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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the nostalgia for NotePad - the most featureless piece of software ever invented.

There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism. I've wasted a lot of time during my life reconfiguring Emacs or Vim, switching back and forth between various GUI note-taking apps, or tweaking my LaTeX preambles. The brutal minimalism of something like NotePad leaves you with less distractions.

I think it's the same reason I sometimes decide to leave the computer entirely and grab some pen and paper to really get things done.

When you can't even undo properly (while you're used to this in other apps), does this annoyance not distract you from whatever you're doing in the text editor?

> There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism.

I think there's little credit to be given here. A text widget is part of any gui toolkit and there are hundreds of notepad like text editors. I think basically every DE on Linux has their own...

I feel the same. If a text editor doesn't have at least multiple levels of undo, it's worthless. IDK if it even had redo.

There's been UltraEdit since 1994, SciTE since 1999, Notepad++ since 2003, the browser's address bar to remove formatting or just for holding some text...

Honestly, I also don't know anyone who has any fond remembrance of notepad. The majority of my friends on windows used notepad++ and then later sublime.

Just like how almost everyone I knew used Paint.NET rather than mspaint.

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