to manual typewriters of that era which advanced the paper by one line upward each time you moved the print arm to the starting position at the far left of the paper, hence the term carriage return.

Re:too little, too late

[thegarbz]

Guess they always assumed nobody use notepad?

Or maybe they are planning on screwing up wordpad even more. :-/

Re:too little, too late

[thomst]

Zaelath noted:

Yeah, but then.. Notepad++

Personally, I've used Alan Phillips' Programmer's File Editor in place of Notepad for almost 20 years now.

MS made it harder when they killed off support for the .hlp helpfile format, but there are ways around that - and, in addition to a pretty useful feature set, the program IS free, after all ...

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your definition Windows is the only one doing it right! A line feed should not also return the carriage.

It's a shame Unix people aren't more open minded.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions upon millions of MS Windows admins 'stuck' with Linux systems?

It's not called 'stuck' when you are too stupid to learn how to do your job which includes managing Windows, Linux, BSD, various router and switching platforms, etc... The word you're looking for is 'incompetence'. Millions upon millions of *incompetent* MS Windows admins don't know *how* to work on Linux systems....

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Vim is the fastest editor I know of. Sure, you need to learn some, but it's worth it.

There's your problem. Windows admins don't give a shit about being fast, efficient, or knowledgeable about all things IT-related. They learned how to point-and-click on their mom's computer at age 6 and that's why they will always recommend Windows--they don't have to be bothered to learn something new.

Re:too little, too late

[xSauronx]

> Recognise a Windows admin worth having a conversation with by the fact that he scripts most of his work using VB or C#

powershell. they should be scripting in powershell these days, which is kept up to date, has tons of built in functions and available modules for working in AD and just about anything on a wdinwos computer or server already available, and can take advantage of .Net libraries so you dont have to develop in c# to get something that powershell doesnt have as a native cmdlet. VB still has its uses, but the sort of stuff my coworker does in VB is way easier in powershell much of the time. I'm not saying there is no use for c# scripting, but powershell is where it's at.

I am a windows sysadmin who had a little linux background and uses a ton of powershell in my day to day work. there is some weird stuff MS is still behind on for no-good-reason, serer 2012 and 2016 resolved some of those things, but powershell gets a lot of attention from them

Re:too little, too late

[xSauronx]

> It's a horrible environment to get real work done on.

this is sort of ridiculous, we are stuck on windows 7 at work and I can get all of my work done without an issue--my last job had 8.1 which i liked better, what do you really get out of linux that is so great? I got frustrated with linux a long time ago and have never looked back--to each his own, right? windows is not perfect, and *nix has had several features MS has been stupid slow to incorporate, but come on, to act like it is worthless is just silly at this point.

Re:too little, too late

[admin7087]

Don't worry, it's just part of their plan to make Windows more Linux-friendly, until one day they'll nuke all dual boot systems from the orbit "inadvertently" with a software upgrade, only to tell people they need not to worry, since they can continue to use Linux from their Windows partition. :-)

Re:too little, too late

[KingMotley]

Let's be fair here. The correct implementation of a new line in a text file *IS* CRLF. It is the format you need to send a printer to print the text. A single CR would just print all the text on a single line overwriting itself over and over, and a LF would make the text look like a staircase (until it ran off the side of the page). CRLF is therefore the correct way to end lines in a text file (or LF+CR which actually makes more sense, but I wasn't consulted when the standards started). Seriously, just go read any manual that describes the ASCII control characters and there will be no doubt left in your head about what SHOULD be the correct way.

Linux got it wrong because it copied it from Unix. Unix got it wrong because it got copied from Multics (some of the original devs working on Unix were also devs on Multics). Multics (most likely) got it wrong because it was a bad performance hack (using a single byte to end lines is easier).

Re: too little, too late

[VernonNemitz]

I'd like to see a menu option that lets the user specify what type of line-ending is wanted. Upon making the choice, an open document would be automatically given a search/replace pass, to change all line-endings to the specified type.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ is certainly a good option and one I can recommend as well, but....

I've been using TextPad for over 20 years now and can highly recommend it. I certainly think it is a better choice over all the other options and I still check out other editors from time to time and even use them on occasion, but my go to editor on windoze is most definitely TextPad.

Now in the UNIX/Linux world I always recommend vi or vim... and that can start a whole other "discussion".

And, for what it's worth, I used a program called qedit in the DOS world. Still works pretty damn good even if I am forced to run it in dosbox now that win7 (and such) refuse to run it from the command line. If you go back to DOS for any reason, try to get a copy of qedit.
--
Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordpad could open them, so it was low priority.

Re:too little, too late

[craighansen]

Look, if you want to emulate ancient technology, you'd also better make sure that if you only send carriage-return, your emulation should smear the next character across the paper about 40 positions to the left of the prior character, and that every character past 72 should overwrite that 72nd position, getting darker and darker until the ink starts to spread. And your terminal emulator should make a terrible racket with every printable character, which by the way, only included UPPERCASE letters and run at 110 baud (10 characters per second, 11 bits per character - an extra stop bit because it needed that extra time, too).

ASR33s needed carriage-return, followed by line-feed because it took 200ms to get the carriage brought back to the left margin, slamming into the dashpot to cushion the blow, with the small metal arm carefully adjusting the size of the air hole to make the dashpot as close as possible to critically damped.

Re: too little, too late

[barakn]

Notepad++ has that.
Edit -> EOL Conversion -> ...

Maybe you wanted that in Notepad?

Re:too little, too late

[Tenebrousedge]

I'm stuck between, "this is a joke, no one would do that," and "who would make something like that up?".

You might want to improve your toolset, perhaps with software from the current millennium.

Re:too little, too late

[David_Hart]

Yeah, but then.. Notepad++

I prefer PSPad myself... but I'm a network engineer, not a programmer...

I needed something that could handle both large log files and UNIX formatting. Even with this fix, Notepad still wouldn't work for me because of it's file size limits.

Re:too little, too late

[Austerity Empowers]

It is worthless from my perspective. Literally everything I do or use, if it works at all, requires a ton of work-arounds or bloat, or custom support from vendors who will never provide it.

I suppose it depends on what you do, but browsers work fine everywhere, and I don't really need word or excel, i work for a living.

Re: too little, too late

[datavirtue]

Yeah. They have a lot more things to support before I stop throwing up in my mouth whenever I have to use notepad.

Re: too little, too late

[datavirtue]

Registry change? WTF!?

Re:too little, too late

[Darinbob]

I used Wordpad for viewing text documents instead of Notepad, because Wordpad would let you wrap lines. I didn't use either to actually write text docs though. I did go to notepad+ a couple years back, but it does a lot of things I don't like, but it's much better as a "default" application to read text files.

Re: too little, too late

[Darinbob]

Microsoft has been steadily removing more and more user options from menus. They seem to fundamentally dislike the notion of user customization. Sometimes those removed options go to the registry, but they also remove registry entries as well.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in the day where if you wanted to bold text, your text would look like this:

is not bold
is boldis bold
is not bold

is not bold \r\n is bold \r isbold \r\n is not bold \r\n

Re:too little, too late

[Darinbob]

Ha. I know RFCs are treated as "standards" but those are only standards through general grudging agreement. Many of them came into existence with very little feedback, some were modified by later RFCs, etc. I take them with a grain of salt. My guess is that requirement is there just so that some less-than-stellar programs would work.

Re:too little, too late

[Darinbob]

A lot of systems were written at a time when printers that didn't all work the same way and display terminals that did not all work the same way, so they would add a bit of translation when printing files, converting the text format to a printable format. Ie, read a record, send to printer, add CR+LF, repeat. Ie, the file didn't have the same format as the protocol needed to send the file and display it properly on a printer. There were tons of file formats out there, the "plain array of bytes" used on Unix wasn't all that common. No one could point to just one format and say "this one is correct all the others are wrong, without sounding like it was proselytizing".

When microcomputers came along later, most affordable printers had settle into a single way of doing things with CR and LF, so the micros found it easy to just copy a file verbatim to a printer without needing a file. In other words, the file and the protocol were merged, somewhat out of ignorance perhaps, or maybe for convenience.

These were telegraph codes originally, later standardized in Baudot codes (1900ish). CR and LF were separated from each other for practical purposes. CR took a long time for the carriage to actually return, but LF was fast. So you could send CR+LF+LF to do double spacing, or send lots of LFs to put in more gaps. Sending a redundant CRLF when only an LF was needed was wasteful, slow, and expensive.

So there is no "correct" implementation. A file format does not need to have a printable representation internally.

