3 ms·

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 wo

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 7mo ago
[deleted]
alansaber 7mo ago
Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)
westurner 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- projektfu 7mo ago
  I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.
  - canucker2016 7mo ago
    The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95. Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit. see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/richedit-versions https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...
    - projektfu 7mo ago
      Cheers, thanks

deleted 7mo ago

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alansaber 7mo ago

Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)

westurner 7mo 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 7mo 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.

projektfu 7mo ago
I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.
- canucker2016 7mo ago
  The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95. Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit. see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/richedit-versions https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...
  - projektfu 7mo ago
    Cheers, thanks