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Comment by danivaz | Hacker News Reader

For how long has this bug been live? It blows my mind that no one noticed this sooner

> Back in May 27, 2020 [...] new feature in Notepad

So almost a year.

Probably because few of the people who are aware of what an asterix in the title bar mean (mostly devs) are still using notepad.

I mean... I use notepad.

I frequently use it to clear the non-text formats from the clipboard so when I paste I actually get text. Some apps don't let you pick the paste format and try to be helpful with formatting. Most of the time I don't want that.

Win+R is useful for small snippets, but notepad is useful for multiline text.

But I don't pay attention to the asterisk, because I just use it as a scratchpad. When I need to restart for updates I inevitably have several Untitled notepads open that need to be manually closed out.

I do the same. People often reference CTRL+SHIFT+V without realizing that it isn't a Windows feature, the destination application needs to implement it (which several popular applications do, but not all).

Notepad is a great "scratchpad" application for clearing format/re-arranging data/fixing copy mistakes/etc. Plus leaving little short-duration notes to myself (with Sticky Notes for longer term reminders).

The fact it is a window-ed application on Windows is a major perk in 2021 when nearly no application behaves in a standard way anymore. That's why I use Notepad++ for different things than Notepad: It is more powerful, but takes longer to open, and has tabs which is a detriment for my usage of Notepad (I want fast taskbar switching) but a benefit for how I use Notepad++.

Notepad++ is great for Show Symbol -> Show All Characters, Encoding, and RegX/Extended Search&Replace in particular. Regular Notepad as a glorified clipboard helper.

I do not like to leave inane comments, but I feel the need to share that I somehow feel a bond with you, a total stranger online, just because we share identical practices in a very specific (generally speaking) problem. Isn't that strange.

I use Notepad in the same way, every day over the last year or so (and ongoing). It did take a couple of months to find that non-breaking hyphens get eaten by Notepad.

https://microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs.narkive.co...

The URL bar is useful for that too (before pasting into a webpage text box) :)

Yeah that is interesting.

Wonder if it could be something split between the control that the editor is using vs their key handler. The control may be eating it before the editor code even see the key press.

That would be my 'guess'.

I just tried any edit on my copy of windows and it is not showing any asterisk for any edits. It could be a newer feature that is not done yet? As I am using an older win10 copy.

Blows my mind that people actually care about this bug.

Lets see if I can blew you mind even more:

Today I found a bug in the editor of the Commodore 64. It has been there for at least 30 years.

Submit this - I'd be interested if nobody found it before or if it's a known issue that nobody's in a position to fix.

I believe this is what is know as a "nerd snipe" https://xkcd.com/356/

It's impressive that it was there for so long, and nobody saw it!

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