Thank heavens the abysmal DOS way of using ^Z was ditched though.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

You think this makes you sound smart but you're just a stereotypical neckbeard.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

That would have been the case iff text editors allowed you to have just a CR (and write over the same line) and/or just a LF (and move to the next line at the same column). A grand total of none of them ever did that.

Text editors never needed this because, unlike line printers that may have had a need for those characters separately, maybe to optimise printing, or to overwrite text for a "bold" effect, it never made any sense for text files, and by extension text editors. All that was ever needed was a newline character.

The "bad performance hack", or rather the quick and sloppy design, was to have the text file contain the exact commands to send to the printer (ie CRLF) instead of abstracting it away and delegating the details of how to get the printer to move to the next line to a driver.

Re:too little, too late

[KingMotley]

Well except that baudot didn't have a line feed character. It had a "line" character which both returned to the beginning of the line (like carriage return) and advanced the paper (like a line feed). Line feed by itself didn't go back to the beginning of a line. For all the terminals and printers I know of, if you sent it "abcdef", it would turn out like this:
abc
          def

As it was defined to do. And that's why line feed by itself is just wrong. That's also why character code 10 in every ASCII chart including the first one defined in 1963 is called "line feed", not "line". Line feed has a very specific definition, and multics/unix/linux misused it if you actually want to be able to call your text files "ASCII". It either conforms to the ASCII standard or it does not, and having a line feed character act line a CRLF simply does not.

But I agree with the ^Z (EOF) character. I can't count the number of times that copy {src} {dst} landed up truncating a binary file on me because I was too lazy to specify the /b option to tell it that it was a binary file and not stop at the first EOF character.

Re:too little, too late

[KingMotley]

Erm.. Yay slashdot for eating thing that look like HTML. That was supposed to be "abc^Adef" would turn out like:
abc
        def

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

>they don't have to be bothered to learn something new.

Thats funny, in a thread about vi/vim

Re:too little, too late

[spitzak]

This is incorrect. Quite a few terminals, especially line printers and video terminals, interpreted LF as moving to the start of the next line.

It was teletypes that did the unusual move straight down. This was done in order to hide the slowness of the mechanism for returning the carraige. Having to send a LF after a CR meant that there was an extra character time to handle the CR and get the carraige all the way to the left before printing.

Dec in particular used Teletypes as cheap terminals, leading to the CR+LF behavior. CP/M was strongly influenced by DEC and from that you got MSDOS and Windows. Other systems (ie Multics, but also all other mainframe systems) used as single character for newline.

Re:too little, too late

[KingMotley]

I could be wrong, as much of this was before my time, but I don't recall a single printer that interpretted LF as moving to the start of the next line, and a cursory examination of terminfo (the most complete database of terminal capabilities that I am aware of), and having written a couple dozen terminal emulators myself shows that the vast majority does exactly what I said.. "cr" is defined as the ASCII CR character, cud1 is defined as the ASCII LF character, and nel (new line) is defined as the combination of ASCII CR and ASCII LF:
dumb|80-column dumb tty,
        am,
        cols#80,
        bel=^G, cr=\r, cud1=\n, ind=\n,
unknown|unknown terminal type,
        gn, use=dumb,
lpr|printer|line printer,
        OTbs, hc, os,
        cols#132, lines#66,
        bel=^G, cr=\r, cub1=^H, cud1=\n, ff=^L, ind=\n,
glasstty|classic glass tty interpreting ASCII control characters,
        OTbs, am,
        cols#80,
        bel=^G, clear=^L, cr=\r, cub1=^H, cud1=\n, ht=^I, kcub1=^H,
        kcud1=\n, nel=\r\n, .kbs=^H,

vanilla|dumb tty,
        OTbs,
        bel=^G, cr=\r, cud1=\n, ind=\n,

Re:too little, too late

[spitzak]

Sending CR+LF to a terminal that did both for LF was harmless, which was why the dumb definition does that. Most of these terminals had a option to switch the behavior due to the popularity of DEC operating systems (as they supported Backspace it was actually possible some software relied on LF going straight down, earlier terminals did not interpret backspace so going straight down was nearly useless). I know VT100s did, I think VT52 did with a dip switch. As the computer could not know which way the terminals were set, sending both was safer.

Re:too little, too late

[KingMotley]

That actually explains a lot. Every once in a long while someone comes along and makes a truly insightful post and I remember why I still come here. Thank you for that.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

You will be happy with what Help Desk provides, or you get the hose again

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing you don't understand is that you need all those Powershell functions to edit all those bizarre file formats and APIs... on Linux / Mac most of this can be accomplished through editing text files, or devices which appear to be text files.

So while you're so happy about having to have a large set of tools for what amounts to mostly simple tasks, the rest of us look at it and laugh at the waste... and that you're such a fan that you can't see the frivolity of it all through those rose-colored Microsoft glasses.

Re:too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

All our large stuff runs on Linux. We use Windows for Active Directory and are migrating away from SQL Server to MySQL for everything important. We use Sharepoint and Office, sure, end user stuff, but that universe isn't growing and our big backend stuff is... a lot. YMMV of course

Re:too little, too late

[Agripa]

Back when this mattered, it was standard to include a DIP switch settings on the printer which selected between various behaviors in response to CR and LR.

Re:too little, too late

[brantondaveperson]

That's a nice argument, but taking a step back from the origin of these character codes, which aren't really that important except from the point of view of a history major, it simply doesn't make any sense to use two characters to denote the end of a line in a text file. Doing so only raises the question of what either of those characters by themselves ought to mean, to which I can't think of a sensible answer.

Re: too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

>they don't have to be bothered to learn something new.

Thats funny, in a thread about vi/vim

You misunderstand. Just because you learn something new, doesn't mean it's better.

Notepad++ ?

[Pascal Sartoretti]

All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?

Re: Notepad++ ?

[DonkeyG5]

More like 14 years ago.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[thegarbz]

All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?

And yet this is a godsend when working on other people's machines which *don't* have Notepad++

Even wordpad sucks these days.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

portable notepad++ exists.

https://portableapps.com/apps/...

it is a must have on your usb flash drive of tools and utilities and bootable iso.

oh, for making that? try

http://www.easy2boot.com/

then copy all your 'non bootable' stuff over to a separate root directory on it.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[fisted]

it is a must have on your usb flash drive of tools and utilities

Lol, found the Windows admin.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Mysund]

Next year Microsoft will release their new feature swollen text editor: Notepad#.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or to gvim.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[thegarbz]

it is a must have on your usb flash drive

It's faster to download it and run it as a portable than it is to mail a USB drive to the computer you're supporting.

Know what's even faster? Having the default text editor able to display text correctly.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're working for an Enterprise client and they allow USB drive access, not to mention running code from them, leave now.

If you need this explaining ask an adult.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are working for an enterprise client and need to log on the server to edit a text file, leave now.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're required to edit plaintext on other people's computers - I feel sorry for you.

Not needed for linux setups - you ssh in (or sshmount their fs) and do all work from your own office/computer. No getting used to their keyboard setup or whatever.

Hardly ever needed for windows - if you support windows users, you fix & set things up using GUI or registry editors.

Bringing "tool software" around on usb? 1990 sneakernet? We have something fine called a network (cable or wifi) - and had it for a long time. Work in a company? Surely they have a file server where you can put "tool sw" in a convenient shared folder, accessible from every client machine.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Austerity Empowers]

All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?

Creating a never-ending cycle. Notepad is the only editor you can count on in a workflow, as a result a dependency is built in to a lot of windows apps, and CRLF leaks all over. While on linux/bsd/osx most things obey the EDITOR ev, allowing the user to pick his favorite. As a result if Apple dropped/changed TextEdit, many people may not notice, but if MS drops or changes Notepad, major LOB apps are going to break. And Linux...forget it, the only editor you can rely on being there is maybe vi, and building a dependence on that will start WWIII.

MS needs to throw out their OS and start over if they want to play in this millenia. Since they've offshored all their real R&D, the better option is just to embrace linux and throw their UI over it.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[moronoxyd]

If you're required to edit plaintext on other people's computers - I feel sorry for you.

Not needed for linux setups - you ssh in (or sshmount their fs) and do all work from your own office/computer. No getting used to their keyboard setup or whatever.

Well, it's great if that works in your setup. But you don't always have complete control.

We have some 10.000 Linux server appliances running within our customers networks. We don't have direct access to most of those. So if we need to troubleshoot anything, we need to ask our customers to grant us access to their local network via TeamViewer or such like and then connect with putty (as practically everyone uses Windows).

