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Microsoft is Updating Windows Notepad Application For the First Time in Years (theverge.com)
Microsoft is giving its Notepad app for Windows a surprising amount of new features. From a report: You'll soon be able to do wrap around find and replace alongside the ability to zoom into text by holding down the ctrl key and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Microsoft is also adding in extended line ending support so that Unix/Linux line endings (LF) and Macintosh line endings (CR) are supported in Notepad. The status bar will now be enabled by default in Notepad, and it includes the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled.
posting old dupes on slashdot!
Didn't I read about it last month? No maybe the month before
That's the only version of Windows I use anymore.
jumping from 1991 to 2002 in a single version update
Did this happen during the last administration? I don't think so. Now that the Notepad Tax has been reduced, this is exactly the sort of reinvestment we should expect.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
LF and CR support is definitely the biggest plus for me. What took them so long!?
...because they use Notepad++ or Textpad or basically anything else.
Sounds like it will still be behind Notepad++ or even Textpad in functionality.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Hmm, [Windows]+[R] notepad [Enter]... Well I'll be!
I'd still rather use NotePad++.
Like Windows.
Imagine it like Notepad++, but less of a mess, and scriptable. The block mode is my favorite for everything where you want to work with columns. And I wonder why nobody thought of rendering then document as a wider scrollbar on the side earlier.
"Oh hey, look! A useful application that everyone has been using unaltered for almost 3 decades! You know what we should do? We should update it with a bunch of crap nobody asked us for! That is what the consumer truly wants; for us to make unsolicted changes by bogging down basic programs..... whats that? No, why on earth would we waste time creating useful error dialogue boxes? Nobody that uses windows wants to know any more detail than "Undefined Error", you're fired."
~ Actual transcript from a board conference call
Does anyone at Microsoft understand that Macintosh line endings haven't been CR for over 15 years? Macintosh is now Unix. Has been since 2001. Please inform the Excel team too.
This is a boring sig
And once they get to highlighting, plugin support, multi-file support and macros, they might even get a handful of Notepad++ users to actually use theirs.
You know, Microsoft more and more reminds me of the retarded brother of someone. He's trying soooo hard to be as good as his idol, but he is at best adorable in his effort.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just the other day I was thinking, "What Notepad really needs is a ribbon, just like Microsoft Office!" I mean, how can people edit text without a ribbon? The barrier to entry is obviously too high. The absense of a ribbon probably also contributes to the gender gap. This may even be deliberate, given the well-established history of misogyny at Microsoft.
(this post is satire)
As a side effect, it'll probably go from opening in about .3 milliseconds to 15 seconds.
It's installed on every windows machine and always works and is very light. It's the one application that Microsoft really hasn't touched and guess what..it works the same as it always has.
Now they're touching it, it'll snowball and eventually be moved into an AppX application with a tiled interface with ribbons and Cortana build into it.
That would make it so many of us would start to use windows again after moving away.
If it was just a little more useful I'd have no reason to download something else.
Time to protest and loot a Starbucks. "Hands off my Notepad"
They could enter the future and copy Ubuntu's Unity design - it's actually pretty simple. First they need to remove all the controls and then... done. Ship.
It is ubiquitous
It is a really nice and easy way to strip all formatting/metadata from text. I hope they don't enhance it to include non-ascii data.
Hopefully it will have AI and Blockchain features.
What good is it if it doesn't give you code highlighting like vim?
Just wait until they add 3D support to compliment Paint3D!
Yay for 90s 3D text effects!!! They know we need it!
How is this even a news on ./ front page?
A modern minimalistic graphical text editor should be able to:
Now what about this new Notepad?
Notepad++ has MS notepad beat hands down.
It might have stopped me if it would've come earlier – as things are, I moved every remaining Windows machine in my jurisdiction to Linux during the past eight months.
While I welcome these essential additions I don't agree with those who say it should be as good as Notepad++: This is a basic tool included in an OS. It's there for when you don't have anything else. If you want something better just install it.
That said, with what they've done to basic apps in Windows 10 (Solitaire having to be downloaded from the Windows Store and having ads anyone?) (and general user hostile changes through Win 10) I don't trust Microsoft to not fuck up Notepad. If those will be the only aditions I'll be happy.
Being forced to use Microsoft software, I'm used to doing the wrap-around.
Wait, no, that's the reach-around.
...? I used the hell out of it.
As Windows matured, I moved further and further away from the OS, but DOS and PFE did some very neat shit for me back in the day.
Note: Although other good free editors probably exist now,
I've left this review here to possibly use as a comparison test,
or in case someone might still be interested in finding an editor
for older (Win9x?) 32-bit machines; probably with little memory.
Don't let the title fool you! This editor is not just for programmers.
It has all the standard functions that any good text editor should have and a whole lot more! This excellent program is free for any use!
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
How will that work when the Magnifier is used? It better not interfere with the Accessibility options. There is no better way to piss off visually impaired users than to fuck with their tools....
Solitare and Minesweeper are now malware.
Calculator used to be useful in scientific mode you could at least move between hex and decimal.
That's no longer available in scientific mode and the behavior of programmer mode the only one with hex representation option is ridiculous. In this mode 4/3=1 yea because as a programmer I EVER wanted a calculator to emulate integer math. I only discovered this wasting an hour of my life trying to debug something only to realize the fucking calculator was conspiring against me.
That's when I dug up an old version of calc that BTW uses 6 times less RAM and is actually useful.
Notepad is one of the few remaining tools that are useful exactly because it is simple and not some gignormous npp machination. I really like unix file format support in notepad yet I have zero confidence Microsoft won't keep going ... add ribbons, inject ads, "cloud integration" make it render html, xml, json, context highlighting..blah blah blah...why not, they ruined everything else. Why not finish the job?
