This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s.
It's basically a fancy textbox.
Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role.
That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET.
I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
They laid off a lot of people with Win32 experience in the past couple of years. If that was really a problem they could just hire some of them back (or, I dunno, keep them in the first place).
It's weird that Linux people are still seething to this day that the reason for Linux's lack of success on the desktop comes from the unfair pushing of Windows, when it's clear that Microsoft has been barely putting any effort into Windows, and gutting development save for AI stuff.
I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.
It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.
Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.
I'm a Linux user but I don't understand the drive of Linux users for it to be a mainstream OS. If it would be mainstream it would be more commercial, the users having less agency, having no choice in desktop environment and tied to commercial services. Because once it's big, big companies will want to make big bucks off the people using it. And most consumers actually like big tech companies taking them by the hand and choosing for them.
So in other words, Linux on the desktop will be a Linux I will hate. The closest thing to Linux for the mainstream we have is ChromeOS and I'm sure we all hate it. I sure do because I want nothing to do with Google services.
I'm no longer at MSFT, but according to the people that are, the leadership is straight up saying that anyone who doesn't like AI coding has no place in the company now.
Unfortunely, they are making people like myself, that in general tend to have comments more pro-Windows, starting to consider the alternatives yet again.
Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.
I do not know what is up with people and their aversion to help people be better (or at the very least more useful) at their job. Not just in IT, but even hard / physical labor-type jobs or w/e.
In a culture obsessed with individual success, helping someone else does not have any obvious upside, but plenty of clear downsides - what if he gets so good that I look worse in comparison? What if he stays the same and I look like a bad mentor? Why would I sacrifice my time for no practical reward? Etc etc.
Yeah I understand that and I was thinking the same things, but it honestly sucks. I have been in a position where I was supposed to be taught the work on the spot but instead they expected me to know everything and do what I have never done before and it is such a bad experience. :/
It costs money. You're paying that person to be doing something other than working. If you're not squeezing maximal productivity out of your workers, then you have failed as a manager and will not be getting that sweet bonus this quarter
>> they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development
They can hire pretty much anyone. They choose to not hire people with Win32 experience. They choose to implement hiring process which results in hire other kind of people.
Do you honestly think you could hire a staff a project (requiring hundreds) with young(ish) people of at least decent skills who all know Win32/COM/C/C++?
> this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
That may be, but there is PLENTY of people with the expertise to develop WinUI apps -- IMO, the glaring problem would be that Microsoft can't get their head straight on which UI to support in the first place!
WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.
As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.
WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.
But who is letting interns with no experience take architectural and technological decisions for a core feature such as the start menu? These are the people that should be blamed.
Yet Apple can find decent developers to work with their Apple-specific tools+tech.
Yeah, there's been complaints about some Apple's old polish and consistency being lost, but it's usually very nitpicky stuff, nothing compared to the complaints about Win11.
It's my daily driver. I have zero problems with it. I don't mind the Liquid Glass UX. I'm not blindly anti-Apple though, neither am I a fanboi. I've just legitimately not had any problems. There have been minor bugs, etc., but nothing broken. Definitely night and day from Win11....
You're only half right, a lot of these devs probably use Windows but since JSwhatever is the current lingua franca of programming it's easier to hire for
Out of curiosity, what does notepad++ have that kate of other texteditors does not?
Looking at the features there does not seem to be anything special, but a lot of people seem to love it so there is clearly something special about it.
For me it's the TextFX menu and the MIME Tools plug in. They offer very easy access to lots of handy features like changing case (upper, lower, proper, sentence, invert), remove/swap/replace quotes ('/"), removing trailing spaces, non-printable characters, and blank lines (or just extra blank lines), base64/URL/HTML/ROT13/UU encoding/decoding, all kinds of decimal/hex/binary/octal/text conversions, add/remove escapes, etc.
Having so much there in just a couple clicks is very nice!