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And leave the lucrative job for you? Good strategy, seeing the good in the bad. (floating away in my noodle sky cart)

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, even a Linux admin has to eat. If an organization has a Linux or Unix application, typically they have the brains to hire someone full time to take care of that application. So if you're not employed by one those organizations, you need some Windows skills to pay the bills.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is a must have on your usb flash drive of tools and utilities

Lol, found the Windows admin.

... because this sounds like a desktop admin trick ... and you presume that’s always Windows?

Re:Notepad++ ?

[arth1]

And yet this is a godsend

Is it, though? I think it is worse than nothing.
The problem is that it will now read LF, but any new line you put into the text will still have a CR+LF.
So earlier, when you opened a Unix style text file in Notepad, you would notice that it was LF-based because everything was on one line. So you would open it with Wordpad or something else instead.
Now, on the other hand, you will open it, see nothing amiss, modify it, and save it, and because the new lines you made will have CR+LF, it may break the system that then reads it that expects LF separation throughout the document.

That's worse than nothing in my opinion. A typical Microsoft "solution".

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS needs to throw out their OS and start over if they want to play in this millenia. Since they've offshored all their real R&D, the better option is just to embrace linux and throw their UI over it.

And that will go over about as well as the Netscape Communicator 4 to Netscape 6. Need another example? Microsoft's XP to Vista rewrite. That didn't turn out so badly for MS because they're the only game in town, and the cost of hardware - especially RAM - fell through the floor. Now, would MS Linux automatically beat Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch - No, not necessarily, Especially when you consider that MS Linux will be 1) Non-free, and each copy has to have it's own license. You want it to interact with MS Exchange/Office 365? You'll need a CAL for that, too, in addition to the machine license. 2) Non-editable/No source, so if MS doesn't give you a shim for proprietary Nvidia cards, you are SoL, Problem with the Weirdnix userland? sorry, cannot help you and 3) Spyware - reporting all sorts of telemetry back via the Cortana service. Finally (and this is a biggy) 4) backwards compatibility - what is the point of Windows if you must re-buy all the applications? People would switch en-mass to Mac or LInux. Yes, there's some die-hard Windows zealots out there (see neowin.net for instance, or /r/windows on Reddit), but IMHO, if you take their applications away, users will have zero loyalty to you.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[thegarbz]

The problem is that it will now read LF, but any new line you put into the text will still have a CR+LF.

So don't edit python scripts. Seriously though if you're doing something sensitive to CR vs CR+LF then Notepad is the wrong thing to use to edit a file and you'll know it's wrong too. The biggest problem with CR vs CR+LF is being unable to read files (a universal problem) and not that the LF will break the system (a problem that affects an incredibly minor set of possible scenarios exposed to an incredible minor part of the userbase and a part of the user base that is a) most equipped to handle it, and b) likely refuses to use something like notepad anyway ).

That's worse than nothing in my opinion. A typical Microsoft "solution".

Sounds like your opinion may be moderated by applying the genetic fallacy to the solution.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[timftbf]

The first tech book on Unix I owned had a section on how you couldn't rely on this newfangled "vi" thing being available, or working from the console, on every system, and both taught and suggested as a default "ed", which is available everywhere.

I have recovered a very minimally-booting system with "ed" in anger. I don't want to have to do it again any time soon.

(Also had a great chapter on the joys of booting, and how to use repeated dcheck / icheck iterations to repair filesystems - unless you were on a *really* cutting-edge system that had the new "fsck" utility!)

Re:Notepad++ ?

[jittles]

All users caring about line endings had probably migrated to Notepad++ 10 years ago, right ?

Nope. I just don’t open up anything but Word documents on my Windows machine. Visual Studio already handles the line endings, though it does always try to convert to Windows line endings.

Re: Notepad++ ?

[Baloo Uriza]

I've been suggesting they do that for 20 years now.

Re: Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely. I install tools reluctantly and rely on built in tools as much as possible. I can sit down at any machine and be productive.

Notepad++ would be great if it were built in, it it's not, so I won't cripple myself by becoming dependent on it.

Re: Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You misread the article.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[thegarbz]

That's worse than nothing in my opinion. A typical Microsoft "solution".

This typical Microsoft "solution": "New files created within Notepad will use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default, but it will now be possible to view, edit, and print existing files, correctly maintaining the file’s current line ending format."

It actually is funny to see prejudice just blow up in people's faces.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...

Re:Notepad++ ?

[fisted]

Don't get me wrong, I too have to fiddle with a windows machine every now and then. I still don't see a need to carry around a usb drive with tools, I only need one tool anyway (an ssh client) and I told our actual windows guy to roll out putty by default to the clients, problem solved

Re:Notepad++ ?

[fisted]

Yes? Both other relevant (or semi-relevant) desktop OS would be Apple Windows and GNU Windows, both ship an ssh client by default last time I checked.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Tenebrousedge]

Well yeah actually, because with Unix you either SSH into the box remotely, or your toolkit consists of a single liveUSB. Real Unix Admins(tm) can restore the whole system from deletion with a half-working copy of cat and no filesystem, of course.

Re: Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

???? I do this all day in Unix. I SSH into boxes and set up config files or tweak them. Am I doing something wrong?

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geany works better for me, the gtk+ runtime dependency is small and included in the installer (last time I checked the installer was only ~5MB).

Re: Notepad++ ?

[datavirtue]

I hope to fuck that guy was trolling.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this new version as the equivalent of "vi" on Unix. Its pretty basic and there are better editors available, but it is virtually *guaranteed" to be installed and available.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[spitzak]

Virtually every program in the world handles just LF or CR+LF the same (some may think the CR is a whitespace before the LF, but this does not affect their behavior). Even on Linux, due to the need to deal with files from Notepad. Therefore the combined output of notepad will work. What this does mean is that output from other programs is viewable in notepad.

I agree it would be nice if they just made it output LF only, but the reason is so they can get rid of "text mode" file I/O.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stay away from windows users

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Billly Gates]

In 2018, Microsoft VS Code editor and Atom.IO are easy to use and very powerful electron based text editors and are free and multiple platform. No you did not misread that as VS Code editor is not Visual Studio but a fork of Atom.IO.

Re: Notepad++ ?

[brantondaveperson]

Yes, I'm afraid you are. Configuration should be centrally managed, but alot of the time an infrastructure will grow past the point at which this could have been cheaply implemented, and will wind up in a situation like you describe, and will eventually need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Re:Notepad++ ?

[Gollent]

Notepad++ definitely the best platform.

Mac OS and macOS?

[MichaelSmith]

Wow. How are they different?

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X is Unix. macOS is not.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Carewolf]

No, MacOS is ancient, macOS is new..ish.

Yeah..

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Yaztromo]

By "Mac OS", they mean versions of Apple's operating system prior to version 10.0.0

By "macOS", they mean all versions since (and including) 10.0.0.

(Apple renamed Mac OS X to just "macOS" a year or two ago, to better align with "iOS", "tvOS", and "watchOS" naming, as well as to move away from marketing the OS as "version 10", which they had already done for over 15 years).

To confuse matters somewhat, early versions of macOS (OS X) could run Mac OS software that used the old-style CR-only line terminator, so the line demarcating the change isn't exactly clean.

Yaz

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually macOS is Apple's current official name for what used to be called MacOS X. Have a look at their current page for High Sierra and it's got macOS everywhere. The older non-Unix OS was referred to as MacOS, so TFA was correct.

The two do actually have different line endings as well. macOS, like typical Unix uses a linefeed, while the old MacOS used only a carriage return. I have no idea why Notepad would add support for old MacOS line endings today though since Apple hasn't supported them for over 15 years now.

Re: Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this page, it is still UNIX-certified

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3632.htm

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[MichaelSmith]

And did the line endings change between < 10.0.0 and >= 10.0.0?

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS != macOS

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they were completely different operating systems despite looking similar. Old MacOS = 10.0.0 uses a linefeed like any typical Unix.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welp, something went wrong in the editing there. But yeah, old MacOS used carriage return only, while the new macOS uses linefeeds.

Re: Mac OS and macOS?

[DonkeyG5]

âoeFunâ fact: in 2012 they changed Max OS X name to OS X and then, in 2016, they changed the name to macOS.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[cstacy]

By "Mac OS", they mean versions of Apple's operating system prior to version 10.0.0

By "macOS", they mean all versions since (and including) 10.0.0.

