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Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad
- m_fayer 8y agoThis year's build is rather underwhelming.
- nvr219 8y agoThis will, surprisingly, make my life easier. Awesome.
- edgarvaldes 8y agoI dual boot on my work and home computers (Windows 10, Linux). I use a lot of txt files as todo list, reminders, quick notes, etc. This are good news for me.
- joshuaeckroth 8y agoAlmost feels like an April Fool's joke. For 30 years Notepad had this bug and I've always wondered why they never fixed it. It was just "one of those things" like the unusual arguments to Unix find or tar commands. I find it very surprising that someone finally bothered to fix it!
- yiyus 8y agoI would not consider it a bug. It was working as intended. This is a new feature.
- Stratoscope 8y agoWhen "working as intended" means "doesn't work at all", I consider it a bug. Take a look at the first screenshot on the announcement page and then tell me it's working as intended.
- Latty 8y agoIs it a bug that opening an excel spreadsheet in notepad gives something unreadable? Linux line endings are a type of file that notepad was never designed for.
- swebs 8y agoTo be more precise, they're Unix line endings. So yeah, I'd consider it a bug if it didn't support what has been the standard line ending format since the 60's.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago> So yeah, I'd consider it a bug if it didn't support what has been the standard line ending format since the 60's. The standard line ending format in the '60s, which was the height of the mainframe era, would probably have been the newline character in IBM's EBCIDC encoding, which differs from the value used for ASCII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline). Unix didn't really start taking off until around the early '80s IIRC. Windows properly supported the newline format for its platform of lineage (CP/M + DOS) which also didn't start taking off until the early '80s. Not sure that Unix has any real claim to precedence here.
- mark-r 8y agoThe standard line ending of the '70s was CR/LF, because the printers commonly used as interactive terminals required them both. I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems?
- bleke 8y agoIt would be more unreal if they introduce "Windows 9x" desktop shell, probably for me it would be reason even to consider to dual boot to windows
- megaman22 8y agoHow much would it cost Microsoft to buy Notepad++ and Classic Shell, and remove two of the biggest annoyances in modern Windows? Meaning, of course, that they would use them in Windows, so there would be a text editor and a start menu that work. Not buy and kill.
- make3 8y agofor notepad++, they already have vscode
- cm2187 8y agoNot really comparable in term of resource utilization
- khedoros1 8y agoVS Code seems like less of a general-purpose text editor, though (and is also much "heavier")
- make3 8y agoheavier sure, general purpose I'm not convinced
- derefr 8y agoPlus, I think Windows strives to not be "batteries-included" in some ways, perhaps in order to encourage a healthy third-party software ecosystem (and perhaps to follow the spirit of the anti-trust ruling.) Windows 10 has fewer bundled apps than Windows 98 did. Nothing is an "optional feature" any more; it's all App Store packages [that happen to be made by Microsoft] now.
- rasz 8y agoIt was never a bug. For \r\n you had WordPad, for more you had Word.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- KSS42 8y agoI see it as a natural result of the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" effort. Also Azure Sphere uses Linux. I expect Windows to become more Linux friendly.
- Rondom 8y agoOn 32-bit versions of Windows, EDIT (the MS-DOS Editor) reads Unix file endings fine. So finally notepad reached feature-parity with that one... I am not sure, when they introduced it. It might be that it happened in Windows 95, when edit became a stand-alone program. Not sure if the QBasic-based editor in DOS 6.22 or earlier supported it.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoIt wasn't a bug. I actually liked the predictable nature of notepad, even if it did support a line ending I never use and run on an OS I never use.
- nextweek2 8y agoI cannot fathom a reason why someone would disable this feature. It has been 25+ years in the making.
- ilogik 8y agohttps://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- mark-r 8y agoThe hover text on that one is priceless.
- lopmotr 8y agoYou sort of answered your own question. People's workflows tend to morph around the idiosyncrasies of their tools. There'll be somebody doing something weird like using LF to keep lines separate for Linux but wanting them condensed to fit on one screen in Notepad. Notepad does preserve LF characters, just doesn't display them, so you can think of it as a no-wrapping display mode.