If it didn't use (LF) or (CR) what the hell did it use?
They are updating the Notepad app for Windows on the mobile phone. So which screen will feature that word wrap, I'm trying to get to that status bar by Happy Hour.
What a leap, I need that
it better be win32 or least keep the old one around.
there needs to be an basic text editor that does not need the store framework.
It looked like WordPad was the replacement for Notepad but Notepad did not pollute files the way WordPad does so it lived on.
This must be the year of the Windows Desktop!
These seem like minor changes but they are the most important ones. First thing I install on any computer I use regularly is win32pad which is old itself but is what Notepad should have been.
Unix land ending support and displaying the line #'s/cursor position are must haves in a text editor.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I love notepad. Opens in an absolute flash, I can type something super quick, and save it for later. No stupid modules to load, never had an error or crash, it just does *exactly* what it's supposed to - it's a quick place to jot down a note. I love the program. I use it all the time.
... interpret keyboard/mouse events to zoom the displayed text? I'd think that would be better done by the OS+windowing system and made available to all applications (it would be a boon for the sight-impaired, no?). MS would rather this have this re-implemented in every application? This seems to go back to the days when each and every Windows application had to re-invent printing. Having problems printing from WordPerfect? Did you configure the print settings? Trouble printing from that whiz-bang graphics software? Did you configure the application to be able to print to your particular printer? Big step backwards. But that's just my HO. (But, in the end, I couldn't care less as I don't use Windows any more.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
MS VIM or MS Emacs
I wonder if this will be the first text editor to send every single e-mail address or phone number you type in back to Microsoft.
-Telemetry
-More Telemetery
-Data "personalization" , ie: more telemetry
-Relevant "ads", via more telemetry
Still needs word and character count
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Oh joy, Microsoft's programmer is busy fixing an app no-one sensible uses any more, while File Explorer STILL doesn't use the flag MICROSOFT added so that apps could handle long file paths.
Maybe they should hire another programmer to FINALLY fix this GLARING bug that affects MILLIONS OF US ?!
There are free text editors available for windows that have spell check built in to them (and have for many years). I know it's not necessarily the driving point of notepad but it can be useful.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...I thought Notepad was one of Windows' better applications.
I'll use vim thanks. Now put it back the way it was and give me the old mspaint as well. No need to annoyify the hand full of useful application windows still had.
Wow, nothing points out a stagnant company who has lacked innovation for years than updating what by now has to be a 20 year old piece of software.
Go Microsoft! It's stuff like this which will keep you great for years to come! Imagine, being able to see what line and column you're on in a text file!!
Holy fuck is this pathetic. Is Microsoft really this lame these days?
Can we now get to a world where everyone uses Unix line endings? Where we can get rid of the reams of stupid code everywhere to deal with differing line endings? Where we stop wasting thousands of man-hours on line endings issues? Please god can we do this now?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
So, notepad is finally getting the features that every CS student added when they wrote their own version in C++, C#, VB, etc. 20 years ago in college? Brilliant! LOL
Who still uses this shit? People use Sublime, NotePad++, or Atom these days. Default Windows text editor is complete shit.
Notepad now reads your notes to feed the microsoft AI ... its hungry ... and serves you relevant ads based on your notes. Now 9000% slower to open.
be now?
Who wants to be that there will have to be another update to fix new bugs after this?
Will it also support my .emacsrc ?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Zawinski's Law demands it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Notepad.exe works.
Created back in a day and age when you were expected to publish correct intact code, the first time.
If only your professors let you constantly "update" your Exam Answers months after you took the test...
For anyone who wants a complicated version there is Notepad ++ Most people will want an actual notepad-like app, with tiny footprint, if they are using the default Notepad. Stop the bloat!
Well, don't forget Microsoft's take on ed. If you don't have any Windoze at hand, here's my packaging of FreeDOS' remake.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I still use it regularly. Or I did. Oh well.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
adding new bugs!
Really??
No sane person would be so stupid to code for Windows and on Windows!
Of course, since by far the most "people" are utter retards, you will argue that there are many "sane people" doing it. Sorry, they violently attack me every time I try to make them act like ... people. They prefer not to be people, but drones, livestock, humanoid automatons, ... something like that. So no, they are neither sane, nor, by their own wishes, people.
When I worked at MS... back in 1998, the company internally had *4* distinct text editing code bases that it maintained. Notepad back then was old and pretty much left alone to bitrot--it was "good enough" for all it did.
I may just have to start using Notepad now!
I use Notepad for one thing and one thing only: to purge embedded formatting between applications (e.g., copying text from an email into a Word document). I have zero faith they won't ruin this simplistic app like everything else in the world now that used to work perfect but now is bloated, useless trash.
I don't understand this attempt to make Notepad into Wordpad, an app that already exists.
So Microsoft has finally employed a developer who is capable of writing code, rather than re-skinning the same old crap.
Your penis, losing your virginity at 65?
Why is that not a system-wide accessibility feature like on MacOS? That's been around for at least a decade...
Countless data has been lost on BSODs and auto-update reboots.
This is the most exciting news I've heard in a long time.
It has to have a plan to be good enough to replace Notepad++ or it is a waste of time.
Why not just use WordPad?
It already does all of that stuff, and more.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
If I'm working on windows for some reason, I use vim.exe. I use vim because I know how to use vim, but if you're a novice, all you need to know is i and esc and vim.exe with the menu enabled is equally as lightweight as notepad and useful in the same ways. Unlike notepad, you can look up little vim snippets online for solving more complex problems.
and pre-OS X Macintosh line endings (CR)
FTFY.
CR (ASCII 13) has not been the Mac line ending character since the 20th century. It's been LF (ASCII 10, same as UNIX) for almost 20 years now.