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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

The greatest thing about Notepad is that it runs and displays a blinking cursor ready for typing in much less than a second for a new document. On my Windows 11 machine it appears to be around 200 msec. I've tried setting my text file handler to other text editors but nothing else comes close to this speed of utility. I'm very glad they are not messing with that.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It's not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It's more of a nicety to upgrade. It's better looking but functionally not much different afaik

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Have you tried Notepad++? I just tested it on my system after reading your comment and the difference between Notepad++ and Notepad was barely perceptible (the former being slower by ~0.1 seconds, at a guess). It also has a lot of quality of life features that notepad is missing - my favorite is that it auto-saves a cached copy of unsaved documents during shutdown and presents them to you on next open for saving (this doesn't seem to slow start up by any noticeable amount, for the small files I just tested).

Yes, Notepad++ is really great. In my case, I would tend to have a bunch of text files in tabs that slowed loading, so associating 'txt' with it meant I'd have to wait to jot a note down. I could have fixed this by closing all tabs before putting it away, but I'm happier using VS Code for my larger text file needs and good old notepad.exe for quick notes.

FYI notepad++ has a setting to open a separate instance for each file. It drives me crazy when I install on a new machine and it defaults to the behavior you’ve described.

TextEdit on macOS is this fast when set to plain text and not reopening previous windows. The entire app is 2.6mb.

Launching with rich text as the default is a bit slower. But hey, rich text.

Sublime Text, god bless its soul, is right there with it.

And TextEdit is less than half that size if you strip out the translation dicts!

Sublime Text wasn’t as fast to launch on my 12” MacBook (RIP), which is why didn’t mention it. TextEdit still pretty much instant.

On my intel 16”, Sublime Text 4 is amazingly fast, even with a dozen medium-to-large rails apps open.

> TextEdit on macOS is this fast when set to plain text

Not for me.

Opening textedit on macbook 13, with plaintext mode takes noticeable time to animate the window before I can start typing.

Opening notepad.exe on Win11 is instant. The window is on-screen and ready to take input, before my finger has lifted off the enter key.

Not to mention the silly bugs and lack of attention to detail.

Open a new file. Don't type anything, it will prompt you to save the file on close. Why?

>I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers.

They are pushing developers to it as well. See new WSL features as an example.

Can you explain how? I'm inexperienced in this field but found wsl to be a great quick way to run Linux software in Windows

WSLg for example. This was a windows 10 feature in beta. Windows 11 only at release.

Can I still configure the Taskbar to show small icons, ungrouped, with title (win95/2k look and feel)? That would be decisive for me...

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