I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.
For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.
Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.
It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.
Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember those?) had a cow and my lead pulled out all of the changes.
I'm still at MSFT, now as an architect, so it turned out not to be a career limiting move, but I certainly should have discussed my plans more broadly rather than just "cowboying" those changes in.
Small world, I worked with you on the Windows Update team. Hope you are doing well. Good to see you here on the HN forum. I also remember the notepad incident!
I love Notepad. I love the .LOG feature. I hit F5 for fun.
For some reason, the dead-simple text editors have always fascinated me. It's damn near good enough.
My app is even part of their compatibility test suite (they asked me for permission and a license).
I understand the need to move forward and that BW compatibility can be hinder that, but it's really frustrating for me to 1) respond to thousands of people asking why it doesn't work after they upgrade, and 2) lose income because there's nothing I can do to make it work the same in Windows 11.
Removing functionality is a bigger problem.
Well, it had a good run. Should such compatibility forever hold Windows back from making breaking changes to those APIs though? 20 years is an eternity in computing...
There is no "need to move forward".
See: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2018/12/10/announc... and https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
If the answer to any bug report is that the buggy behavior is now the baseline standard, what's the point in reporting any bugs?
For instance, Unix LF support was added to Notepad back in 2018 (at last!) with a few registry switches for compatibility.[1]
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
I'm not entirely clear whether the "current" API set called "WinRT" is the continuation of "Windows RT". It sounds plausible but it could just be Microsoft being terrible at naming.
Wait what, external software calls into notepad?
Patching other people's binaries, turning off features if the app making the request is "problematic-app", re-introducing bugs, fixing should-be-impossible-to-happen calls from programs that were written by hand, it's all there!
External software calls into everything. Welcome to Windows development.
It's extremely difficult to implement even "obvious" changes like a dark-mode Notepad when it could potentially break customers who have been depending on specific behavior for decades.
This is why they've had to write shim-specific code for certain vendors. The desire to move forward versus the awful prospect of having to keep those shims in place.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sees that some app calls an undocumented internal function, or has a bug that causes it to misuse an API call that just happens to still work correctly, or even worse, hooks into a system library or something, and considers that now to be a part of the public SDK that is to be maintained and made compatible with everything that might use it, forever.
- It consistently starts slower than Notepad3 while having substantially fewer features to load (and also slower than the old Notepad of course)
- THEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS (especially when grabbing the scroll bar handle). Any amount of delay is too much in notepad
- the animation runs at 60Hz even on a high refresh rate screen, so it looks choppy
- the animation has to "catch up" when grabbing the scroll bar handle and moving it quickly
- 215k lines loaded, moving the window itself is choppy now? HOW
- another first party piece of software that ignores the "no animations" setting in windows
- I've grabbed a notepad.exe from Windows XP SP3 in comparison, no problems there, scrolling and editing is instant. Both have SIGNIFICANT lag in the new one.
- Don't even try to resize the window with a big file open (< 1 FPS)
EDIT: Note that I haven't even complained about new features or anything, just the previous, basic features still working correctly.
I lost count of how many PMs I got to see on comunity meetings since the Windows 8 days.
They also pretend that all the rewrites that keep being requested since WinRT was introduced, and rebooted on the process, aren't a big deal.
When faced with these questions they always ask for us to explain our viewpoint, as if it wasn't clear for them to start with, of course it is clear, but they cannot say it live.
That's always the first feature I turn off if I start a clean web browser profile. I'm not even sure why "smooth" scrolling is a thing...
I'm curious what the difference in binary size is between the two, and with the one in Windows 10 (which does have some enhancements compared to previous versions, but the same good old UI.)
Overall, I'm very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It's not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It's more of a nicety to upgrade. It's better looking but functionally not much different afaik
Launching with rich text as the default is a bit slower. But hey, rich text.
And TextEdit is less than half that size if you strip out the translation dicts!
Not for me.
