Microsoft Rolls Out Revamped Notepad App To Windows 11 Insiders (arstechnica.com) 123
Microsoft is continuing to update and refine Windows 11 two months after its public release, and the Notepad app is the latest bit of the operating system to get some attention. From a report: The updated version of the Notepad app is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Dev channel, where the company is also testing tweaks to the taskbar and Start menu, a new-old button for setting the default web browser, an updated Media Player app, and other changes. The main changes appear pretty much as they did in the leaked Notepad screenshots from early October: the new unified title bar and menu bar pick up Windows 11's "mica" styling, as well as dark-mode support, support for switching between dark and light mode, and modernized font controls.
So? And what stupid things did they do this time? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems whenever MS works on something, they are making it worse.
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Why?
Because Malibu Stacy has a new hat!
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No idea. It is just a text editor. Maybe all these tech websites are done by clueless amateurs?
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Developers make boring UIs (Score:2)
UI designers make UIs that follow the latest trends.
I like boring. Like one menu system. And Submit buttons.
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Because likely the code is extremely ancient, and they want all the apps to be able to have a consistent look and feel instead of some Windows 95 holdout. We all know Microsoft just isn't good at software so it's highly likely that notepad was written at a time where it was extremely difficult to change the look and feel and so it kept being put off year after year.
I say this while working on a project where it seems easier to rewrite everything from scratch than to try and fix a very small feature.
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Want to edit a used-by-Windows file: Can't, the security privileges have been escalated to prevent administrators changing it. Even the profile picture uploaded to your account is now a Windows system file. To edit files, I install software that resets the security privileges per directory.
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It seems whenever MS works on something, they are making it worse.
Response from Microsoft:
Please correct your typo from "worse" to "work".
Thank you.
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How can they make notepad worse though?
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How can they make notepad worse though?
I am sure they can find a way. But I have to admit that my imagination is not flexible enough to think of one myself.
Thank god (Score:5, Funny)
This was the only thing holding me back from hitting that upgrade button.
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Hold the line! If we stick together we can force them to re-release pinball for x86_64.
The REAL Story On Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Thank god (Score:3)
Notepad, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this what qualifies as news these days, Notepad is getting updated? An editor so neglected and barebones that it's a big deal they've made a change to the title bar, and any sane person would only use it as a quick scratch pad for tiny files?
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Well yes, ... for all the reasons you mentioned. If it were a constantly updated beast of an editor, then getting an update wouldn't be "news".
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To be honest, they should have just discarded it and instead linked it to Wordpad.
So did users like the (Score:2)
Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Nah, it's an OS people get for free and largely ignore while they get on with their lives using their apps. People who use operating systems are weird, they don't do anything.
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Nags? Interrupts? Not sure how you've configured your OS, but in terms of notifications I get maybe one a week, usually for some system update, and if I ignore the notification it goes away after a few seconds.
If you are heavily autistic and can't cope with something popping up this may be an issue for you. Most of the world just happily ignores it, and judging by the number of people on Slashdot for whom system updates come as a complete shock and surprise, most slashdot users clearly ignore them too.
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You can use Windows for free. If you don't have a licence key it says "not activated" in the corner and stops you charging the wallpaper, but that's about it.
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Microsoft doesn't care about piracy for the home user, it's not worth the effort. If people are willing to pirate Windows rather than take a free-of-charge and legal option of a BSD or Linux based OS then that just continues to cement their position as the incumbent desktop OS.
Microsoft has run out limbs to shoot themselves in with their OS blunders, oddly enough nothing they've done so far has been catastrophic enough to make people want to switch to an alternative desktop OS. When Apple upended the smartp
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What? C'mon, you're kidding, who'd be that stupid?
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Newer Windows 10 versions automatically turned on a "News and Interests" on the Taskbar, and set it to pop up whenever the mouse hovers over that area.
I updated my Windows partition from 10 to 11 and I still don't see this thing. Maybe it's something I turned off but I can't find an option for it in the task bar settings. FWIW this listed as "Windows 11 Home" if that makes a difference (another oddity, could have sworn this machine had the "Pro" version...though now I'm not really sure what difference that makes, if any).
It's easy to turn off
Presumably the same mechanism is used to turn it on, where is that? I'm curious to see what this thing is.
Side note, I noticed when I wa
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What about Notepad++ ? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is lame.
There already exists a nice editor for Windows: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ [notepad-plus-plus.org]
Is it so hard to help fund Notepad++ ? Or better hire its author ?
What's wrong with MS ?
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Yes. Notepad++ is very nice, but even short of that, just adding line numbering that you could turn on and off would have been a massive improvement to basic Notepad.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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But it sounds like we're safe (for now).
Genuinely curious about what scares you about the ribbon being present in an application so simple that most people never even use the menu. The first time it opens, collapse it and ignore it forever more.