- userbinator 8y agoMore practically, it could be as simple as checking whether text files actually have CRLF line endings. That's one thing I personally use Notepad for.
- swebs 8y agoIt's really surreal to see how far behind basic Windows tools are compared to counterparts in other operating systems. Compare Notepad to something like Gedit or Kate that comes with most Linux distros and are much more advanced. I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE. It's also pretty silly that you have to hack registry keys just to change some basic settings.
- joshuaeckroth 8y agoThe registry key hacking is to support backwards compatibility... for those workflows that require opening Unix text files in Notepad and inexplicably NOT seeing linebreaks...
- ams6110 8y agoNotepad is a very basic editor. Likewise, most Linux distros come with nano or some other very feature-limited editor. While I did once know a developer who used notepad as his primary editor, it was never intended to be anything but a very simple editor for INI files and the like.
- mappu 8y agoNano has syntax highlighting, auto-indent, spellcheck, regex search/replace, and overwrite prevention. It's clearly in a class beyond Notepad.
- rossy 8y agoYeah, I think it's safe to say most Linux and macOS systems don't have an editor as basic as Notepad (even ed has regex support!) The closest equivalent I can think of is Mousepad from Xfce. I don't really see the need for it either. If your distro comes with something like nano, gedit or KWrite out of the box, why would you need something like Notepad?
- Analemma_ 8y ago> Compare Notepad to something like Gedit or Kate This is the wrong comparison. Notepad is like nano or ed. More powerful editors are available on Windows too. > I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE. Usually we do. But notepad can be invoked quickly from the command line, tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs, and is opened by default by a lot of utilities like git (you can change this, of course, but you might miss one). So it ends up getting used a lot for quick one-line changes and improvements are still welcome.
- andyjpb 8y agoIt's a welcome addition but all was not lost on a Windows install before. write.exe has managed to do this even if notepad.exe couldn't.
- sebazzz 8y agoThe most common case for needing an external editor on Windows Server is default Notepad not supporting non-CRLF line endings. Unfortunately licensing would not allow transplanting the insider Notepad.exe to Windows Server, preventing the need for installing external software on the OS.
- ams6110 8y agoI thought wordpad was also part of a standard windows install? It does support the unix style line endings. Or am I misremembering and wordpad was an add-on?
- dEnigma 8y agoDefinitely part of a "normal" Windows install, but I don't know if it's part of Windows Server too.
- Someone1234 8y agoWordpad is part of Windows Server, but it is a rich text editor not a plain text editor. Therefore there are some file formats that it will interpret and corrupt on save.
- lopmotr 8y agoThis change will eliminate most of my need for Notepad++. It feels a bit wrong that it supports old MacOS CR though. Isn't that thoroughly obsolete, and encouraging its use only going to prolong its death, making it harder for everyone else to have to keep supporting it?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoYou could say the same about using CRLF instead of just LF.
- lopmotr 8y agoNo because it already supported CRLF so that would be a step backwards for CRLF users. CR is a new feature so it would be no worse than before if they didn't add it.
- jakobegger 8y agoMicrosoft really goes the extra mile when it comes to backward compatibility. "Just in case you depend on Notepad being broken, we added a setting for you!"
- dmannorreys 8y agoAnd they even made the setting easily accessible, just hit [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad] and change some registry key
- Spivak 8y agoI don't know if this is sarcasm or not but that's pretty standard in the Windows world. Your ops team wouldn't blink at tweaking reg values.
- reaperducer 8y ago>I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but that's pretty standard in the Windows world. Your ops team wouldn't blink at tweaking reg values. I can only assume that requiring an ops team to change a setting in a basic text editor is pretty standard in the Windows world, too?
- eterm 8y agoIndeed, the registry is actually a good feature, it's a configuration database rather than relying on flat files as in the "just go to /etc/<package>/<package>.config or /home/<user>/.package/<package>.config" of the linux world. The problem is that when it was first introduced in windows 95 the registry would easily and often corrupt causing many issues so some people still associate the registry with being a bad design, when it was actually just a bad implementation of a good design.
