9 ms·

Almost 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" li

Almost 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 ago
I would not consider it a bug. It was working as intended. This is a new feature.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  When "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 ago
    Is 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 ago
      To 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 ago
        The 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?
        cesarb 8y ago
        > I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems? Probably the same way it still works on today's Unix systems: it converts NL to CR+NL on output. See the manpage for the stty command: Output settings: [-]onlcr translate newline to carriage return-newline
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        The standard in the 1960s, USAS X3.4-1968, actually prescribed both forms. But (in §4.1.2.2) it "strongly recommended" that people "use CR and LF to obtain the effect of New Line".
    - Stratoscope 8y ago
      I suppose it depends on whether I'm wearing my "user hat" or my "Notepad developer hat". As a Notepad developer, I might agree with you that Unix line ending support is a new feature. As a user, I double-click a text file and it opens in Notepad. It opens fine in all of my other editors, but is garbled in Notepad. That feels like a bug. I don't try to open .xlsx files in Notepad, so it isn't very relevant to me as a user that Notepad won't open them. If I did open one accidentally, I'd think "D'oh! That's not a text file!" But this is just terminology. Files that Notepad couldn't open usefully before will now work. That's a good thing, whatever we call it.
- joshuaeckroth 8y ago
  I'd entertain an explanation of how the original behavior was a feature :)
  - ams6110 8y ago
    The crlf line ending has been the standard on the PC going back to the days of DOS. That's what notepad was supporting when it was developed. Unix was strictly a server or esoteric workstation OS at the time. So there was never a requirement for Notepad interoperability with Unix files on Windows.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Unix was strictly a server or esoteric workstation OS at the time. And of course Mac OS wasn't Unix then, and used a different (third) line ending style.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      A double byte end-of-line sequence was a bug to begin with. Just like ending files on ctrl-Z (yes, it is End-Of-File, but filesystems know where the end of the file is already). These are just holdovers from teletype days and with Notepad being solidly GUI based it could have simply had a backwards compatibility mode for 'DOS' style files. Incidentally, CR-LF and LF-CR are interchangeable on a teletype, but various windows software would respond totally unpredictable to that alternative, including some spectacular crashes.
      - mark-r 8y ago
        Are they really interchangeable? Moving the print head from the right side to the left could easily take two character times, and a teletype didn't have any buffering.
        jacquesm 8y ago
        The combined time is equal, why would it matter what the order is? http://hans.presto.tripod.com/scan/teletype/28_02.html http://hans.presto.tripod.com/scan/teletype/28_02.html "Dependable carriage returns with only one carriage return and one linefeed signal" at 100 wpm. Now I'm curious :) I don't have a teletype handy though, I'm sure other HN'ers do.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  The article disagrees: > Today, we’re excited to announce that we have fixed this issue!
  - cstrahan 8y ago
    Users can take issue with intended behavior, as in this case. This resolves that issue, despite the old behavior working as (previously) intended. “An issue (as perceived by a user)” is not equivalent to a bug.
    - rootlocus 8y ago
      > As you can see, Notepad is incorrectly displaying the file’s contents, making the file look garbled. So the intended behavior was to incorrectly display the file contents? Also, I don't know why you quoted "An issue (as perceived by a user)", since I can't find that in the article anywhere.
      - Retra 8y ago
        Quotes are not solely used for citation. They are also used for emphasis or indirection. You can also use quotes to set off something that someone explicitly did not say as a way of indicating a paraphrasing.
      - cstrahan 8y ago