(Apple renamed Mac OS X to just "macOS" a year or two ago, to better align with "iOS", "tvOS", and "watchOS" naming, as well as to move away from marketing the OS as "version 10", which they had already done for over 15 years).

To confuse matters somewhat, early versions of macOS (OS X) could run Mac OS software that used the old-style CR-only line terminator, so the line demarcating the change isn't exactly clean.

Yaz

iConfused

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[arglebargle_xiv]

And mAcOs is kinda lumpy, while MacoS is either a suspension bridge or a Filipino meat dish.

Re: Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they had an intern they needed to keep busy for 15 minutes, so they told her âoedo this just like for 0x0A, but now for 0x0Dâ.

They then spent 14 days trying to figure out the 0x0D0A edge case.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Bongo]

You can export a tab delimited file from FileMaker today, and still get CRs.
It's like, cute and quaint.

Ah, fond memories of booting Mac OS X Cheetah (or was it public beta?) on a Quadra 8500 with 130 odd MB of RAM, and it not crashing the whole system whenever an app crashed.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Xenolith0]

MACOs are a specially trained combat wing of the Earth military.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mac OS" does not exist.
There's:
MacOS (old OS, sometimes called "classic")
Mac OS X (unix)
macOS (same as Mac OS X, but new name to fit in line with iOS, tvOS, watchOS)

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Powermac 8500. Quadras were 68040 based and never ran any version of OS X. (Some people might have been able to shoehorn it in with a PowerPC upgrade card and lots of hacks, but I doubt it. I don't think OS X even supported the NuBus Powermacs; at least not past 10.3.)
They also had 3-digit model numbers. The beefiest Quadra to ever ship was the Quadra 840AV. [I think it had a faster processor than even the 900-series] which came in a tower that looked similar to the 8000-series Powermacs. I wish mine didn't die. It was a nice machine.

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[bn-7bc]

Neice to see another Star-trek enterprise fan have a nice day, Backl on topic, nice to see notepad catching up

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[laffer1]

It does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[mfnickster]

Cheetah required a minimum of a G3, and upgrade cards were not supported - though I vaguely remember a shim system extension that would allow you to boot it on unsupported G3 Macs...

After trying MkLinux and Mac OS X Public Beta, I got a Quadra 800 on eBay and installed A/UX 3.0, which I really liked!

Re:Mac OS and macOS?

[Bongo]

Ah yes, thanks!

Odd

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, great; but odd. I guess it is to go along with the Linux Subsytem.
It is just odd that they would leave this out forever on purpose and then suddenly fix it. It has been literal decades, and the absence was obviously malicious.

Anyway, great!

Re: Odd

[Monster_user]

Ubuntu is now an officially supported part of Windows.

Re:Odd

[MrKaos]

It is just odd that they would leave this out forever on purpose and then suddenly fix it. It has been literal decades, and the absence was obviously malicious.

Cloud is king and the writing is on the wall. You don't take you lead architects of core products unless your business strategy is changing. This is just another sign of the inevitable.

Re:Odd

[Buchenskjoll]

Which line endings should I use when writing on the wall?

Re:Odd

[Megol]

Yes this is probably yet another advantage due to the Linux subsystem and therefore (indirectly) Linux.

Re:Odd

[Megol]

You are a modern human right? So you use Unicode, right?
U+2029

Re: Odd

[tepples]

Ubuntu Server, yes. Anything that relies on the presence of an X server, not quite yet. WSL users trying to run GUI apps have to obtain an X server elsewhere, which usually means a decade-old copy of Xming.

Re: Odd

[Anonymous Coward]

the xserver in mobaxtrerm feels relatively up to date

Re:Odd

[MrKaos]

hmmmm, I try to go for a current model so you can get parts for it. I mean it's cheaper if it's end-of-line but it's much harder to get parts.

-- Make America hate again!

clever sig you got there.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

For years I've used notepad just for this reason: remove and drop all unix lineendings. That way I knew I never ended up with a mixed-line ending document.

Re:Why?

[TheRealQuestor]

same here. Good thing you can just copy notepad.exe from an older version and run it on the newer Win10 to be able to use it for that ::) it doesn't have any real dll depends and is standalone so it works as is.

Re:Why?

[fisted]

Good thing you can just read TFA and learn there's an option to retain the old behavior

Re:Why?

[TheRealQuestor]

Good thing you can just read TFA and learn there's an option to retain the old behavior

I "could" RTFA but then I would not be able to post something stupid. Sigh. I'm just gunna fire up RS5 and play around with it instead :)

Re:Why?

[jabuzz]

"man unix2dos" and for good measure "man dos2unix"

Windows a legacy OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Through and through.

Re: Windows a legacy OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, Windows is now a service.

Why has it been an annoyance?

[91degrees]

Notepad is a small simple text editor that exists because occasionally you might need to edit some text files (typically for config files or something). These will be in a Windows friendly text format. It doesn't pretend to do anything remotely sophisticated.

If you want to do something more complex then download a non-minimal text editor. There are loads available for free.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Carewolf]

Imagine those config files are shared with non-windows computers.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

You answered your own question. You wont have to download and second this is a basic feature of a text editor but I guess you think word wrapping is a power usermode.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

mac and linux have simple editors (even simpler than notepad) with syntax highlighting. Notepad is not simple (not simpler than textedit in mac or nano in windows), it's simply a bad editor, that's why is unable to tell EOL from anything but windows among other things.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Yaztromo]

Notepad is a small simple text editor that exists because occasionally you might need to edit some text files (typically for config files or something). These will be in a Windows friendly text format. It doesn't pretend to do anything remotely sophisticated.

That's great if you're the one running the editor and doing the editing.

What's not so great is when you give a co-worker a bash script, and they open it in Notepad, and then complain to you about all the extra spacing -- forcing you to waste a ton of breath explaining why it's not a problem with the text file, but an issue with their editor.

I once had to send a developer at my employer a SQL script intended to be run on Linux, and they did just this. It was unbelievable how long it took me to finally convince them that Notepad was the issue. And it wasn't just the double-spacing; they early had a fit because the file showed up as "ANSI" encoding in Notepad, whereas the spec said the file had to be UTF-8. So not only did I have to convince them (with lots of references) that Notepad was rendering CR/LF as two lines whereas UNIX systems treat them as a single line ending pair, but then I ALSO had to waste a lot of time convincing them that not only is there no such encoding standard as "ANSI" (a very long-standing bug in Notepad Microsoft has never got around to fixing), but that ASCII and UTF-8 are identical for values between 0x00 and 0x7F (which every byte in the document were within).

It was extremely annoying, because even with lots of links to references as to why they shouldn't be using Notepad for UNIX text files in the first place (and why you can't trust its encoding field), in the end I couldn't convince them. Our DBA eventually had to tell them the file was just fine as-is. And sadly, this wasn't the first person I've had this problem with.

As such, as a non-Windows user I'm rather happy for this change. I can't believe how many developers I run into who have no notion of line termination or the actual details of encoding standards, and who simply trust whatever Notepad tell them. Hopefully it will save me some aggravation in the future.

Yaz

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well some modern CAD software has evolved from 1980s workstation software (in some cases even further back, I'm looking at you, SciCards!) and by default, the Windows version uses Notepad as an editor for editing config files?
So no, these will NOT be in a "Windows friendly text format".

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[thegarbz]

Notepad is a small simple text editor that exists because occasionally you might need to edit some text files (typically for config files or something).

Just because it's simple and occasionally used doesn't mean it can't be annoying. Also just because there are alternatives doesn't mean I'm going to install them on every computer I touch (or even can install them). ... And Wordpad is now a mess.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[ET3D]

I've often encountered downloaded text files which aren't Windows-formatted. While there are many alternatives that do handle line ends correctly (the most readily available in Windows is WordPad), Notepad is a default for various file types and this added support will certainly help.

This really isn't something basic, not something sophisticated, and there's no particular reason not to include it. While Microsoft is very late to the party, it's a definite case of 'better late than never'.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[phantomfive]

What happened to Wordpad? I used to use it fairly often.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[CrashNBrn]

Compliant programs write UTF-8 files with a 3byte BOM (marker) at the beginning of the file.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[fisted]

Fuck BOMs

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compliant to what?
The UTF-8 standard recommends to not include a BOM.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[thegarbz]

Nothing really. It just isn't the program it used to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You can change some settings force it to look like normal, live with the ribbon, but more fundamentally: It isn't the default text editor. None of this is really a problem, it's just irritating: Help some, open explorer, double click, "crap", close notepad, right click, open in word pad, change the view mode and the wordwrap settings, keep doing what it is you were doing in the first place.