Opening textedit on macbook 13, with plaintext mode takes noticeable time to animate the window before I can start typing.
Opening notepad.exe on Win11 is instant. The window is on-screen and ready to take input, before my finger has lifted off the enter key.
Not to mention the silly bugs and lack of attention to detail.
Open a new file. Don't type anything, it will prompt you to save the file on close. Why?
They are pushing developers to it as well. See new WSL features as an example.
I do assume we can open files larger than a few megabytes now and there were some more functionality issues that seemed very 90s, could it be that there was only one undo step or did they already fix that in a previous release? I truly haven't used Windows in, dare I say, too long.
Edit: yes I did remember the undo problem correctly and that's finally fixed: "adding support for multi-level undo".
Please can we stop this trend? It's ridiculous. It universally makes the user experience worse by reducing the effective screen real estate for actual work. Nobody cares about the aesthetic, they get used to it after a few session.
If they are so set on redesigning Notepad and/or all system apps to use the new design style, why would those not be prioritized and included in the original release from day 1?
I don't think it makes much difference to the quality, some features are too big to fit in a single cycle anyway. The question is whether they have enough discipline to hold back projects that aren't ready. In this respect neither Apple nor Microsoft seem able to say no.
Emoji or gif support in desktop OS, sidebars or notification centers, all sorts of content or tasks suggestions, virtual assistants that are limited to only few languages, countless GUI changes or application redesigns that makes no sense or make the workflow worse. All of this is often presented as some breakthrough "experiences" that are about to fundamentally change user life - forever. And for quite some time I'm having a feeling that all of this is being done only to provide an illusion that someone does something, so the all decision-making people, CEOs would be satisfied that a product was improved. Maybe there are people who are impressed with such things or expect that these should be here but I'm definitely not.
Are you suggesting that a desktop OS shouldn’t support an input method for standardized Unicode characters? That would be incredibly annoying. Especially if you’re a developer working on programs that are supposed to handle said characters.
> Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years
(Good) UI scaling support? Dynamic refresh-rate support? eGPU support? Thunderbolt? Support for modern biometric authenticators like Windows Hello? Support for booting off a portable volume? Handwriting recognition in arbitrary apps? Basically 80% of accessibility features being finally pushed down into older software (with “dark mode” as a side effect)?
Yes, none of these things are from Windows 11, but none of them are more than 10 years old, either. People forget how many extremely recent OS features have immediately become table stakes to be taken completely for granted. (And this process is continuous. I’m sure there’s some accessibility feature being added to computers only today, that will enable people who never were able to use computers before to do so.)
Try using a modern Bluetooth gamepad with Windows XP / OSX10.6 / Linux 2.6 / other “perfect” OS versions some time. Even if you can get it to connect, it won’t even recognize all the buttons, because old APIs had hard limits on assumed number of buttons!
As such, Notepad, like other inbox apps, is now decoupled from the release cycle of Windows. It’s just some arbitrary app, that happens to be made by Microsoft, and happens to come with Windows.
When fix or feature is ready, it's moment to distribute it.
It's way better than Apple style feature hoarding to pad yearly OS release changelog with application fluff.
Windows XP use to have software to make shell look like anything. Only ever felt the need for skinning since windows 8 to go back to old UI which has clear borders and boundaries for everything including windows, buttons, menu bars, menus taskbar buttons...and lots of other things.
Is it harder to skin now? Why there aren't any software to give windows its classic look back?
I recall some of the marketing wankery around Windows 11 advertised it as being the "most diverse and inclusive". Maybe the designers were.
Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial? Why encourage or tolerate an operating system (slash ecosystem of apps) with such a limited view of choice? Announcements like this really lay bare the collective dumbing down that these centralized ecosystems encourage.
Someone's going to respond with "people don't like thinking about choices for things and just want simplicity," and I will point you to an American grocery store to remind you what utter BS that is. This is monopoly(ish) leveraging, perhaps not at its most harmful, but it's really silly.