If it comes down to FOSS/freeware stuff I am actually quite fond of Windows ecosystem.
Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.
Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.
Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.
Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.
There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.
MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...
Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...
Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time...
I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable.
I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.
I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone.
Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from
my damn bathroom.
And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...
That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.
I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions.
And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.
Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.
Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.
I've switched all my machines to linux in the past couple years.
I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.
It's not even a competent textbox. Try to scan barcodes into it for example, or use it with Autohotkey. It has some sort of buffering issue and lags horribly whenever characters are input faster than a human.
The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
On my 5 year old work laptop it was so bad it was nearly unusable. I found that disabling the shell extensions they used to implement the new file explorer UI helped a lot with that.
They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.
It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...
I often used it to convert unix style line endings to windows. Notepad choked on those, wordpad could load them easily, and just resaving them as a txt file converted them to windows line endings.
IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
It's an amazing technical feat how they managed to introduce a graphical delay to it in Windows 10. I feel it actually took planning to work out how to introduce friction into easily the simplest conceivable app for no reason. It is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with Windows today.
They put a copilot button in Outlook. Which, when ask, gladly confesses it doesn't have access to your mail or calendar, completely negating any value it could possibly have.
The same with the AI thing Meta added to Whatsapp. After spending a while trying to search for a message whose exact wording I couldn't remember, but whose content was easily described, I thought I'd give the bot a try. Turns out it doesn't have access to my messages.
I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.
Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind…
“Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
> “Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
I pasted this into Google to see what you were referencing, and was met with this full-screen, front page, all-important "AI Overview" (that of course takes precedence over actual search results)
> You're very welcome! If you have any questions about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's products, their marketing strategies, or need assistance with anything else, feel free to ask.
Don't play along by calling it "toast". It's a pop-up that's been re-branded to avoid the stigma of the old name, exactly like what companies do to themselves after causing a disaster like an oil spill.
You are conflating two similar but different UI elements.
A popup is a larger object, often a full window, that covers large parts of other elements or sometimes the entire screen. They are sometimes modal.
A toast is a smaller element, appearing (often by sliding into view upwards, hence the cutesy name) in or above a specific notification area of the application or the overall OS. These are much smaller, seldom modal and often convey useful notifications or warnings, unlike popups (especially modal ones) that are often either useless or actively, deliberately, in the way.
While it is correct to call then both popups if you wish, "toasts" are generally considered a specific subset.
To me the first would be called a modal window or a message box, while the latter is what I would call a popup. I guess different exposure with different UI kits.
For reference: you can get the regular notepad back by just uninstalling Notepad from the control panel (the new one, with big buttons and less features). Since it's possible using the regular UI without particular shenanigans, I assume this is fully supported.
So its gonna sound weird, but some companies really have strict policies and notepad there is ok, but notepad++ isn't. Usually, there is some way to get exceptions, but those tend to require more effort than it is usually worth it. I guess what I am saying it: it is not always by choice:D
Lots of organizations have a blanket ban on any third-party software that wasn't specifically approved by IT. Being free might help it get cleared but that's nowhere sufficient. Since Notepad comes with Windows, it's probably always there and never banned. (Although of course the cloud-based LLM integration might actually be a problem.)
With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.
If it's a windows-based server, there's probably little need to do much text editing, so installing Notepad++ wouldn't be needed or desired. Then, you suddenly need to copy/paste/amend some text, so you end up opening Notepad. My use of it is typically if I'm connecting remotely to the Windows desktop and am not sure if the keymap is correct when typing in a password, so I type it into Notepad to make sure I'm putting in what I think I'm typing.
I do, when I have tons of tabs in Nodepad++ and then need some other notes of different priority/context in explicitly another window that looks visually different to Notepad++ :)
Aaaand... thats about it, even Total commander's built in text editor is more powerful.
This is endgame. They are at the stage when everything in game is already done and they are lazingly trying to do some sidequests, like stacking the most cheese you can in a room.
They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.