Notepad not screwing up every file you use it to read is just one less hassle. It doesn't solve an unsolvable problem.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they don't.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Serious question, why did you waste your time explaining things to him?
Just tell him it's correct and if he isn't convinced he can fix it himself.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Reminds me of the time I had to convince a Economics professor. It was a three level course, HS307 or something, Intro to Economics. The solution to the test problem was the equation of a straight line. I gave it in y = m * x + c form. His answer key had this in A x + B y + C = 0 form. Would not accept any of my explanations. I said, " 0.5, 1/2 and 50% are all the same thing" and he had fits, he claimed they are all different. He grudgingly offered partial credit. I had to walk him to a math prof's office and have him convince this dude.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck BOMs

Fuck BOMs, fuck BOMs
You're my fuck BOMs
And baby you can turn be OMs

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

.5 and 1/2 and 50% can have different meanings regarding significant digits.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. a UTF-8 compliant document contains only valid UTF-8, nothing invalid. A BOM may be valid UTF-8, but it is not needed. A pure ASCII document, as originally mentioned, is by necessity also valid UTF-8. That backward compatibility is one of the great things about UTF-8, there is lots of ASCII around.

Something that start with a BOM may or may not be valid UTF-8. Could also be a binary that happens to start with a BOM, but also have lots of code that can't be interpreted as UTF-8.

An editor that wants to be sure, may scan through the entire text (which it does anyway in order to display the first page). It will then know if it is valid ASCII all the way, valid UTF-8 all the way - or some other supported encoding all the way.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[mjwx]

Notepad is a small simple text editor that exists because occasionally you might need to edit some text files (typically for config files or something) on a machine that is not yours so doesn't have Notepad++ installed. These will be in a Windows friendly text format. It doesn't pretend to do anything remotely sophisticated.

If you want to do something more complex then download a non-minimal text editor. There are loads available for free.

TFTFY. If you're regularly editing text files, Notepad++ (or a contemporary) is essential. Notepad is for when you don't have anything like Notepad++

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of that happened. Notepad does not render CRLF as two lines, and neither does Unix.. Notepad ignores single CRs and LFs. The text continues without a linebreak. Unix shows superfluous ^M symbols at the end of each line when a text file uses the CRLF convention instead of the Unix-typical LF only.

Re: Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

ASCII, as you mention, is a 7 bit character set. Before Unicode, there were 8 bit character sets that contained extra characters needed for languages besides English such as é in the Western Europe code page 1252. It is Calle ANSI because it was based on a standards draft that eventually became ISO 8859â"1, but they did deviate from the spec. At any rate, âoeANSIâ is not a Unicode encoding, and is not portable to other Windows systems using other code pages (such as Cyrillic 1251 as the code points are reused). 16 or 24 bit character encodings solves this more elegantly but is an implementation clusterfuck with endian issues and âoealternativeâ codings to compress all of the wasted 00 bytes since most computer text is still Latin alphabet.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try saying, "I'm sorry, that was a Wordpad text file."

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[glenebob]

You're correct about Notepad rendering CR/LF as a single break, but Unix is not a text editor. Notepad is the only editor I've used in modern times that cannot deal with mixed line breaks.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I need some help figuring out how to post without manually copying half my username into the body of my post, if someone could help me with this please, everyone else has this simple thing figured out but me.

Yaz

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Windows insists on making Notepad the default application to open text files despite attempts to tell it otherwise.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[glenebob]

Wordpad is not a text editor. It's a *choke* word processor, and quite easily even more bad at doing its job than Notepad is.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[thegarbz]

Well Microsoft can't fix stupid people. Look on the bright side, due to this issue someone learned something, even brighter would be if you consulted at the time, because then that also translated to billable hours :)

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck would they have different meanings?

They all mean "HALF" of something.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Microsoft can't fix stupid people.

So where is the point in hiring every single one of them then?

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[tepples]

Perhaps the partial credit was that you couldn't recite or improvise a proof that B for any slope-intercept form line is always negative 1.

Proof:

y = Ax + C
y - y = Ax + C - y
0 = Ax + (-1)y + C

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

a ton of breath

That's about 1000 cubic meters of air, FYI.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is absolutely nothing "complex" about properly handling line-endings in all used formats. It boils down to like 4 lines of code, and it's something users should expect from even the most basic of basic of basic of text editors.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[goose-incarnated]

Compliant programs write UTF-8 files with a 3byte BOM (marker) at the beginning of the file.

No. Compliant programs *can* use the byte order mark but it's not required for compliance.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't true anymore. Windows Subsystem for Linux is gaining a lot of adoption, and it's actually this reason that Microsoft decided to finally support other line endings in Notepad.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[think_nix]

nano does this as well, as well as vi now (vim , not lightweight) I wont mention emacs, well because.

Re:Why has it been an annoyance?

[spitzak]

No they do not. The BOM is probably the biggest obstacle to getting I18N and Unicode working on Windows, and it is leaking into Linux from there as well.

The BOM is a parser error for many programs that can handle UTF-8 fine. Even if you fix the parsers you have to deal with embedded BOM from concatenation, and you have to deal with other programs having (like the #! parser) not agreeing with you.

Never ever ever write UTF-8 with a BOM unless you are copying a file with a BOM in it.

CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

You want the carriage to return and the paper moved up by one line, not print over the last line (CR only) or continue at the current position one line down (LF only). Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 90's dot matrix printers had the option to automatically do a carriage return on line feed, and, if I remember correctly, that was usually turned on by default.

I suspect (but I'm not old enough to actually having used those) that the teletypers unix is born to be interfaced with also had auto CR on LF by default, which would explain why unix choose that behavior.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I forgot to say, in the 70s sparing a single character for every line would have been an essential optimization, since they had 150 or 300 baud rate connections at best, so I can't blame whoever choose to use one char line endings that if the teletyper allowed it.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Bert64]

When printing sure, but most text won't be printed and is just edited electronically. Using a single character makes more sense as it reduces file size, especially if you have short lines.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

" since they had 150 or 300 baud rate connections at best"

Maybe home users, but are you seriously suggesting that's as fast as anything went in the 1970s? Seriously?

The Interface Message Processor in the late 1960s was already using 50kbs links.

http://www.walden-family.com/p...

You really should learn the history of computing; what they were already doing in the 1960s is amazing.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[fisted]

Where can I find this paper version of notepad you're talking about?

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm aware of faster links existing at the time, byut that'ss irrelevant to what I was trying to convey.

A one byte per line optimization was an important one in the 70s and I can't accuse a programmer choosing to take advantage of it of having made a bad choice. Especially in the specific condition of the early UNIX development.

Also while faster links did exist common teletyper models were peripherals unable to handle such speeds.

Another fact you'r not considering is that UNIX at it's birth was a small underfunded project, developed on spare and slightly old hardware, so they were using oldish and low end peripherals for sure at least for the first years. That's the time when the "LF only" standard was set.

When writing my comment I didn't think I was writing a science paper for submission to this kind of nitpicking. I'll remember to avoid commenting here in the future.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

You want the carriage to return and the paper moved up by one line, not print over the last line (CR only) or continue at the current position one line down (LF only). Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.

Confusing a text file with printer driver communication is not "doing something correctly". Even in the 60s, there were "format control characters" for the latter.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[halivar]

The deal for me is that, as an old MUD coder in the late 90's, I am so used to the VT100 convention that the Unix way of doing it baffles me. I'm too used to doing \n\r.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[jabuzz]

Even today it would make a difference on the web. This page that I am typing in is according to a combination of wget and wc 1213 lines long. That is 1.2KB less if using a LF formatted HTML file over a CR/LF formatted one. Multiply that by all the CR/LF formatted files being shoved around the internet and I would imagined it comes to many TB a day.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Reduces file size?

You have to be joking of course. That is a 20th century problem.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

The deal for me is that, as an old MUD coder in the late 90's, I am so used to the VT100 convention that the Unix way of doing it baffles me. I'm too used to doing \n\r.

Apparently the Windows way of doing it (\r\n rather than \n\r) also baffles you. What are you going to do when nobody needs teletype service technicians any more?

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Using two characters to do the job that's done by one character in every other system, just to maintain backwards compatibility with typewriters. That's Microsoft for you!

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Registered Coward v2]

You want the carriage to return and the paper moved up by one line, not print over the last line (CR only) or continue at the current position one line down (LF only). Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.

It's a holdover from the old mechanical printer / typewriter days. Since the LF and CR were handled by separate mechanisms separate commands allowed controlling them independently when needed.

