I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason.

I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.

For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.

Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.

It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.

10 minute QA because they don't seem to have done it:

- It consistently starts slower than Notepad3 while having substantially fewer features to load (and also slower than the old Notepad of course)

- THEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS (especially when grabbing the scroll bar handle). Any amount of delay is too much in notepad

- the animation runs at 60Hz even on a high refresh rate screen, so it looks choppy

- the animation has to "catch up" when grabbing the scroll bar handle and moving it quickly

- 215k lines loaded, moving the window itself is choppy now? HOW

- another first party piece of software that ignores the "no animations" setting in windows

- I've grabbed a notepad.exe from Windows XP SP3 in comparison, no problems there, scrolling and editing is instant. Both have SIGNIFICANT lag in the new one.

- Don't even try to resize the window with a big file open (< 1 FPS)

EDIT: Note that I haven't even complained about new features or anything, just the previous, basic features still working correctly.

The greatest thing about Notepad is that it runs and displays a blinking cursor ready for typing in much less than a second for a new document. On my Windows 11 machine it appears to be around 200 msec. I've tried setting my text file handler to other text editors but nothing else comes close to this speed of utility. I'm very glad they are not messing with that.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my Windows 11. Everything is just slightly, but enough, better to make it a good upgrade. That said, I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers. It's not a big loss for a Windows 10 user to stay on 10. It's more of a nicety to upgrade. It's better looking but functionally not much different afaik

I was expecting a ribbon or other fluff (like write.exe / WordPad), perhaps even ads (two days ago I saw at a friend's that a Windows built-in game now has ads). Honestly I'm very impressed they kept the simple look. It's just a larger-than-necessary menu bar and some unobtrusive theming and that's it. The toggleable dark mode is also a welcome change for me.

I do assume we can open files larger than a few megabytes now and there were some more functionality issues that seemed very 90s, could it be that there was only one undo step or did they already fix that in a previous release? I truly haven't used Windows in, dare I say, too long.

Edit: yes I did remember the undo problem correctly and that's finally fixed: "adding support for multi-level undo".

They added much more whitespace. In line with modern UI fashion trends.

Please can we stop this trend? It's ridiculous. It universally makes the user experience worse by reducing the effective screen real estate for actual work. Nobody cares about the aesthetic, they get used to it after a few session.

It's crazy to me that Windows 11 has already been released and yet they're still adding what should be core functionality to the OS as an after thought.

If they are so set on redesigning Notepad and/or all system apps to use the new design style, why would those not be prioritized and included in the original release from day 1?

What happened to UI customizablity since windows 7/8?

Windows XP use to have software to make shell look like anything. Only ever felt the need for skinning since windows 8 to go back to old UI which has clear borders and boundaries for everything including windows, buttons, menu bars, menus taskbar buttons...and lots of other things.

Is it harder to skin now? Why there aren't any software to give windows its classic look back?

From the Linux side of the fence;

Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial? Why encourage or tolerate an operating system (slash ecosystem of apps) with such a limited view of choice? Announcements like this really lay bare the collective dumbing down that these centralized ecosystems encourage.

Someone's going to respond with "people don't like thinking about choices for things and just want simplicity," and I will point you to an American grocery store to remind you what utter BS that is. This is monopoly(ish) leveraging, perhaps not at its most harmful, but it's really silly.

I assume it will be at least as slow to load as the redesigned Calculator, and bug me to rate it Microsoft Store every now and then.

That 'redesigned find and replace experience' covers the text in the same way the old notepad did, but the old notepad you could move the window.

I could have sworn it would have supported dark mode too. Was the old notepad using WHITE instead of the system window background color all that time?

I just hope the new version is fast and not like Paint 3D which sometimes spends multiple seconds "creating a new project" when opening a simple PNG on a 5950X.

"with a lot of effort, Microsoft succeeded in adding undo"

not 1987

I understand it's reasonable to be cynical about Windows, but is it really appropriate here[1] when the changes of note are support for dark mode and multiple undo steps? At least wait for someone to find an actual problem.

[1] When I post this, the only other comments are complaints. The ones that are at least complaining about notepad are complaining that MS had the gall to change notepad without pointing to anything specific.

If you looked at the code for the old XP Notepad, it was the Windows standard text entry control resized to full screen.

Pedantic: does anyone find the existence of the gear icon very odd (out of place)?

windows 10 + 11 is such a mess.

