7 ms·
To be honest, I hope they never "improve" Notepad (either of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnew
by scottjackson 17y ago
To be honest, I hope they never "improve" Notepad (either of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008....). I think every operating system needs a totally-bare-bones text editor. Because of that, I think Notepad does exactly what it's meant to do, and "improving" Notepad would change that.
WordPad, on the other hand... They can keep Ribboning the shit out of that for all I care.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoYep, I agree. Notepad should be (and is) the simplest possible GUI text editor. All the devs that I know use either Notepad2 or Notepad++ for more complex general-purpose editing.
- listic 17y agoAnyone uses something other, like TextPad?
- WalkingDead 17y agoI am still using TextPad which I started using since 90s. But wish I could jump to something better. TextPad is now dead with no update for, what 6 years? No v.5 doesn't count as update, it's downgrade. No Unicode, only more fancy GUI. Switching editor is really hard.
- blue1 17y agoJust my experience: I have been using textpad for ages, and I am still using it (v.4.7, for the reasons you mentioned). In the meantime, however, I had to learn emacs (for Slime etc.). Now I notice that when I open textpad I begin to miss emacs features. And on emacs, I miss the fancy GUI far less than I imagined.
- madh 17y agoI use notepad++.
- enthalpyx 17y agoI'm a fan of Programmer's Notepad. http://www.pnotepad.org/ http://www.pnotepad.org/
- vetinari 17y agoWell, support for unix-style line ends would not hurt...
- saurabh 17y agoLegacy software prevents this from happening.
- vetinari 17y agoI would like to ask you: How? Microsoft managed to support Unicode in Notepad, starting in Windows 2000; the heuristic used when detecting character sets is fragile and has potential to break what used to work (mostly opening readmes anyway). How would support for Unix style line ending break legacy software?
- unalone 17y agoYou can improve a text editor without making it more complex. TextEdit on the Mac is just as minimal as Notepad, perhaps a little more so (because its menu's on the top rather than in the window), but it has powerful support for fonts, page layouts, and the like that you can access if you ever need it. I actually use it as my main word processor in most situations because it's powerful enough to handle it.