While in general you wanted a CR and LF, they also had utility themselves. A LF allowed advancing paper without activating the CR mechanism if a CR was not needed, while a CR allows you to over print and blackout text, such as a password.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Misagon]

Specifically, it is a holdover from the Teletype Corporation telegraphs. Previous Murray telegraphs had used a single "Line" code for a new line.
The Teletype machines were electro-mechanical and while a character could be typed relatively quickly, the printer's carriage return operation was slow.
The "Line" code was split into two codes to allow the printer to keep up!

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[kangasloth]

It's not just a holdover: it's also a compromise after different OS builders tried to simplify things the same way without coordinating and whose arbitrary choices happened to conflict. Once you have unixy LF and macish CR in the wild, reviving the old CRLF admixture made an equally unhappy compromised. That compromise was baked into telnet and subsequent protocols. By the time Microsoft brought MS-DOS to market, CRLF looked like the sensible, standards-compliant choice.

I am mostly summarizing the old EOLstory, which says it better.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to bet that the Murry teletypes were the super expensive "line" printers - printing an entire line of text at a time, with 80 or 132 immovable print heads spread across the entire page. Whereas the cheaper teletypes were the old-school ball of letters or a serial matrix variety. Cheaper, but orders of magnitude slower.

For instance, most line printers are rated in lines per second (LPS), but most serial matrix are rated in characters per second (CPS). Even then, they all lie - the LPS and CPS ratings are based on barely legible fast draft mode. For legibility, you generally want Draft Copy or NLQ/LQ if you can afford the time/ribbon.
I know that doesn't apply to those thermal printers, but that's a whole other ball of wax, as the ribbon used is a once and done sort of affair.

Re: CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can use transport layer compression and not use premature optimization.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Registered Coward v2]

Good points. It's interesting to see how technological solutions prior to the development of computers and OS impact and influence decision made in the new technology, sometimes minor and other times having greater impact.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[halivar]

It's not a order of the characters that matters to me; as former email developer, I'm also used to standardizing on CRLF as per RFC. But there were enough non-standard clients out there that I was used to having to deal with either-or. What fucked it all up were those clients that only send bare LF's. "Be liberal in what you accept" except most of these were spam clients, anyhow.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll remember to avoid commenting here in the future

No, you're doing fine. Posting AC lets you ignore them slings and arrows; or lets you act as if they were talking to the other guy, who gives a f**k. So post away, and folks will be asking Who was that masked man?

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

NO. Unix had it correct. The only reason we have the stupid binary/text options in file APIs is because of sh*t like this. On Unix there is NO difference between a text and binary file.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

And IIRC so is the home position( 0,0 ) on the Windows screen. It's in the upper left corner because decades ago line printers were used and the top line was printed first. X11/*nix systems use lower left for 0,0 even though they've been around since the 80s too.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[pjwhite]

Don't forget to add some NULLs (0x00) following the carriage return to give the carriage time to slide all the way back to the beginning before sending more text.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

it's more of a "I don't have any valid counterpoint so I'm going to be overly pedantic"

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Solandri]

Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.

I suspect it wasn't a matter of doing things correctly, but rather had more to do with the limitations of computer technology at the time. Unix was written in the 1970s, when RAM and storage space were measured in single digit kilobytes or less. Some developer probably counted how many rows of text there were in all the text files of code he had written, and figured out that ~3% of the memory and storage space would be wasted holding the extra byte in the CR/LF combo. So he shortened it to just LF.

By the time DOS rolled out in 1981, 16-64 kB of RAM and 160 kB floppies were the norm. So DOS could afford to be more profligate with the space occupied by text files.

These sorts of constraints on storage space and processing speed forced programmers of that era to resort to innovative shortcuts to save a little bit of space or time here or there.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha +1000

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[spitzak]

Wrong. Many printers and video terminals interpreted LF as doing both CR and LF. Nobody can rely on LF moving straight down, and nobody did. The reason for CR+LF was to insure enough time was spent for the carraige to get to the left edge, by wasting an extra character time processing the LF.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[spitzak]

In the 70's a primary use of Teletypes was about 60 baud! (for wire services).

Believe me, there was INTENSE desire to use only one character for newlines.

The problem was that the mechanism for returning the carraige was slow, so Teletype forced the need to send a second character by making LF go straight down rather than to the left and down.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[spitzak]

No this is not correct. CR+LF was developed on CP/M and on early DEC microcomputers which were smaller or equal to the machines Unix was developed on. In fact CR+LF saved the need for code that translated one byte to two when printing to terminals that needed it, so in fact the limits of the machines actually caused CR+LF to be preferred. On these machines the idea of storing text long enough to have more than one line was probably laughable, too, so the space taken by a newline was irrelevant.

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[ProzacPatient]

While we are musing on obsolete mechanical computer commands, let us also not forget the Vertical Tab (0x0B).

Re:CRLF is technically correct

[Agripa]

You want the carriage to return and the paper moved up by one line, not print over the last line (CR only) or continue at the current position one line down (LF only). Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.

It was an accident; they copied from CP/M.

Finally, a reason to upgrade to Windows 10!

[johannesg]

Or will this be backported to Windows 7?

Re:Finally, a reason to upgrade to Windows 10!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or will this be backported to Windows 7?

Maybe... MS is trying to strangle all versions of windows prior to windows 10, but windows 10 telemetry have already been backported to windows 10 so you never know... :-)

I sometimes do PHP and HTML for fun in notepad... but only because I can... kind of like people using keyboards with blank keys and people wearing watches that display the time in unconventional ways...

I bet that there are also people that still write programs in assembler because they can, maybe even writing their binary directly in a HEX editor.

For more serious work I would always use Notepad++ (on a windows system atleast)

Re:Finally, a reason to upgrade to Windows 10!

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Or will this be backported to Windows 7?

This kind of functionality is only available to paying customers who want the latest and greatest Microsoft can deliver. This feature will likely get it's own bullet point on a "list of what's new in Windows 10-foo" power-point presentation that someone, who works for MS, probably in sales, and is very very sad, will have to sit through. There's a whole 'nother world out there. And it's awful. But, I can ignore it because I don't use Windows. :)

Relief?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like if notepad was used by those uses! It's more than dead for them for quite a few decades. Relief would mean they use it and have to deal with the pain regularly. Microsoft is optimistic as hell if it thinks this is the case.

Microsoft Push to Allow OS-independence

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a small sign of how Microsoft is embracing OS-independent software development and deployment. No, seriously! They finally got around to adding those several lines of code to properly support other end of line conventions. The code to do this is trivial and has been left out until now on principle alone.

BOM

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me again when they drop that stupid BOM at the start of UTF-8.

Yeah, I know that the Unicode consortium accepts that, but I'm sure this is a Microsoft misdeed. It looks like Microsoft, smells like Microsoft and quacks like Microsoft. This alone kills one of the nicest properties of UTF-8, namely that when you only have codepoints 0..127, it is equivalent to ASCII.

Somehow they manage to fat-finger most nice standards by stuffing the standard commitees with (incompetent? malicious? pick your poison) people.

I always have to think of that bastard child of Hanlon's razor and Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence"

Re: BOM

[Anonymous Coward]

Serialized / encoded data always has a magic number in the header. Isnâ(TM)t that the Unix way? You guys didnâ(TM)t like using the file system driver to store .txt.utf8 metadata. So here we are.

Re: BOM

[spitzak]

And the BOM breaks every one of those magic numbers by being there instead of them, stupid.

Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, for years, the internet has been routing around the damage via Notepad++, Notetab, Eclipse (...) or even vi on MinGW (gasp).

Excited

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft:

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have fixed this issue!

Really? They fix something that obviously should have been fixed decades ago and that is so hard that just about everybody else has had no trouble doing it right in their products and they get excited? I know it's marketing speak, but don't they realise they make themselves sound incompetent?

Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[najajomo]

'Microsoft's text editing app, Notepad, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, now supports line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices. "This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community,"'

You cannot be serious, what professional developer in his right mind would use Notepad?

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Gavagai80]

Developers have clients who aren't developers. I don't use Windows, but I'm happy about this change because occasionally I've had clients who wanted to edit one of my files in Notepad and would find it looking broken to them because of lack of line break parsing.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[thegarbz]

You cannot be serious, what professional developer in his right mind would use Notepad?

Close to 100% of them. Just not necessarily while developing. Kind of like just because vi is my editor of choice doesn't mean that I don't frequently end up on a test system opening something in nano or *shudders* emacs.

