Microsoft Notepad: If it ain't broke, shove it in the Store, then break it? It's the summer holidays. A good time to do things while nobody's watching. Except The Register, of course. Aside from sneaking Notepad into the Windows Store, last week Microsoft gave Insiders a new 2020 Windows 10 build, added features back into Skype, rounded out Azure's persistent disk storage and prepared a Typescript …
Spare a thought for us poor Windows Server users, who occasionally want to remote into a server and open a log file or config file in Notepad. There's not a chance in hell that any server will be connected to the Store, for the usual security reasons. What happens when the old Notepad is removed and replaced with a shortcut which automatically tries to launch Store?
It'll prompt mounting a resource with Notepad++?
Let's face it, the way Microsoft compiles you can probably add War and Peace to anything that uses a more efficient compiler and still have functionality that exceeds Notepad.
Use wordpad, which also lurks in the background and generally I only ever remember it exists when I try to open a file that's too large for Notepad. Don't have a 2016 or higher server to hand to check, but it's certainly still there in 2012 R2.
I should think that any server is going to need some sort of resident basic text editor to sort things out if one manages to break the configuration beyond the ability to talk to the Store. Maybe Microsoft will ship with edit.com or edlin if they actually remove Notepad.
How does one deal with Windows (hypothectical) inappropriate attempts to use the Store? Beats me. Probably something in the registry. I gave up on Windows decades ago. I'm not smart enough to deal with it. I doubt anyone is.
I should think that any server is going to need some sort of resident basic text editor to sort things out if one manages to break the configuration beyond the ability to talk to the Store. Maybe Microsoft will ship with edit.com or edlin if they actually remove Notepad.
They stopped shipping EDLIN.EXE a while back, but real men use "copy con > myfile.txt" anyway.
:)
It did a job (simple text editor available on any Windows box) that allowed you to review logs, make simple config changes, get less technical people to grab command output to a file or simply cut+paste commands between hosts.
Yes there are other ways of doing it, but you're not always in control of the other ways.
Exactly - sometimes simple is extremely useful.
I don't do server stuff myself, but I still use notepad pretty much every day in my job - have yet to find a better way of stripping all formatting and hyperlinks off text in one swift move for moving between various applications, and I need to do that multiple times most days.
I still use notepad pretty much every day in my job - have yet to find a better way of stripping all formatting and hyperlinks off text in one swift move for moving between various applications,
I do the same, as when you copy/paste text from modern web apps it often comes with extra unnecessary formatting. I call it 'washing' the data.
My partner recently got the piss taken out of her by a colleague for doing this when copying from a web page into a Word document. Ironically, it was a colleague who she had been tasked with showing how to format her customer letters better, and this is one of the most useful tricks to stop Word from making your letter look like a 15 year-old's school project.
Apparently, I'd shown her how to do this a year or two ago, but the memory of doing so has completely gone from my mind. Probably because to someone who fights with computers* day-in and day-out, it's such an obvious thing to be doing.
*This is the best decsription I can come up with that covers all the various and sundry things I get asked to do alongside what my contract of employment says...
21 years ago I had to learn vi because that was the text editor we had on our sun workstations. Ever since then, I've installed it on every computer I have to regularly use. Fortunately for my colleagues, I'm not enough of a sadist to set it as the default text editor on shared workstations...
Sometimes all you want is 'simple'. Notepad, and Wordpad for that matter, have provided simple capabilities that are just right for personal things. For anything more complex or fancy, there's MS Office and Libre Office.
I would hate to see either of them disappear or, worse, mutate into some ribbon-wearing monstrosity.
Copy the XP version into Win 7 - it still works. It doesn't have the 'improvements' that made the Win 7 version useless such as 1.5 line spacing that would revert every time it was restarted. Always use it for those text files from *nix systems that don't have terminating line feeds like DOS.
Phil.
Oh. And no fecking ribbon.
Yep
Notepad 365
A real snip at $9.99/month
If this ever comes to pass then we will really know that MS has totally lost the plot.
{Most of us know that already but a move like that will just make the average punter sit up and take note and wonder if there is an alternative to what moneygrabbing MS is offering}
[see icon for one option]
Have you never been warned about plugging in a USB stick to a server and the virus risk that is? Also in this age of virtualization and clusters it is unlikely the box is in the rack is the server you are looking at. If you turned up to consult at my company and wanted to plug in a stick so you can put notepad++ on a production server, once we had finished laughing at you, you would then not be left unsupervised during your visit so you don't do anything that would result in us having to use the cattle prod.