        >> As you can see, Notepad is incorrectly displaying the file’s contents, making the file look garbled. > So the intended behavior was to incorrectly display the file contents? I would argue that you're getting hung up on the author's lack of precision. Does the file look garbled in that screenshot? Sure, I think that's a reasonable interpretation of things. Is it incorrect? That depends on what Notepad was intended to be used for. I suspect Notepad was intended from day one to be a simple means of read and editing "plain text" files written on Windows, and under that premise Notepad has always functioned perfectly. To the author's credit, belaboring the distinction between incorrect behavior (a property of the object with respect to the intentions of its creator) and undesired behavior (an attribution given by a user with respect to their needs) would make for boring reading. > Also, I don't know why you quoted "An issue (as perceived by a user)", since I can't find that in the article anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
- rogerbinns 8y ago
  Correct. The existing Notepad is top level Window and menu bar around the existing [edit control](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa368342\(v=vs.85\).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...). It has always had the same limitations - eg in way earlier versions of Windows it was limited to 64kb of text. Addressing the "bug" is not simple - the edit controls behaviour could be changed in which case it could cause existing programs to behave differently, or extra code would have to be written for notepad to do its own text editing. Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Anyone curious about the Microsoft side of this should find Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog interesting (about 5 posts a week). For example here is content tagged history: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history and here is how there are actually two copies of Notepad on each system: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090312-00/?p=18843/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090312-00/?p=...
  - simonh 8y ago
    >…the edit controls behaviour could be changed in which case it could cause existing programs to behave differently… You just add a new mode to the control that enables the new behaviour. Existing programs using it would work fine.
    - mark-r 8y ago
      Adding new features to an existing Windows control, particularly one that has existed since the dawn of time, is a much bigger deal than adding to a simple utility. The last time that happened they added a whole new control, the Rich Edit.
      - simonh 8y ago
        Oh come on, framework libraries add new features to controls in a backwards compatible way all the time.
  - nintendo1889 8y ago
    There's a quick fix on all existing systems, just open in wordpad.
- jl6 8y ago
  I think “bug” used to be slang shorthand for the more professional term “defect”, and under that definition the Notepad change would accurately be described as a new feature. But the word bug has been coopted by the masses to have the wider meaning of “doesn’t meet user expectations”.
  - squiggleblaz 8y ago
    "Defect" always seems like a johnny-come-lately polishing of the word "bug", rather than vice versa. I would be surprised if "defect" is truly the original term for a software bug, and "bug" was chosen as shorthand. In any case, bugs need not be only in software. As as earlier comment says, bugs can be in specs, too. Here, the spec was buggy and that has been resolved. Or to put it another way, the defect was in the spec, and that has been resolved. (Note that many specs are implicit and best derived from the software in question. If that is the case for Notepad, then fixing the bug in the spec requires one to fix the code. I somewhat doubt Microsoft follows that practice, but it's certainly not beyond the realm of the possible.)
bleke 8y ago
It 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 ago
  How 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 ago
    for notepad++, they already have vscode
    - cm2187 8y ago
      Not really comparable in term of resource utilization
    - khedoros1 8y ago
      VS Code seems like less of a general-purpose text editor, though (and is also much "heavier")
      - make3 8y ago
        heavier sure, general purpose I'm not convinced
    - derefr 8y ago
      Plus, 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 ago
It was never a bug. For \r\n you had WordPad, for more you had Word.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
KSS42 8y ago
I 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 ago
On 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 ago
It 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.