Developers especially frequently send files cross platforms onto test systems they don't administer and need to use a standard OS image. God forbid they remotely access a file on another system, or their main OS from another OS.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[BadDreamer]

You cannot be serious, what professional developer in his right mind would use Notepad?

Any developer having to do a change of an ini file or script on a locked down machine where no user software can be installed, such as a machine in a production environment or factory.

And any developer who has to guide a user in such a change over the phone or a remote connection.

Making Notepad actually useful is a huge step in reducing the pain of maintaining Windows based automation and enterprise solutions.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you tell them to right-click and select Open With Wordpad. Problem solved.

This update is going to be worse because if they open and edit with Notepad, the file will now have mixed line endings. Microsoft screws up as usual.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[ausekilis]

You cannot be serious, what professional developer in his right mind would use Notepad?

Those same senior developers that use pico and nano, I would assume.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, seen that. Developer created a PHP report generator all in notepad. Yes, there was a lot of cut & paste code, with loads of duplication across the hundreds of 1k to 40k line files - in one singular directory (PHP's require/require_once feature(s) leaves a little to be desired). The error 500 troubleshooting procedure demonstrated was to remove a section of code, save, test, and if if it ran, to undo and tinker with that section until it did run. Packaging that project was quite the experience.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone who wants a basic text editor for shell piping. An editor that doesn't insert random formatting symbols into your text. You don't have to use it to write million line programs for it to be a useful tool in development.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Bite The Pillow]

When you can't download or install anything, you use what's on the server you're on at the moment.

So many idiots here saying "just create a potential security problem" as the solution. No wonder every website ever has leaked personal info. You people are stupid.

Re:Notepad a major annoyance for developers

[Billly Gates]

Atom.IO, and even MS Visual Studio Code is free and available for all platforms for the win32 fanboys and are very simple to use unlike Emacs and gVIM.

Trailing Emacs by what? 25 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny enough to be just sad.

Wordpad

[nuckfuts]

I don't know whether it handles Mac OS files, but Unix text files open just fine in Wordpad (which like Notepad is part of every Windows installation).

Re:Wordpad

[drdread66]

WordPad works on Mac OS files just fine. I use notepad++ if it's available because WordPad defaults to a proportional font, which makes code and script really hard to read...but in a pinch, WordPad will do.

M$ web search, pollution of linux results?

[Anonymous Coward]

see this is what pisses me off..

in the near future when you search for linux/linux issues, up pops M$ and linux related articles. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK THAT.

and I don't give a shit what you think

Azure

[mccalli]

This is geared at people working with mixed deployment systems on Azure. And it's great. Honestly, this has been my most wished for feature in Windows for a long, long time.

Drop the negativity - a good and useful thing has just happened. Thanks.

Re:Azure

[skullandbones99]

Just wait until notepad corrupts your file when it writes the file back to disk in CR/LF format... and this will be classed as a "feature".

Re: Azure

[Anonymous Coward]

You are using windows for your cloud deployments? Even Microsoft using Linux in the cloud. You must be a serious die hard fan boy. geeesh.

Write

[fluffernutter]

MS write (or.. wordpad?) always supported it and came with windows free so it was never a big deal.

Windows EOL? MS-DOS EOL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Carriage Return (CR) + Line Feed (LF) was initiated since MS-DOS, later Windows.

Re:Windows EOL? MS-DOS EOL!!!

[peppepz]

Even earlier than MS DOS, IBM PC ROM BIOS routines parsed the CR and LF characters that way. And that behaviour was probably inherited from CP/M, which in its turn inherited it from the PDP machines of the 60s.

To be honest, the CR + LF line ending is closer to be a standard for text interchange than any other combination of CR and/or LF. Many IETF RFCs mandate the use of CR + LF.

The funny thing...

[Slartibartfast]

Is that edit.exe -- the console-based editor that came out with DOS 5.0 -- *did* support UNIX EOL. Go figger.

Re:The funny thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as unusual as you are suggesting. Back then, MS had their own Unix product, Xenix, so it makes sense that something from that era would support Unix line endings. Even Apple was in the Unix game with A/UX, but I suspect 1) A/UX config files were in Apple format, and 2) DOS Edit could not successfully open them.

Re:The funny thing...

[geekymachoman]

Most people in the past 20 years didn't care about edit.exe but many did care about notepad, even 100 % linux users like me.. when I had to move some shell scripts, or quick edit some files that were created on Linux, for other people of course.

Reason MS didn't do this earlier is because majority of people were using Windows .. and they wanted to mess with Linux users in one more way.. and to show to that user base that even simple things as TXT files don't work properly on Linux... just another attempt to cause incompatibility between everything UNIX and Windows (since they had majority of users, this works for them actually... or at least worked).

They never wanted to have Windows and Linux compatible... and they did everything in their power NOT to help the situation.. goes from boot loaders to notepad.exe taking everything else in between.

Re:The funny thing...

[Slartibartfast]

I have to disagree somewhat. While I will never be guilty of ascribing good things to MS while under Ballmer/Gates, once the web came along, UNIX EOL suddenly became righter -- or at least terribly common. I would have to say it was just sheer hamfisted bluster and pride, moreso than a desire to put the hurt on the (then) microscopic userbase of people like you and me.

But, really, barring an internal document showing this, it doesn't really matter what we think the reason was.

Re:The funny thing...

[omnichad]

Wasn't it edit.com back then and really just a loader that put qbasic.exe in text editor mode?

Re: The funny thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting.

Re:The funny thing...

[Slartibartfast]

Ha! I actually hesitated before adding the file extension for that very reason. I do believe you are right.

Winvi

[Anonymous Coward]

I use WinVI as a replacement for notepad. Standalone, small, starts immediately. Works like Notepad, but you can press escape to go into VI mode. And the handling of LF/CR is superb.

always puzzled me

[Anonymous Coward]

It always perplexed me why MS didn't just buy Notepad++ out for (relative to them) some pittance ages ago and bundle it standard with Windows. To me one of the apps an OS should most definitely include bundled is a solid text editor.

Of course I also say I don't know why they continue to push Edge and didn't just license Chrome and/or Firefox for inclusion by default. It would earn them a load of goodwill and get regulators off their back in a lot of ways and save them a load of money and obviously the whole approach of use the browser to promote OS market share failed.

Re:always puzzled me

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ is GPL'd free software. For a moment, I had a fantasy about MS providing users a script linked to a button icon that says "Download this free software that helps," then the moment passed.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when windows can read EXT4 filesystems, I mean it has only been around for 15 years, is an open standard which could easily have been coded for, and it would be just common sense to do so. Meanwhile linux has been able to read NTFS/FAT/FAT32 for 20+ years.

But oh yay, linebreaks, lookit all that progress..

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when windows can read EXT4 filesystems, I mean it has only been around for 15 years

Nearly 10 years, in fact.

Meanwhile linux has been able to read [NTFS] for 20+ years.

Around 15 years, depending on where you want to draw the "able to read" line. That being said, MS made a breaking change to NTFS 15 years ago, so it's not practical to expect more than that.

Your point still stands, of course.

For those (few) not understanding why 2

[Anonymous Coward]

For the few who don't know, or can't immediately figure it out, LF would change the line AT the current column (position) which was good for (among other things) rapidly positioning print head (or what ever) when you wanted it to not waste the time to return to the far left (I don't know what happened with bi-directional typing devices). CR would return the print head to the left which would allow double-strike making underlining possible (especially automatically) and also allowing two characters to occupy the same space (ie strike-thru, etc.). At one point there were games/contests for inventing 'symbols' made up of two or more characters. Of course this makes more sense when the print head (or key or whatever) is physically fixed in terms of what it can impress onto the page. So, in the context of not assuming a new line necessarily was always what was wanted after you got to the end of a line, having two characters makes some sense.

Re:For those (few) not understanding why 2

[skullandbones99]

Yep, that was the original idea of ASCII control codes to control teletypes and teleprinters over serial communication links.

Re:For those (few) not understanding why 2

[spitzak]

This is incorrect. LF was pretty useless for positioning because the machines lacked any method of moving the printhead to the left (other than CR). Backspace did not work.

The reason LF worked this was was to force data to waste the time of 1 character after sending a CR. If LF returned to the left and moved down (as it did on MANY devices) then cheap ones could not do this fast enough to be able to print the next character.

see comment

[johnsnails]

this app can break

Re:see comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you certainly typed words on the internet.