- Hello71 8y agoif it's trying to be a database, it's doing a terrible job. all the problems of not being files (can you do "find HKEY_CURRENT_USER -name mypackage" to see what the uninstaller left behind?) with none of the benefits of a database (ACID).
- skullt 8y agoNow just let us change the tab width.
- teddyh 8y agoNo! Just add elastic tabstops support! http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
- jimnotgym 8y agoThere was a thread on here at the weekend criticising Windows 10 for not making enough progress, and also MS for not properly testing updates. I hope this silences those critics. A thoroughly tested change that is fully backwards compatible, but also adding genuinely useful new features. If you were wondering whether to upgrade to Windows 10 I think this settles it.
- seba_dos1 8y agoNot sure how you go from "finally catching up with support of a basic text format that's around for decades" to "making enough progress". This won't silence anyone - it just shows that Microsoft is finally starting to do things it should have done 20 years ago.
- thieving_magpie 8y agoI think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.
- Moru 8y agoI see it more as a platform war that's finally settled. No more Mac/Linux/Windows linebreaks, now we can at last talk about "Linebreak". I mean there is only so many ways of putting together two different characters. Is it supposed to be \n\r or \r\n? Or just \n? Or mabe it's \r? So much of the last 35 years have gone to writing the wrong line endings for the intended platform...
- pjmlp 8y agoOnly if you ignore mainframes.
- cheschire 8y agoNever underestimate a neckbeard's desire to flare their plumage. There is always another reason to criticize.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pcunite 8y agoNice, I actually had a customer ask about a configuration file (that one of our product produced) as not being readable anymore. Turns out that an update did not properly write out "\r\n" but rather "\n". Looked fine in Notepad++ of course, but sure enough in MS Notepad ... things look garbled.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoMicrosoft was clearly upset at the number of SysAdmins installing Notepad++ onto their freshly-imaged Windows PC's.
- jimrandomh 8y agoFor pretty much as long as I can remember, it's been a fact of life that Windows had these little embarrassments, and Microsoft was too dysfunctional to address them. Everyone just sort of learned that Notepad didn't work and you weren't supposed to use it, then forgot it was there.
- dash2 8y agoSo, today the Google news is "robots that automatically phone businesses and have conversations on your behalf", and the Microsoft news is "Notepad can now cope with Unix line endings". Symbolic or what?
- Zelizz 8y agoPretty sure that Google is advertising a service that you might pay for, whereas Microsoft is adding a new feature (in reality, many features) to an OS you already paid for. Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft, this post doesn't reflect my employer in any official capacity, etc.
- jxi 8y agoFar more likely for Microsoft to try to charge you for random features/upgrades than Google. This is also backfilling a feature that should have been implemented years ago.
- GordonS 8y agoFWIW, Microsoft also made an AI related announcement today about their new, OSS, cross platform machine leaning framework, ML.NET: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/introducing-ml-net-cross-platform-proven-and-open-source-machine-learning-framework/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/introduci... Just a tad less dramatic that a robotic telephone assistant, but still :)
- nxc18 8y agoTake a look at their other keynote(s) yesterday. Much more impressive demos for developing consumer and Enterprise experiences. Today's keynote was about the windows and office platform specifically.
- tbob 8y agoCan't understand why Window still uses CRLF line endings. Just to be different?
- vbezhenar 8y agoWhy not? If something works, why break it? HTTP uses CRLF as well. Should we redesign it?
- cesarb 8y ago> HTTP uses CRLF as well. Should we redesign it? We did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2
- ksk 8y agoBecause thats what people did on serial terminals, which preceeded CP/M which preceeded Windows. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7812142/how-to-toggle-cr-lf-in-gnu-screen https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7812142/how-to-toggle-cr...
- kbumsik 8y agoBackward compability really matters. Windows has been always obsessed with compability. Guys in MS keeps max 255 characters long path just because of backward compability. Right after Windows give up CRLF line endings, it will be immediate compability disaster.
- reaperducer 8y agoWelcome to 1974, Microsoft.
- maltalex 8y agoI don't understand all the negativity in this thread. Is this Microsoft's crowning achievement? No, it's just a stupid little historic decision that someone remembered and decided to fix. They even took the time to enable admins and power users to use the old behavior. I too don't see who'd want it, but who knows? People do unexpected things sometimes. Why bash them for that? There are enough good reasons to bash Microsoft... There are Microsoft products that fill me with a fiery rage of a thousand suns. But they did something cute here, someone there deserves a good word.