yiyus 8y ago

I would not consider it a bug. It was working as intended. This is a new feature.

Stratoscope 8y ago
When "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 ago
  Is 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 ago
    To 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 ago
        The 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?
        cesarb 8y ago
        > I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems? Probably the same way it still works on today's Unix systems: it converts NL to CR+NL on output. See the manpage for the stty command: Output settings: [-]onlcr translate newline to carriage return-newline
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      The standard in the 1960s, USAS X3.4-1968, actually prescribed both forms. But (in §4.1.2.2) it "strongly recommended" that people "use CR and LF to obtain the effect of New Line".
  - Stratoscope 8y ago
    I suppose it depends on whether I'm wearing my "user hat" or my "Notepad developer hat". As a Notepad developer, I might agree with you that Unix line ending support is a new feature. As a user, I double-click a text file and it opens in Notepad. It opens fine in all of my other editors, but is garbled in Notepad. That feels like a bug. I don't try to open .xlsx files in Notepad, so it isn't very relevant to me as a user that Notepad won't open them. If I did open one accidentally, I'd think "D'oh! That's not a text file!" But this is just terminology. Files that Notepad couldn't open usefully before will now work. That's a good thing, whatever we call it.
joshuaeckroth 8y ago
I'd entertain an explanation of how the original behavior was a feature :)
- ams6110 8y ago
  The crlf line ending has been the standard on the PC going back to the days of DOS. That's what notepad was supporting when it was developed. Unix was strictly a server or esoteric workstation OS at the time. So there was never a requirement for Notepad interoperability with Unix files on Windows.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Unix was strictly a server or esoteric workstation OS at the time. And of course Mac OS wasn't Unix then, and used a different (third) line ending style.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    A double byte end-of-line sequence was a bug to begin with. Just like ending files on ctrl-Z (yes, it is End-Of-File, but filesystems know where the end of the file is already). These are just holdovers from teletype days and with Notepad being solidly GUI based it could have simply had a backwards compatibility mode for 'DOS' style files. Incidentally, CR-LF and LF-CR are interchangeable on a teletype, but various windows software would respond totally unpredictable to that alternative, including some spectacular crashes.
    - mark-r 8y ago
      Are they really interchangeable? Moving the print head from the right side to the left could easily take two character times, and a teletype didn't have any buffering.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        The combined time is equal, why would it matter what the order is? http://hans.presto.tripod.com/scan/teletype/28_02.html http://hans.presto.tripod.com/scan/teletype/28_02.html "Dependable carriage returns with only one carriage return and one linefeed signal" at 100 wpm. Now I'm curious :) I don't have a teletype handy though, I'm sure other HN'ers do.
rootlocus 8y ago
The article disagrees: > Today, we’re excited to announce that we have fixed this issue!
- cstrahan 8y ago
  Users can take issue with intended behavior, as in this case. This resolves that issue, despite the old behavior working as (previously) intended. “An issue (as perceived by a user)” is not equivalent to a bug.
  - rootlocus 8y ago
    > As you can see, Notepad is incorrectly displaying the file’s contents, making the file look garbled. So the intended behavior was to incorrectly display the file contents? Also, I don't know why you quoted "An issue (as perceived by a user)", since I can't find that in the article anywhere.
    - Retra 8y ago
      Quotes are not solely used for citation. They are also used for emphasis or indirection. You can also use quotes to set off something that someone explicitly did not say as a way of indicating a paraphrasing.
    - cstrahan 8y ago
      >> As you can see, Notepad is incorrectly displaying the file’s contents, making the file look garbled. > So the intended behavior was to incorrectly display the file contents? I would argue that you're getting hung up on the author's lack of precision. Does the file look garbled in that screenshot? Sure, I think that's a reasonable interpretation of things. Is it incorrect? That depends on what Notepad was intended to be used for. I suspect Notepad was intended from day one to be a simple means of read and editing "plain text" files written on Windows, and under that premise Notepad has always functioned perfectly. To the author's credit, belaboring the distinction between incorrect behavior (a property of the object with respect to the intentions of its creator) and undesired behavior (an attribution given by a user with respect to their needs) would make for boring reading. > Also, I don't know why you quoted "An issue (as perceived by a user)", since I can't find that in the article anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
rogerbinns 8y ago
Correct. The existing Notepad is top level Window and menu bar around the existing [edit control](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa368342\(v=vs.85\).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...). It has always had the same limitations - eg in way earlier versions of Windows it was limited to 64kb of text. Addressing the "bug" is not simple - the edit controls behaviour could be changed in which case it could cause existing programs to behave differently, or extra code would have to be written for notepad to do its own text editing. Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Anyone curious about the Microsoft side of this should find Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog interesting (about 5 posts a week). For example here is content tagged history: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history and here is how there are actually two copies of Notepad on each system: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090312-00/?p=18843/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090312-00/?p=...
- simonh 8y ago
  >…the edit controls behaviour could be changed in which case it could cause existing programs to behave differently… You just add a new mode to the control that enables the new behaviour. Existing programs using it would work fine.
  - mark-r 8y ago
    Adding new features to an existing Windows control, particularly one that has existed since the dawn of time, is a much bigger deal than adding to a simple utility. The last time that happened they added a whole new control, the Rich Edit.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Oh come on, framework libraries add new features to controls in a backwards compatible way all the time.
- nintendo1889 8y ago
  There's a quick fix on all existing systems, just open in wordpad.
jl6 8y ago
I think “bug” used to be slang shorthand for the more professional term “defect”, and under that definition the Notepad change would accurately be described as a new feature. But the word bug has been coopted by the masses to have the wider meaning of “doesn’t meet user expectations”.
- squiggleblaz 8y ago
  "Defect" always seems like a johnny-come-lately polishing of the word "bug", rather than vice versa. I would be surprised if "defect" is truly the original term for a software bug, and "bug" was chosen as shorthand. In any case, bugs need not be only in software. As as earlier comment says, bugs can be in specs, too. Here, the spec was buggy and that has been resolved. Or to put it another way, the defect was in the spec, and that has been resolved. (Note that many specs are implicit and best derived from the software in question. If that is the case for Notepad, then fixing the bug in the spec requires one to fix the code. I somewhat doubt Microsoft follows that practice, but it's certainly not beyond the realm of the possible.)

bleke 8y ago

It 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 ago
How 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 ago
  for notepad++, they already have vscode
  - cm2187 8y ago
    Not really comparable in term of resource utilization
  - khedoros1 8y ago
    VS Code seems like less of a general-purpose text editor, though (and is also much "heavier")
    - make3 8y ago
      heavier sure, general purpose I'm not convinced
  - derefr 8y ago
    Plus, 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 ago

It was never a bug. For \r\n you had WordPad, for more you had Word.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

KSS42 8y ago

I 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 ago

On 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 ago

It 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.