"But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them." -- [which I didn't keep a source for, and searched back to http://www.garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html "The Command Line in 2004" but that looks like a more modern post about an earlier Neal Stephenson article]
> "Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial?"
It's a blog post on the "Insiders" blog[1], they seem to appear weekly. Why comment on this at all "from the Linux side" in one breath advocating freedom of choice, in the next breath condemning everyone who doesn't value what you value, or who does things differently to you?
Which is it, freedom of choice, or mandatory complexity? Freedom of opinion, or "that is trivial and I am correct"?
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/tag/windows-inside...
I'm saying it's ridiculous that Microsoft gets so much "air-time" over it and that professional IT people are paying attention as if this were something special, when it's not particularly difficult to do a really good interface that the user can dig in and modify if they choose.
I'm reminded of the "addition" of Dark Modes to things, as if flippin' Windows 95 didn't let you change your theme way way way back when.
https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsdevices
That, along with the tendency towards Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's law of triviality, means a lot of people care.
Android has a comparable number of users, but I think we should compare desktop PC systems here and in this case, Linux users have much lower expectations of Linux Desktop along with not being nearly as many users.
Specifically: Okay, bikeshedding. Bikeshedding is what it is for individuals and their own environments; I do it, sometimes it's a waste of time, sometimes not.
But this feels like bikeshedding on behalf of others, which is WEIRD for a tool like this. If you're an insider, than you probably have moved beyond, way beyond "Notepad for everything." If you're a non-techie, you likely don't use notepad at all, and if you do, not extensively in a way that makes this update interesting.
If you're in the middle (first, who is this even?) old Notepad or new Notepad is still probably something transitory.
The broad version of this is: IT generally does far too much in terms of trying to think about and creating dumb, unmodifiable and heavy handed entrenched interface designs for people who are not themselves.
Anyhow, this is not some huge announcement. I'm assuming it got voted up in hacker news because there's a humorous element to the whole thing, notepad being one of the more glacially-iterated-but-still-around software systems in existence.
Now how many people actually replace the radio in their car? Or the rims? Or the seats? A vast percentage of owners are very happy with the included version as they don't desire / require anything beyond that. It's not a monopoly, it's just including the basic features most users will be content with.
Now if they forced you to keep Notepad associated with TXT files then we'd have an issue. (I'm looking at you Edge)
(adding a note to address in comments likely coming about how media systems aren't easily replacable in cars anymore but I'm a child of the DIN radio era)
I would also be happy to always help out other people and share my changes with my friends.
And I do this when I can. Guess why I can't, now.
Come ON people.
No matter what the OS, the default editor is important. Changes to the default editor that address long standing demands by the community are important. Communicating those changes to a wide audience is important as well. (And the Linux side of the fence could stand to learn a bit about communicating with the wider community)
And that's why that article exists - because a tool used by a large user population just got significantly better. And that user population is mostly happy about the improvement. If you're not the audience, skipping it is an option.
So what I'm hearing is, there are changes in software that a lot of people wanted for a long time, but weren't allowed to have for some reason?
If only there were a model of software creation that let you fix that?
For anyone who hasn't seen these, I recommend them as well. The default calculator works fine for me, but "Simple File Manager" and "Simple Gallery Pro" are fantastic apps that strip out the typical cruft of these tools, and unlike some alternatives (looking at you, Amaze), have no tracking scripts or nag screens.
How slow is it on your machine?? I've also not had it ask me to rate it on the store. I don't think it even exists on the store.
The rating thing was real at some point, they might have removed it by now.
My point is, important things are getting noticeably slower for almost zero gain, even though the machines have gotten WAY faster. Something is not right.
I could have sworn it would have supported dark mode too. Was the old notepad using WHITE instead of the system window background color all that time?
not 1987
[1] When I post this, the only other comments are complaints. The ones that are at least complaining about notepad are complaining that MS had the gall to change notepad without pointing to anything specific.