Re:What about Notepad++ ? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is absolutely the wrong way to go. Notepad is still useful because it's so simple. It's universal, starts instantly, and is completely predictable. Anything more sophisticated is bound to cause problems.
Notepad++ is decidedly not a replacement for notepad. It's primarily a code editor, which is an entirely different class of tool. I use EditPlus myself, but not for the same kinds of tasks I use notepad.
Remember when windows 10 came out and the calculator took several seconds to start? It ran faster on my 386! Photos (or whatever it's called) is somehow worse. I've seen it take more than a minute just to show a picture! (How do you screw up something as simple as an image viewer?! What is it spending all that time doing?) MS Paint, the very basic and simple program, in contrast, loads the same images instantly.
Basic utility programs should stay basic. There is a great deal of value to be had in ubiquitous, small, fast, and predictable programs like that.
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Ok, Notepad++ with about a dozen tabs open starts what i would refer to as "instantly". So I don't see that s a very big concern.
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You hit on one point, but what he says has merit as a whole.
I've worked with some people who were told to use Notepad++, but have no sense of what they're doing. 30 open files, half of which don't even exist anymore. Standard notepad is *simple* and that is all I need most of the time.
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I went to a new computer the other day and there was nothing instant about opening a file with Notepad++. Going and downloading and installing it took ages compared to just using Notepad.
Re: What about Notepad++ ? (Score:2)
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Sadly, edlin was dropped from 64-bit windows.
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As I recall, the original Notepad (through Windows 7 at least) was simply a UI put around an multi line Edit control.
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Notepad++ starts almost instantly, and I tend to keep it open anyway since it has tabs. I keep a couple of notes open all the time.
There is also Notepad2, which really does start instantly, and includes syntax highlighting and some decent text wrangling functions.
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Whatever they add to Notepad, it won't be tabs.
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Exactly. Nothing in this update is going to make me use their Notepad.
Most of the users who bother to switch to Dark mode - the only remotely useful update in there are ones that will be using Notepad++ anyway.
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Is it so hard to help fund Notepad++ ? Or better hire its author ?
Hey boss, here's an idea, how about we just give money to someone else and encourage people to not use our products?
What's wrong with MS ?
They are a company with their own development people. There would be something *wrong* with them if they took your suggestion.
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Would you please shut up? You know what this would mean, right? They'd gobble him up, microsoftify notepad++ and we'll end up with something that is unusable, slow, buggy and can only work sensibly on files that MS deems "important".
I need Notepad++, ok? Don't let that ... thing near it!
Fucking why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Notepad works for what it is, why fuck with it?
Re:Fucking why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I don't know if it does that or not. Nor do I care. It's just a likely scenario these days since data collection seems to be the holy grail of all tech companies these days.
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They added that to word and it's incredibly obnoxious.
can it be disabled? probably; it was just easier to download open office and be done with it. I'd only be mildly surprised if it took a registry edit to disable it.
No you POS, i know exactly what i want to type, i typed it the way i wanted to; if i need to fix a typo, i'll do it myself.
That red squiggly line? That's just intrusive enough.
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So they can add predictive autocomplete (aka background keystroke spyware).
And a dark theme. Nothing is complete without a dark theme.
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You don't know the power of the Dark Theme.
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Notepad used to have that feature. As far back as I remember, notepad would use the system window text and window background colors.
Not quite as obvious as it was in Windows 3.1, but you can still set those in the registry under HKCU\Control Panel\Colors
I guess MS forgot, because they're shipping a darkmode for Notepad in Windows 11 [windowscentral.com]
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Hot Dog Stand [codinghorror.com] is the only theme you need for Notepad.
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Well, let's not get too ambitious. Recognizing \n line endings would be a massive improvement...
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Do we trust MS to actually accomplish that without doing something as retarded as making notepad dependent on their app store?
I speak, of course, of their calc program since windows 10 ( I think ); if the app store is broken, then you won't be able to run calc either.
Re: Line endings (Score:3)
Notepad has handled Unix line endings just fine for a while now. There's no menu option to set what line endings you want, but it does correctly recognize \r\n verus \n.
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By gosh, you're right...
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Notepad works for what it is, why fuck with it?
Because it is what it is: Something that is actively avoided by people.
Thank goodness! (Score:2)
All the telemetry in Windows 10 is finally paying off. /s or /h, you decide.
Does anyone really care? (Score:2)
I mean they may as well rollout a new skin for solitaire.
Comment (Score:2)
I Love Notepad (Score:5, Insightful)
It's my go-to-formatting stripper when pasting into anything with no "paste test only" option.
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...geez... "test" should be "text".
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My #1 peeve with office - pasting font size and style into documents. And no way to turn it off.
There aren't enough emoticons for the utter stupidity of this.
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But yeah.
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Right-click, past special, text only.