- andrewmcwatters 8y agoThe interesting thing is this change was almost without a doubt done by some random developer at Microsoft rather than an institutional luminary for certain, and yet here we judge the change based on the institution rather than who may have produced it.
- maltalex 8y agoThe backwards-compatibility is probably an institutional thing. I've dealt with a Microsoft storage library for Java once that had an absolutely idiotic bug - you'd store a certain value, but would get something slightly different when retrieving it in 100% of cases [0]. I reported the bug and it was quickly fixed. But what amazed me was that the next version came out with a page long description [1] and analysis of the bug, its meaning for compatibility with other storage clients in different cases, the fix, and astonishingly a new flag you could enable if you want to keep retrieving screwed up values. [0]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/issues/30 https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/issues/30 [1]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/wiki/Java,-Android-Storage-Client-Library-Date-Bug-Resolution https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/wiki/Java,-Andro...
- tossaway1 8y ago> The backwards-compatibility is probably an institutional thing. And the apparent routing of all bug reports and feature requests to /dev/null -- er, the recycling bin -- certainly seems to be an institutional thing. I have no doubt that thousands of their paying customers have complained about this to Microsoft over the years and it had to have been ridiculously simple to address.
- kristianp 8y agoI imagine the reason this was done after all these years is to improve compatibility with Bash for Windows/WSL.
- pradn 8y agoNotepad seems like the perfect candidate for open-sourcing. It provides no competitive advantage to Windows. So might as well have the OSS community improve it. It's possible it might be too hard to remove it from the Windows code base and put it online.
- userbinator 8y agoNotepad is literally just the Windows EDIT control with some trivial code to transfer the data in it to/from files, and a menu to change some of the edit control's options. I don't think it needs much improvement, really. Anything besides fixing bugs in its own code (i.e. this "extended line endings support" is in the edit control) would go against its core principle. There's Notepad++ and all the other "heavier" editors if you want more features.
- jdblair 8y agoIt's worth pointing out that CR-LF is the original ascii standard behavior, from electro-mechanical teletype. It took two characters worth of time to return the print carriage to the left of the paper. Rather than implement buffering (expensive at the time) the designers split the operation into two characters (Carriage Return and Line Feed).
- hzhou321 8y agoWill I be able to find an exe download and fix my old PC?
- mixmastamyk 8y agoHard to believe, but the neglected issues of DOS/Windows are being squashed one by one, almost thirty years later. Too bad about the telemetry and lack of privacy, or I might actually be tempted to use it. :-/
- pjmlp 8y agoBetter stay away from Google OSes then.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoI do.
- calebm 8y agoI appreciate this gesture of heterogeneity.
- omarforgotpwd 8y agoThis is huge.
- ComputerGuru 8y agoWe developed an open source notepad clone (feature, keyboard shortcut, and look compatible) replacement basically to address this one gripe with an otherwise fast and barebones text editor. It’s nice to (mostly) no longer need this! https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/hello-betterpad/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/hello-betterpad/ (Only other features iirc are hyperlinked URLs and unsaved document persistence after reboot/kill a la text edit on macOS.)
- NVRM 8y ago[FIXED] « The default editor can't read text files »
- Wildgoose 8y agoHallelujah! I am so sick of having to tell people not to use Notepad because it is badly broken and always has been. You shouldn't have to tell people to download Notepad++ or use WordPad if they want to read a text file.
- gymshoes 8y agoMS is on track. Edge, WSL, open source powershell, open source dotNet Core, VS Code and now a Notepad with line endings. Windows is consistently getting better as a developer's Operating System.
- AnnoyingSwede 8y agoI could have really used this feature when editing php back in the day.. Now, not so much. It's mildly amusing that such a trival feature took this long.
- colanderman 8y agoNo love for U+2028? (I slightly kid; that's the official Unicode "line separator". Never actually seen it in the wild, and not entirely sure how the Unicode consortium expected it to come into usage.)