Personally I think the best thing Windows 11 has going for it to stand out from more than just being a nicer coat of paint on Windows 10 is removing as much legacy things as possible and update to "modern" standards given they've already put a hard line in the sand regarding modern CPU compatibility.
You mean, a severely bastardized version of functionality that Windows had back in version 3.0?
It's just a pretty skin on top of the same Windows NT Window chrome. The modern UI skin is baked in with a bunch of none-sensical UX decisions.
I also hate how Windows' happy-path setup, does not encourage use to create and operate with a low privileged local account. Instead, if you click through the setup process, you end up running the OS w/ an admin level account.
In Windows 10 + 11, that prompt does not exist, if you are signed in with the admin account.
Instead they're trying to point people to sandboxed Windows Store apps, which is .. not going well.
Of course it's important with backwards compatibility but.. is it worth the cost?
- multi-cursor support
- tab to indent selection
- encoding selection
- fully controllable with hotkeys
- [optional] line numbers
- [optional] visible whitespace characters
- [optional] column ruler
- [optional] spaces instead of tabs
- [optional] unix-style line breaksI see zero benefit in 11. It breaks my workflow without additional apps. I have my taskbar with countless windows on the right side of my screens. This is not supported under Win 11 without 3rd party tools. All of power user tools are ever further obfuscated.
I have no idea how I got on all these years with square corners in my text editor.
Edit -> Search with Bing... (Ctrl-E)Multilevel undo/redo should have been delivered at least 20 years ago.
How about the ability to handle files with Mac or Linux style linebreaks? Wordpad can handle it but not Notepad.
How about showing recent files in File menu?
Really what Microsoft ought to do is to ship VSCode as the new text editor for Windows (after removing all coding features that might confuse end users). Retain the old Notepad for people who use it in established workflows, no point in updating it at this point because it is hopelessly obsolete.
I wouldn't be surprised to see many "new" functionalities being introduced to Windows tools in the near future, with the catch that you will lose out on performance for a multitude of reasons: like trying too hard on aesthetics, trying to emulate the tooling of entirely different systems, or maintaining backwards compatibility.
What are these "toolings" that are missing in Windows? I have found the opposite to be true. On Macos I need an app to properly snap windows, another app to make my mouse scroll properly, another app to have per-app volume control, another app to do poorly substitute paint.exe. Windows has all that and more, built-in.
Sometimes I just copy and paste file contents to local, edit, and write it to out with command line utilities or powershell.
It is here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-notepad/9msmlrh6lz... so where did that go and why it is not updated on Windows 10? Why is this exclusive to crappy windows 11?
To think that this feature is "new"...
I know notepad is supposed to be as simple as possible, a very fast default and always available text editor. But single undo is for me the single reason I always install notepad++ if I plan to use the computer in the future, or use Wordpad if not.
As the original Notepad was written in Win32 app, doesn't that also signed the death sentence for Win32 on Windows?
You're done writing a text file and go to save.
It's not there. Where's the save button? Oh, there has been another automatic update. You wonder what you have to do this time. You press Ctrl+S.
The screen locks.
"Microsoft Account is signed out"
Sigh. You enter your password.
"Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is Great!'"
Sigh. "Microsoft Edge is Great!"
A Sarcasm Error Has Occurred. Please Say It With Conviction!
"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAt!"
An acceptable performance! Please rate Notepad in the Microsoft Store to continue!
"1 star"
Why do you hate excellent products? Don't you want a fresh and modern editor? Hypothesis: Did you mean 5 stars? Please don't press the second yes option if you don't not mean this isn't your choice: No, Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes.
Uuh... Third Yes.
Great! Your rating has been corrected to 5 stars! Please verify it's you by saying 'Microsoft Edge is The Greatest And I will Name My Children Microsoft And Edge!'