Akelpad FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

What about UTF8 ? Anyway Ive been using Akelpad much better.

small step for MS, big step for the humanity

[goe1zorbey]

Keep up the good work. Eyes waiting for "not trying to format any non-win partition on a drive"

WordPad stock plunges 17%...

[theodp]

...in after-hours trading.

Phew!, it only took 25 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Now let's fix the friggin Windows console(s).

Step one to being usable, done

[Opportunist]

Being able to handle large files by NOT trying to load a huge file into ram and only noticing after two minutes or 10 that it fails will probably take another 40 years.

huh?

[Torvac]

suddenly it got really cold down here for a moment

"vi -b" on the other hand ...

[devlp0]

"vi -b" to see the ^M end of line character and ^Z end of file characters of windows text files under *nix.

Still lacking.

[Anonymous Coward]

It still needs a lisp interpreter.

cockroach

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like announcing that the 2 star hotel across town finally got rid of its cockroach problem. Good news, but it doesn't make me want to stay there unless I had to.

Innovation ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see Microsoft is continuing their breathtaking pace of innovation, and implementing features they should have done over a decade ago.

So glad to see Microsoft is still a pioneer of the tech industry, instead of some stale old one-trick pony trying to remain relevant in the world as they increasingly decide what their customers want is irrelevant.

Nosirree, no turning into another IBM for Microsoft. They're innovating.

Does it support UAC now

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean,everyone who ever edits files in a secured folder has switched to notepad++, but UAC's been around for what, 10 years?

What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either my clock is broken, or I'm a time traveller. Whichever: WTF year is this?

Re:What year is this?

[skullandbones99]

Tis the year that M$ embraces Linux...

It is the year of Linux on the Windows Desktop.

M$ is now extending its support for all things GNU / Linux in a bid to extinguish GNU / Linux once and for all.

We recently discovered it was a major annoyance

[Anonymous Coward]

*not*

F-U M-S

the registry must be a nightmare

[reanjr]

Why does this need to be disabled ever? How is it ever better to ignore obvious line breaks?

Re:the registry must be a nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly, why bury it in the registry instead of making it a checkbox in the menu or preferences somewhere!?!?! Anyone who is using notepad and wants or needs to modify the behavior should probably stay the hell away from regedit (if they're competent enough for regedit, then they probably have a better editor on the system already, or they're using someone else's machine; and if it's the latter, they shouldn't muck with that persons notepad settings in regedit)

Re:the registry must be a nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Adding options in preferences will likely confuse users in general. I mean the users who used to the older versions' behaviour.

Re:the registry must be a nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this need to be disabled ever? How is it ever better to ignore obvious line breaks?

Because Microsoft is obsessed with backwards compatibility and there might be some unforeseen issue with changing how Notepad handles line breaks that affects a small number of users.

Re:the registry must be a nightmare

[Bite The Pillow]

English is left to right, not left to right CR LF left to right CR LF.

Re: the registry must be a nightmare

[reanjr]

But the default has changed. You think it's less confusing for novice users to figure out the old behavior is in the registry?

ProDOS, UNIX, and CP/M newlines

[tepples]

Mac OS 1 through 9 use the same newline as ProDOS on the Apple IIe: $0D.
Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.11 and macOS 10.12 to present use the same newline as UNIX: $0A.
Traditionally, MS-DOS and Windows have used the same newline as Digital Research's CP/M: $0D $0A.

The $0D $0A sequence dates back to the Teletype Model 33 terminal, one of the first terminals to use ASCII. It could process a carriage return ($0D) and a line feed ($0A) in parallel, but because a return took longer than a line feed, computers sent the return first, then the line feed, then a split second of pausing before the next character so that it wouldn't get smeared across the page during the return. If your Model 33 had the optional ASR paper tape drive, you might have had to use the delete key to insert the pauses yourself.

UNIX relied on terminal drivers to convert a newline to whatever sequence a particular terminal needed. CP/M just encoded what the terminal expected directly into an application. MS-DOS was originally a clone of CP/M (and DR-DOS was forked from authentic CP/M), and Windows was originally a GUI shell around MS-DOS. Though MS-DOS 2 was sophisticated enough to use these sorts of drivers, it had to remain compatible with applications designed for the much more CP/M-like MS-DOS 1.

Re:ProDOS, UNIX, and CP/M newlines

[Marillion]

And Microsoft Excel for Mac still saves CSV files with $0D line endings.

Re:ProDOS, UNIX, and CP/M newlines

[ProzacPatient]

Mac OS 1 through 9 use the same newline as ProDOS on the Apple IIe: $0D.

For a second there I though this was going to end with "For everything else; there is MasterCard."

Hey wait...

[skullandbones99]

I just heard that Windows notepad tried to replace MS-DOS edline (line editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), but failed as edline is still in Windows 10 !?

The great Notepad/Wordpad conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft could easily have made Notepad less bare-bones if they wanted. I think it was deliberately made minimal in order to push users with low computer literacy away from text files towards Word files as far as possible.

Unlike most text editors, Notepad provides ways to make text bold or underlined and change the font type and size. Use any of these functions and you'll be told to save to an RTF file to keep the formatting. The RTF file will then open in Wordpad. Open an RTF in Wordpad and save it, and you'll be encouraged to switch to Word format. So you end up using Word for everything.

Also, try to open a large file in Notepad and you get told to use Wordpad instead (although I think maybe they fixed this? not sure). There's no reason a text editor shouldn't be able to open large files, and certainly no reason why they should work fine in Wordpad but not in Notepad. Again, you are pushed towards RTF and Word files.

Viewed from this perspective, not handling Unix and Mac OS text files cleanly is a feature, not a bug. A naive user sent a Unix file that displays incorrecly will assume that there's a problem with the file, not with Notepad, and will trust text files less.

But nowadays this attempt to push the user to proprietary formats is old-fashioned. Normal users share text mostly using email software, messaging apps or maybe web interfaces, and only programmers really make any use of text files any more. So Notepad's crankiness no longer serves any useful purpose.

Significant figures

[tepples]

A fraction in ratio notation, such as 1/2, is assumed to be exact unless specified otherwise. A decimal, on the other hand, often represents an interval of real numbers based on significant figure conventions. For example, 0.5 means "anything that rounds to 0.5", namely the interval 0.450 to 0.550, and 0.50 means "anything that rounds to 0.50", namely the interval 0.495 to 0.505.

UNIX can count to vi

[tepples]

Unix is not a text editor.

A UNIX system includes the vi application, which is a screen-oriented text editor. The standard specifies its behavior.

and csv files are Excel files...

[gosand]

I gave up on convincing people of things.
I will simply state something repeatedly... like "csv files are not Excel files. They are text files with comma separated values." Just because nearly EVERYONE uses Excel to view them, sometimes with terrible results because then they SAVE them in Excel which can change the data, doesn't make them Excel files.

It's kind scary how things like that just become the de-facto standard. Then you get someone - a developer - trying to open and edit a 2MM row csv with Excel. While the developer was waiting minutes for the file to open in Excel... I opened it in vim, made the edits, zipped it up, and emailed it back to him. And people still think I am backwards for using the command line.

They should have just bought Notepad++

[aberglas]

GPL means they would need need to pay for it, but they would probably want to get the developers on board (not necessarily employed).

There are many other free utilities that they could add. WinDirStat is one. 7zip another. Very cheap ways to add value to the base O/S with minimal effort or risk.

ASR Teletype needed CR LF NULL

[aberglas]

LF must come after the CR because it takes more than 100ms to return the carriage. The LF can happen while the carriage is returning. But if it is beyond about column 40 then 200ms is still not enough, so you need to add a NULL.

Those machines really flew at ten characters per second. Marvelous engineering.

What Notepad really needs

[ayesnymous]

Auto backup in case the system crashes/restarts.

Or, worse yet, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Objective-Notepad :-)

That explains a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't been able to get a page of text to print correctly on unix in 30 years... Now I finally know why!

No, it's a joke.

The truth is that, on UNIX, CR is translated to a CR + LF in the terminal and/or printer driver. MS-DOS was such a toy that couldn't afford to have a terminal driver.

Sad

[sproketboy]

It's sad that it's newsworthy the Microsoft finally makes a small improvement to a 30 year old piece of shit app. Fuck you Microsoft.

Who freakin' cares now?!

[martinfb]

WordPad has always been able, and available.
How is this a slashdot-worthy notice?

Thanks Nadella!

[Anonymous Coward]

The NIH syndrome is finally gone. Bill Gates and Ballmer's evil influence is wiped out. We can trust Microsoft now.

(Actually who cares. No one uses that POS anyway.)