It's just a pretty skin on top of the same Windows NT Window chrome. The modern UI skin is baked in with a bunch of none-sensical UX decisions.

I also hate how Windows' happy-path setup, does not encourage use to create and operate with a low privileged local account. Instead, if you click through the setup process, you end up running the OS w/ an admin level account.

It's interesting how a multibillion company can make a simple editor a little worse, while a single guy with a few contributors can make something so useful (Notepad++).

Of course it's important with backwards compatibility but.. is it worth the cost?

I use Notepad almost daily to "strip" formatting before pasting content. I hope they don't ever change that ability.

I hope they put in some way to search Bing using Edge, with no way to change the search provider or browser I use.

It bugs me that the toolbar now takes up more vertical space than before. Not only does the padding just look funny, but vertical space is a premium in widescreen layouts! C'mon Microsoft!

Here's a few features I'd like to see for Notepad which I don't think would compromise its performance or minimalist design:

  - multi-cursor support
  - tab to indent selection
  - encoding selection
  - fully controllable with hotkeys
  - [optional] line numbers
  - [optional] visible whitespace characters
  - [optional] column ruler
  - [optional] spaces instead of tabs
  - [optional] unix-style line breaks

They should just open source the consumer level userland apps and outsource the dev work to third party contributors. It would save quite a bit of money.

I don't really see the selling point of upgrading to Windows 11 - what does it get me, a moderate power user who is moderately set in his ways

This is nice. I run dark mode everywhere and I used to use notepad for quick notes and stuff. Problem is that notepad is a giant wide window so it would burn my eyes out when opened, so I had to switch to something else. Now I can use it for that purpose again... Providing I move to Win11 that is. Still not a fan of the task bar lacking features I use a lot.

> including rounded corners

I have no idea how I got on all these years with square corners in my text editor.

The problem is that Microsoft is still pretending that UWP/WinUI isn't a complete mistake. All those issues are inherent to that technology.

I still use notepad to try to avoid all the crap software tries to cram down my throat these days. Sad to see they've managed to mess with this too. I wonder how long it'll be before tracking and dark patterns are shoved into this notepad version (if it hasn't happened already).

> HEY ANIMATED THE SCROLLING OMG PLEASE DONT DO THIS

That's always the first feature I turn off if I start a clean web browser profile. I'm not even sure why "smooth" scrolling is a thing...

That sounds disturbingly similar to what they did to the Calculator in Windows 10.

I'm curious what the difference in binary size is between the two, and with the one in Windows 10 (which does have some enhancements compared to previous versions, but the same good old UI.)

Did they end up hiring back QA or have they stuck to their strategy of customers and analytics being QA?

Always the same crap with MS redesigns those days (like the Terminal one): there is fancy useless shit like Dark Theme but the basics like a functional IME are broken. What the point of a text editor if it well, can't input text?

Does it append .txt when you don't want it to? `Notepad config.rc` ends up saving as config.rc.txt?

But they forgot to include "Clippy". Looks like you are writting a letter...

Have you tried Notepad++? I just tested it on my system after reading your comment and the difference between Notepad++ and Notepad was barely perceptible (the former being slower by ~0.1 seconds, at a guess). It also has a lot of quality of life features that notepad is missing - my favorite is that it auto-saves a cached copy of unsaved documents during shutdown and presents them to you on next open for saving (this doesn't seem to slow start up by any noticeable amount, for the small files I just tested).

TextEdit on macOS is this fast when set to plain text and not reopening previous windows. The entire app is 2.6mb.

Launching with rich text as the default is a bit slower. But hey, rich text.

>I read somewhere that Microsoft intends it to be mostly for new computers.

They are pushing developers to it as well. See new WSL features as an example.

Can I still configure the Taskbar to show small icons, ungrouped, with title (win95/2k look and feel)? That would be decisive for me...

I'm not sure a slight refresh of the Notepad UI is core functionality of the OS. I don't like Windows, I actually quite despise it, but I think the rolling release approach is far better than, say, macOS' yearly dump. You end up with features that are half-baked or pushed to the next year. Microsoft is taking a saner approach with Windows releases, IMHO.

Operating system for majority of users are feature complete for years and for most common tasks it would make no difference if work would be done on Windows, macOS or some Linux distribution. Perhaps the preexisting familiarity with a particular OS would be the only factor determining how comfortably user get the job done. But it can be done anywhere.