"MiCrOSoFt EdGe iS gReAtEst And I Will NaMe my ChIlDrEn MiCroSofT AnD EdgE!"
Processing accounts and personal information. Security Alert! Inferior non-microsoft software detected on computer! Do you wish to replace them all with modern microsoft products? [ Yes ] [ Options ]
Options
* [x] Don't Replace The Other Software
* [_] Reverse The Above Option
* [x] Really Keep Other Software
* [x] I'm a cheating bastard
* [x] I'm aware Hitler didn't use Microsoft Edge either
* Security Options *
* [x] Remove browsers not developed by Microsoft
Wow, how advanced. For those of you who did not know, Notepad allowed exactly ONE undo step. ONE! In a frickin text editor.
Or their sample text was about chemistry and electron appeared in it.
This is simply absolute nonsense. Are you really contending that no real functionality has been added to Windows since Windows NT? I know HN loves to hate Microsoft but are we really upvoting this crap?
> only bloat to keep up with the need to create a need for faster processors.
Do people not see what their feelings towards Microsoft turns them into?
What have the Romans given us?
Perhaps the single funniest line ever penned by Microsoft.
Cannot imagine any “Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel” who use, let alone rely on, Notepad for any serious work.
EDIT: I stand corrected - mea culpa!
I am missing Paint and Notepad on MacOS when I just need something that opens in a millisecond and I can paste in something temporarily.
* search in all opened docs * find/replace with regex * tabs to space * line operations etc
Very useful, and for my workflows on Windows, indispensible (even alongside wsl or powershell)
just like solitaire: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs...
when was windows 11 released?
why do they act a small indie company working on a week-end school project?
this is so fishy..
If they’d build preview versions of all tools that Windows (11) contains, then release a new Windows 11 preview build any time a tool receives updates (after community feedback) and ask for more community feedback on all of these releases (probably talking a new Windows 11 version every single day) and release Windows only when all the tools and their changes have been deemed worthy/bug-free it will be 2029.
Like, these are the kinds of updates that would take one person a weekend to accomplish. Nor would that individual think to brag about implementing rounded corners. But the bureaucracy inside Microsoft is so sclerotic and hostile to excellence that even these changes require heroic allocations of effort.
So now they're finally (!) fixing some of these issues. They have a terminal that isn't a total embarrassment now. OK it's slow but at least the features are there. They are upgrade Notepad. They upgraded the Calculator. These projects are revealing weaknesses in their new round of Windows APIs but fine, whatever, at least they're dogfooding stuff now and it's not like the original Windows APIs smelled of roses either.
As a result, yes, they seem to be making a big deal about stupidly small stuff. But, whatever. I can forgive them for that. They all do it: GNOME makes fancy marketing material for changing icon themes or adding a dark mode to their settings app or whatever, Apple promote lots of trivial stuff as well. It's still better than the status quo of Windows development for the last 20 years.
I really only play games on my computer--I have no idea when I'll upgrade the CPU. The last one lasted nearly a decade before I replaced it. I guess it'll be a while before I see Windows 11. I'm not too mad though--Windows 10 is a fine Operating System.
You’re absolutely correct in that they ‘drew a line’. They have a specific set of guidelines[0,1] they want CPUs to meet going forward, and it’s more of a matter of ceremony and certification rather than anything concrete nor technical.
0. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...
1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...
[0]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97128/i...
I can see the logic in wanting to make the Windows codebase smaller/leaner/etc by wanting to get rid of the legacy stuff.
Is this from Microsoft? Is this real?
They could say "We always wanted to keep the tool light, fast to start and reasonably efficient for small files, and we have managed to do that" - and this would be OK. There is no need to serve bullshit to a technical community.
Microsoft: Okay, we've made a small visual refresh of Notepad so that it's more visually consistent with Windows 11
Hacker News: Stop breaking my childhood!
It's as much of a meme to see the top post on an HN story is "OMG why are all the top posts such toxic whiners" and scroll down to not see any.