Good luck when you have to work on a server you didn't install, without an internet connection, and when you have to work an a remote connection which doesn't allow you to access your local storage...
...and where policies forbid installing non-standard/freebie apps.
Microsoft seems to be releasing a lot of these odd one-off things lately. VS Code is a really good example where (I'm assuming) someone's pet project ended up taking on a life of its own. All the cool kids are writing in JavaScript, so why not write a text editor that lives in Electron and requires a gigabyte of dependencies pulled from 1000 sources?
I'm guessing it's because they're not constrained by the 3-year release cycle anymore, and the Windows OS itself is now a second-class citizen. So, they can emit anything they want, any time they want.
Yep, it is indeed a pet project:
You're alone in a room with the Windows 10 out-of-the-box apps. What do you do?
First up in new stuff is the long overdue arrival of GPU temperature in the performance tab of Task Manager. The change sees the current temperature shown beside dedicated graphics cards in Celsius. Odd, considering the US-first approach usually taken by the software giant.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone who cares about such things measure it any other way, regardless of region. Giving Fahrenheit as a secondary would probably be a good idea if they're just going to stick it in front of all and sundry, though.
After all, it doesn't matter whether the units mean anything to the average user. They could be in Rankine and it wouldn't matter to most users.
What matters to everyone is whether the temperature is good, bad, or very bad and whether it's rising or falling.
So stick to Celsius, because (as mentioned) it's the unit that everyone who cares about the actual numbers knows.
100C is bad, while 100°F is very cool. It's helpful if the "It's over 100!" is unambiguously bad.
I'd not thought about it until I read this article, but whenever I've seen someone discussing temperatures in a computer, they've always used Centigrade, it must be the standard, even for Yanks.
It's a bit like how Americans use litres to measure engine capacity (as well as cubic inches or square cubits or something). Slowly they're learning to use normal units in specialist fields. Eventually they'll know how to use them all the time.
"notepad's brain-damaged line-ending"
It's more broadly Microsoft's line-ending policy, and there is actually some reasoning behind it (believe it or not).
ASCII is originally based on the (7 bit Baudot code) character encoding originally used in teletype machines, which was still used for early line printers (this is why *nix shells are called tty's). A teletype required both a Carriage Return and and a Line Feed in order to move the print head to start typing the next line in the correct place on the paper (CR moves it back to the left, LF moves it down one line).
When computers stopped relying so much on actual teleprinters, they all adopted their own style of new line characters in text files. The *nix's, BeOS, RISC OS etc. went for just a LF. Windows, DOS, DEC, Atari TOS etc. kept the CRLF, whilst others went with a variety of other combinations (see here).
TL/DR Marking a new line in a text file is done in many ways across different OS's, all relating back to teletypes. Microsoft's is no more "brain damaged" than any other (except BBC Micros which used LFCR which is just BACKWARDS and WRONG).
I may add some details regarding ttys:
As physical CR takes some times, some (most?) of them needed some padding characters to be inserted in flow to create a delay (usual padding character was NULL, ASCII 0).
As soon OS decides to take action of padding insertion for itself (with description set somewhere in a printer database), there was no longer a need for end-of-line sequence to be more than one "well-known" character.
Here you are.
In case MS goes overboard with Notepad features, Notepad Classic would be easy to re-create, as it is little more than a wrapper around the Windows API text widget. This is probably the main reason it has not evolved: adding things not in the text widget requires adding lots of code.
Remembers writing C in dos edit before compiling in Symantec’s "free for non commercial use" C compiler.
Those where the days, 64 kB .com files, 640 kB is enough for everyone yada yada yada.
Mines the one with the Intel 80286 and 80287 Programmer’s Reference Manual in the pocket...
Ahhh the difference between degrees Frankenstein and degrees Roman-Catholic. As a Brit born in the late 70’s, I got a lovely mix of feet and centimetres, weather forecasts in °F, maths exercises in °C, grandparents who had no idea on WTF my lessons were talking about, my father measuring precision parts in thous(ands of an inch), and finding the correct imperial spanner that fit the metric fasteners to mend the breaks or adjust the saddle on my bike...
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