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Comment by StrawberryFrog | Hacker News Reader

Notepad, by the way, remains crap. (page 11)

Ah, call me sentimental, but it's good to know that some things are still kept the way they always were.

I agree with the basic statement on page one: Vista is not that bad, Win 7 is Vista take 2, rough edges smoothed off, and the drastic difference is just in perception.

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To be honest, I hope they never "improve" Notepad (either of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008....). I think every operating system needs a totally-bare-bones text editor. Because of that, I think Notepad does exactly what it's meant to do, and "improving" Notepad would change that.

WordPad, on the other hand... They can keep Ribboning the shit out of that for all I care.

Yep, I agree. Notepad should be (and is) the simplest possible GUI text editor. All the devs that I know use either Notepad2 or Notepad++ for more complex general-purpose editing.

Anyone uses something other, like TextPad?

I am still using TextPad which I started using since 90s. But wish I could jump to something better. TextPad is now dead with no update for, what 6 years? No v.5 doesn't count as update, it's downgrade. No Unicode, only more fancy GUI.

Switching editor is really hard.

Just my experience: I have been using textpad for ages, and I am still using it (v.4.7, for the reasons you mentioned). In the meantime, however, I had to learn emacs (for Slime etc.). Now I notice that when I open textpad I begin to miss emacs features. And on emacs, I miss the fancy GUI far less than I imagined.

I use notepad++.

I'm a fan of Programmer's Notepad. http://www.pnotepad.org/

Well, support for unix-style line ends would not hurt...

Legacy software prevents this from happening.

I would like to ask you: How? Microsoft managed to support Unicode in Notepad, starting in Windows 2000; the heuristic used when detecting character sets is fragile and has potential to break what used to work (mostly opening readmes anyway). How would support for Unix style line ending break legacy software?

You can improve a text editor without making it more complex. TextEdit on the Mac is just as minimal as Notepad, perhaps a little more so (because its menu's on the top rather than in the window), but it has powerful support for fonts, page layouts, and the like that you can access if you ever need it. I actually use it as my main word processor in most situations because it's powerful enough to handle it.

You like that, type "edit" in CMD.EXE :-)

Notepad is really simple from a programmer's point of view. It's a window, with an edit box and a menu on it. Ok, so the added complexity is that there's a second window for the find/replace dialog. I suspect that the command-line edit has more lines of code in it, because less is given in the libraries.

You can keep your fancy NotePad. I use edlin for all my Drupal development.

"Win 7 is Vista take 2"

More like Vista SP3

I'm personally happy that Microsoft didn't shake things up too much with Windows 7. At it's core Vista was a good operating system, it just needed a LOT of polish. I'd almost be happier to see smaller, incremental releases of Windows (that cost less of course), just so bugs can be ironed out easier and new features can be introduced more gradually.

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