Emoji or gif support in desktop OS, sidebars or notification centers, all sorts of content or tasks suggestions, virtual assistants that are limited to only few languages, countless GUI changes or application redesigns that makes no sense or make the workflow worse. All of this is often presented as some breakthrough "experiences" that are about to fundamentally change user life - forever. And for quite some time I'm having a feeling that all of this is being done only to provide an illusion that someone does something, so the all decision-making people, CEOs would be satisfied that a product was improved. Maybe there are people who are impressed with such things or expect that these should be here but I'm definitely not.

The key term is “inbox apps.” Notepad is now one of them. An inbox app is a Microsoft Store app that happens to be pre-installed (it ships “in-box.”)

As such, Notepad, like other inbox apps, is now decoupled from the release cycle of Windows. It’s just some arbitrary app, that happens to be made by Microsoft, and happens to come with Windows.

It's not crazy. We don't live in age of physical distribution.

When fix or feature is ready, it's moment to distribute it.

It's way better than Apple style feature hoarding to pad yearly OS release changelog with application fluff.

Of course, it would be nice if every program ever were nearly perfect upon release, but that isn't necessarily a realistic expectation in every scenario. If it can be updated via the Store (which is the case with Notepad and many other utilities), it doesn't have to be tied to the OS release cadence. In this aspect, modern Windows is more like rolling-release desktop Linux distros than macOS.

Notepad is core OS functionality? I think not.

Better notepad then controlpanel ;)

One quote I've kept around for years is:

"But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them." -- [which I didn't keep a source for, and searched back to http://www.garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html "The Command Line in 2004" but that looks like a more modern post about an earlier Neal Stephenson article]

> "Like, why. Why ANY OF THIS. Why a big "important sounding" announcement for something so trivial?"

It's a blog post on the "Insiders" blog[1], they seem to appear weekly. Why comment on this at all "from the Linux side" in one breath advocating freedom of choice, in the next breath condemning everyone who doesn't value what you value, or who does things differently to you?

Which is it, freedom of choice, or mandatory complexity? Freedom of opinion, or "that is trivial and I am correct"?

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/tag/windows-inside...

How many people use Microsoft windows 10? Latest: 1.3 Billion

https://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/en/windowsdevices

That, along with the tendency towards Bikeshedding, or Parkinson's law of triviality, means a lot of people care.

Android has a comparable number of users, but I think we should compare desktop PC systems here and in this case, Linux users have much lower expectations of Linux Desktop along with not being nearly as many users.

Not disagreeing with you (often have to preface internet comments with that :) but instead discussing. The grocery store example is quite revealing. Yes, you can point to the American grocery store, but what has been well studied there is that presenting people with choices creates its own form of stress. I certainly feel the stress of going to Whole Foods and wanting cocoa powder and seeing what seems like a thousand variations, versus going to Trader Joe's where there's almost always one brand per item (and often it's the Trader Joe's brand). Whole Foods can be good if there's some niche thing I want, but Trader Joe's is quite relaxing to just have a shopping list and pick up stuff not worrying about comparing each item to a whole bunch of other ones. I believe this was also part of the thinking behind most stores introducing house brands over the last several decades.

Anyhow, this is not some huge announcement. I'm assuming it got voted up in hacker news because there's a humorous element to the whole thing, notepad being one of the more glacially-iterated-but-still-around software systems in existence.

When you buy a car are you concerned that it came with manufacturer monopoly provided radio, GPS, seats, tires and a jack? I mean you can go out and get third party versions of all of these things with improved functionality so why should they even include basic versions?

Now how many people actually replace the radio in their car? Or the rims? Or the seats? A vast percentage of owners are very happy with the included version as they don't desire / require anything beyond that. It's not a monopoly, it's just including the basic features most users will be content with.

Now if they forced you to keep Notepad associated with TXT files then we'd have an issue. (I'm looking at you Edge)

(adding a note to address in comments likely coming about how media systems aren't easily replacable in cars anymore but I'm a child of the DIN radio era)

I strongly encourage you to occasionally view the world through more than one lens.

No matter what the OS, the default editor is important. Changes to the default editor that address long standing demands by the community are important. Communicating those changes to a wide audience is important as well. (And the Linux side of the fence could stand to learn a bit about communicating with the wider community)

And that's why that article exists - because a tool used by a large user population just got significantly better. And that user population is mostly happy about the improvement. If you're not the audience, skipping it is an option.