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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Technology
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Seems like they're taking everything good about Notepad and flushing it down the toilet.
Sometimes you just need a dumb, text editor you don't have to fight to do what you need. e.g. if I'm editing a config file, I don't want my text editor's spellcheck or autocorrect fighting me.
But tabs were a great addon. Also, it can finally handle linux line endings (\n). Thats the two things I miss when using old versions of notepad.
But a spell checker? Why?!
It's an opportunity to monitor the contents of the file, and your keystrokes.
Maybe add some forced integration with onedrive then?
also killing wordpad and putting features from that to notepad means one less program to maintain, less expenses
How does the math work out on that? Both are fairly mature, I don't believe that either application takes a considerable amount of development effort to maintain. And taking features from Wordpad and putting them into Notepad has a time and effort cost.
That carriage return that Windows sneaks in there has been the source of a lot of file-parsing problems for me when I forgot to catch that in my programs, because I develop on Linux and I'm not expecting it.
Different OSes using different line endings is such a long standing and well known problem that I would only describe the bugs that come as a result as bad programming. Not even lazy programming, a lazy programmer uses a library that abstracts away these differences.
I program embedded devices. There's not often just a ready to go library for what you want to do when you're doing bare metal. You're given a C compiler with the bare minimums, and that's it. You're expected to mostly build what you need by yourself. That includes file-parsing routines. A microcontroller doesn't even have any idea what a filesystem is unless you build one. I gotta do all that myself with an SD card through low level SPI stuff.
On general purpose OSes, yes, you have a plethora of frameworks and libraries to choose from. In this world, the cool stuff, like C++ Boost libraries for example, doesn't exist.
On embedded devices, how often are you parsing input that came from notepad (or any other text editor)? If your device has a UI or a web server, you’re likely already using something that handles various encoding and line endings. If you’re reading data you included at build time, consider a validator/sanitizer script that can run in your build environment where it can have easy access to off the shelf libraries.
On a side note- as a software engineer who primarily works on things running in a general purpose OS but does occasionally have to make small programs that can function on embedded devices (albeit still usually with an OS, think routers and iot), I’m glad that the Rust community takes no-std development seriously. Large swaths of the rust ecosystem is available even in embedded environments.
Isn't that a long time habit?
Lol, yeah, but with notepad it's an extra helping of how dare they?
The article says it’s off by default for (iirc) config files and ‘other files associated with coding’
Still, not really a place I want spellcheck
So turn those features off. I just checked, there's a setting for both spellcheck and autocorrect.
Lots of us use notepad on hundreds of different machines, many times freshly installed. "just turn it off" is not a solution as that increases the unnecessary burden beyond the utility of the application.
A bigger sin of new Notepad is that its no longer ephemeral when not saving the file. This is really bad if you happen to copy secure data into notepad for brief evaluation or manipulation. It now gets saved unencrypted to the file system in a temporary file whether you want it or not.
Or just use wordpad instead of turning notepad into wordpad?
There’s a reason we opened notepad and it wordpad. Adding features and bloat to notepad removes that.