You can even set that as the default.
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In what?
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Word, outlook... Office in general.
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Well Hot Damn (Score:2)
Been doing this so long I didn't know any other way to do it.
"PureText" in the store. Free, no ads. Tiny.
windows-v to scrub the clipboard of formatting and paste.
if it aint broke, fix it until it is. (Score:2)
The simple and easy to use notepad app that hasn't really needed to be changed since windows 95 was in desperate need of an upgrade.
now that we have multiple cores and and fancy gpu's, isn't it time notepad had some added pizazz? think 3d menus, JS/CSS integration. maybe some audio cues or animated gifs.
the sky is the limit here. does anyone really want or need an extremely simple, stripped down note taking app? i think not.
bring it on MS!
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Not sure if sarcastic or on drugs.
(Disclaimer: Yes. That was a joke :P
Olden days (Score:3)
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Not to mention Windows photo viewer.
Want to look at an image file these days? Open it up with some completely pointless app that can't even zoom/pan using the mouse.
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The problem started in Windows 10 and solved with a registry setting, which works in Windows 11 too. The Windows 11 default app is Printer: WTF. Google "How to Make Windows Photo Viewer Your Default Image Viewer".
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They really did break it didn't they? I have to wonder what they were thinking. It looked like someone's homework assignment. I can't blame them for removing it after that though. It didn't even work as a toy after that.
Microsoft Office Notepad 365 (Score:1)
File Explorer can't handle NTFS Long filepaths FFS (Score:1)
File Explorer hasn't been able to handle NTFS Long filepaths for almost tenty years.
So Microsoft give us a new Notepad and a new Paint ?!
They need to hire another programmer.
Umm (Score:1)
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And only uses a few hundred megabytes of RAM!
Can it support UNIX style text files yet? (Score:2)
That's really the only bare minimum functionality notepad ought to have.
That and not inserting linebreaks just because you resize the window.
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I know on Windows 7 it does. If you resize the window it will insert a linebreak where the line visually breaks based on window size.
Heated cup holders (Score:4, Funny)
Here is why it is so late - lost source code (Score:2)
Late in 90s, I read on USENET forums that MS had lost the Notepoad source code permanently. I didn't believe at that time but then noticed that it never changed at all. Only help files changes (which are not part of the main source code). I stopped using Windows in 2014 but as far as I recall, there was no new version of Notepad till then (over 15 years). So I am pretty convinced that they don't have source code of the original Notepad.
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No way. It's basically a multiline text control with a few menus and could be recreated in a weekend..
If nothing else, the various updates from Raymond Chen say otherwise.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com... [microsoft.com]
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Did you read my post? Images, icons, help file etc can be injected in binary directly. I have personally done some of this without recompiling. The size does not tell you if the source code was recompiled or not.
There needs to be CLI editor (Score:3)
With Windows 11, Microsoft has disabled or removed the last of the bundled CLI editors. There is now no bundled command-line editor for Windows. This is a problem if you want to, for example, connect a SSH terminal to a Windows Server.
Sure you can install nano, vim, or a few other options. They're okay, but having something included by default means both users and other software packages can rely on that software's existence even if it isn't very good. If we can access but can't edit files over SSH, what was the point of making all of the changes to the Console APIs over the past few years along with all of the new support for the Linux subsystem on Windows? Microsoft needs to either make a CLI editor (even something simple like a CLI version of Notepad) or pick one of the open source editors and bundle it with Windows. Instead of monkeying around with Notepad, they could have spent that time solving this issue instead.
But Microsofties don't read /. comments or they'd focus on what actually matters.
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This is a problem if you want to, for example, connect a SSH terminal to a Windows Server.
Note sure what Windows 11 client has to do with SSHing into Windows Server. Your problem would be real if Windows Server removed the text editors.
what was the point of making all of the changes to the Console APIs over the past few years along with all of the new support for the Linux subsystem on Windows?
So you can run vi obviously.
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So nothing to do with Windows 11 then...? The problem as you described sounds very real to Windows Server access via SSH, but completely irrelevant to Windows 11. Even opening up an emergency recovery environment with CLI only still presents you with a basic enough window manager to fire up Notepad. I may be missing something but can you come up with a scenario where Windows 11 needs a CLI editor that runs entirely in the terminal?
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Notepad News (Score:2)
I can't believe notepad gets any attention, here or anywhere.
Might as well just report on the dust that builds up on crown molding.
There is likely absolutely nothing less significant to windows than notepad.
Maybe it's me, but this years seems have an awful lot of computer-related announcements/journalism/reviews that are basically identical to the '90s. We're back to the age of media players, colour settings, colour "themes", and font layouts.
Really, honestly, it's all meaningless. DOS to win3.1 was the jum
Anyone remember Superpad from MFC demo apps? (Score:2)
How about saving unsaved notes? (Score:2)