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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types. Plain text or Office formats, PDF, thats it.

That might well be true for 99% of people, but it isn't true for me. I'd like to have an editor built into windows that was way lighter than an IDE but could handle things like JSON, XML, and CSV without sweating.

Notepad++ serves that purpose today but would be nice to have it bolted into Windows. Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)

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I think it’s more a recognition of the fact that Microsoft expects Windows users to purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, as part of their push to replace local-first applications with cloud services.

Also look at how they are changing desktop Outlook to a web-tech based UI, which is a prerequisite for eventually moving it to the cloud altogether.

Microsoft knows that windows users will eventually cave in to some of those second option subscription reminders.

> Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types

Regular windows users are mostly corporate and there are (management excepted, of course) a lot of file types to be manipulated. (CAD, MS Office, etc)

True, I didnt explain myself very clearly. An editor serves two functions: to open text files, and to act as the Program of Last Resort to open an unfamiliar file type. Id like something beefier than Notepad for the first, but I could live with it: but Id really like something with the power of Notepad++ for the second use case, built into Windows. However its far outside the mainline for windows corporate users since they probably never get sent filetyoes for which they do not already have the right app to open it.

> Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)

An awful lot, maybe most Windows users who need to inspect non txt filetypes still wouldn't be comfortable with Vim, even with a user friendly keybinding.

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