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Comment by NooneAtAll3 | Hacker News Reader

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NooneAtAll3

step 1: remove wordpad

step 2: omg there's demand for features

step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad

step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem

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Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.

I assume there's like a single manager who's job it was was to maintain notepad and force use of AI, so obviously, vibe code needless features because if it's not broke, how can you fix it with AI.

I've never liked Windows but did appreciate the dumb simplicity of parts of it. Especially MS Paint. Like Mac Preview has always had all these nice advanced features, but lacked one simple thing most people need, a frikin pencil tool. Then they added a pencil but made it try to turn your scribbles into neat shapes every time... with fill.

Step 5: reintroduce a plain-text editor [1]

Step 6: GOTO 1.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It hasn't gotten to that point yet, but the maintainer of edit wants to add a lot of features to it.

Make Microsoft Edit a Lightweight 'VS Code for the Terminal' - https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682

Oh god no, it's not the maintainer. It's frankly a student with no prior experience in both the language and the codebase, asking the maintainer permission for pushing a lot of ai generated code with chatgpt for his resume?

Atleast he has the decency to ask for stuff first and being straight.

Hilarious comment by the way https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/682#discussion...

The maintainer is the first comment, agreeing with the post author:

> I concur, but there are two issues with this: Building the foundation of an editor is way harder than building features later on top of that, and currently it is unlikely that Microsoft will fund me to spend half a year working purely on this project. So, I'll work on this whenever I can, which is not much.

Maybe they're referring to the plugin system they want to implement: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17

The maintainer has used a hyped language to write a simple editor that already exists. Do I need to say more? OK. The code will be abandoned in 2 years. Maybe it doesn't comes to more features.

Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar.

I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.

Hence why I use .txt and not .rtf (After having multiple RTF files become corrupted)

Syntax highlighting is definitely less complex than updating and rendering RTF and HTML.

There is configurable syntax highlighting in vscode.

Should an app like Notepad ever embed a WebView? (with e.g. tauri-apps/wry instead of CEF now FWIU)? Not even for a Markdown Preview feature IMHO.

Both Wordpad and Win11-Notepad use the RichEdit control (which first appeared in Win95, brought to you by the Mail client group aka Capone - cuz no one else wanted to do a RichEdit text control). see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/windows-11-not... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/rich-edit-control-...

The RichEdit control handles parsing RTF (I believe there was a CVE-level bug about RTF-handling in RichEdit - ahh - here we go https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/368132/), the programmer/app is insulated from grokking RTF.

Here's sample code for opening an RTF file - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/use...

Adding realtime conversion of text-only Markdown to the processed-richtext Markdown is slightly more difficult than an instant message-type edit control converting a text :) to a unicode emoji character representing :)

You'd have some bookkeeping to remember which lines are markdown and which are plain text. But it's not rocket science.

Imagine Win11-Notepad as WordPad with all the UI for rich text formatting disabled.

I think I remember RichEdit from Windows 3.1, but maybe it was always installed with the OLE common controls and not shipped with the OS.

The RichEdit control was first shipped in Win95.

Exchange 4.0 email client app (shipped in 1996) had a Win16-bit version which included RichEdit.

see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/rich...

Cheers, thanks

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