4 ms·

step 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a

step 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem

datenyan 8mo ago
Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  I assume there's like a single manager who's job it was was to maintain notepad and force use of AI, so obviously, vibe code needless features because if it's not broke, how can you fix it with AI.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - datenyan 8mo ago
    > "adding rich text editing features to a text editor” Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features. Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.
    - eclipxe 8mo ago
      I like having something all in one.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
        Funny comment because this would have been WordPad.
      - ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
        I liked having a simple plain text editor
        procone 8mo ago
        I can't believe I'm saying this on hackernews of all places... Markdown *is* plain text.
        drw85 8mo ago
        That's the point. It now gets rendered in Notepad. Before these changes Notepad was just able to edit plain text and not rendered markdown etc.
    - procone 8mo ago
      Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows. What are these horrible takes?
      - 4k0hz 8mo ago
        The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - sznio 8mo ago
        >Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. then put the markdown support there to supplant rtfs?
      - throw-the-towel 8mo ago
        RTF is not binary encoded though? It's plain text with commands, not unlike TeX.
brokencode 8mo ago
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar. I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- alansaber 8mo ago
  Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)
- westurner 8mo ago
  Syntax highlighting is definitely less complex than updating and rendering RTF and HTML. There is configurable syntax highlighting in vscode. Should an app like Notepad ever embed a WebView? (with e.g. tauri-apps/wry instead of CEF now FWIU)? Not even for a Markdown Preview feature IMHO.
- canucker2016 8mo ago
  Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-notepad/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-examples?view=msvc-170 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-... The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/ https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF. Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use-streams https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use... Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :) You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science. Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.
roger110 8mo ago
I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.
nxobject 8mo ago
Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1] Step 6: GOTO 1. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit
- sorenjan 8mo ago
  It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it. Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682
  - adithyassekhar 8mo ago
    Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume? Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight. Hilarious comment by the way https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussioncomment-15902166 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussion...
    - sorenjan 8mo ago
      The maintainer is the first comment, agreeing with the post author: > I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much. Maybe they're referring to the plugin system they want to implement: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17
  - krater23 8mo ago
    The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more? OK. The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.

step 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem

datenyan 8mo ago

Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.

cyanydeez 8mo ago
I assume there's like a single manager who's job it was was to maintain notepad and force use of AI, so obviously, vibe code needless features because if it's not broke, how can you fix it with AI.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
[flagged]
- datenyan 8mo ago
  > "adding rich text editing features to a text editor” Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features. Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.
  - eclipxe 8mo ago
    I like having something all in one.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
      Funny comment because this would have been WordPad.
    - ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
      I liked having a simple plain text editor
      - procone 8mo ago
        I can't believe I'm saying this on hackernews of all places... Markdown *is* plain text.
        drw85 8mo ago
        That's the point. It now gets rendered in Notepad. Before these changes Notepad was just able to edit plain text and not rendered markdown etc.
  - procone 8mo ago
    Wordpad was horrible! Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. They were a nightmare for any other platform other than windows. What are these horrible takes?
    - 4k0hz 8mo ago
      The point is that there was basically no reason to totally kill Wordpad in the way that they did. They're different products and the new Notepad is closer to the ideal version of Wordpad than what Notepad is supposed to be, and now there's no Notepad.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - sznio 8mo ago
      >Nobody reasonable misses binary encoded .rtf files. then put the markdown support there to supplant rtfs?
    - throw-the-towel 8mo ago
      RTF is not binary encoded though? It's plain text with commands, not unlike TeX.

brokencode 8mo ago

Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar. I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
alansaber 8mo ago
Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)
westurner 8mo ago
Syntax highlighting is definitely less complex than updating and rendering RTF and HTML. There is configurable syntax highlighting in vscode. Should an app like Notepad ever embed a WebView? (with e.g. tauri-apps/wry instead of CEF now FWIU)? Not even for a Markdown Preview feature IMHO.
canucker2016 8mo ago
Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-notepad/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-examples?view=msvc-170 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-... The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/ https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF. Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use-streams https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use... Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :) You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science. Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.

roger110 8mo ago

I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.

nxobject 8mo ago

Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1] Step 6: GOTO 1. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit

sorenjan 8mo ago
It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it. Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682
- adithyassekhar 8mo ago
  Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume? Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight. Hilarious comment by the way https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussioncomment-15902166 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussion...
  - sorenjan 8mo ago
    The maintainer is the first comment, agreeing with the post author: > I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much. Maybe they're referring to the plugin system they want to implement: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17 https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17
- krater23 8mo ago
  The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more? OK. The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.