Microsoft Improves Windows Notepad

Megalith

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While there are numerous alternatives available, Microsoft has decided to revisit and improve its stock text editor for Windows users who prefer the default, barebones app. One significant change is the ability to search for a string in the entire document with the “wrap around” setting; the current Notepad only searches in one direction from the location of the cursor. Text zooming has also been added to improve legibility.

Other improvements include line and column numbers being displayed correctly when word-wrap is enabled, line and column numbers are no longer reset to one when saving a file, lines that don't fit on the screen are now displayed correctly, pressing CTRL + Backspace deletes the previous word, arrow keys functionality has been tweaked to unselect text before moving the cursor, and work has been carried out to improve the performance of Notepad when opening large files.
 
I hope the updated version will be able to do word wrap without formatting in line breaks at each wrap point. Copying and pasting text from notepad to other text boxes can make a mess due to arbitrary paragraphs where there should be none.
 
Amazing. Maybe someday they will get notepad out of the dark ages and bring in support for unix line feed.

Yes. Please. This is the most irritating thing in my day to day work on systems where I'm not allowed to use anything other than what's already installed (i.e. the default apps).
 
I still fear they will break something even with updating Notepad. Millions of office users probably depend on it to behave in specific ways. If they could manage to make people miss the old calculator ...
 
Another nod for Notepad++, there's nothing that compares on the Windows platform, really.
 
Back in school in the 1980s. We had a command line editor. Yeah imagine editing documents thru a command line. That's some hardcore stuff right there
 
I still fear they will break something even with updating Notepad. Millions of office users probably depend on it to behave in specific ways. If they could manage to make people miss the old calculator ...

I actually prefer the Windows 7 version of the Calculator over what is now included in Windows 10. Although if someone has a suggestion for something better....

Back in school in the 1980s. We had a command line editor. Yeah imagine editing documents thru a command line. That's some hardcore stuff right there

You are talking about pre-vi stuff, right? Where one had to type in EDIT linenumber or somesort....
 
It wasn't edline, was an editor on the pdp-1170. A mini computer. It did have a full screen mode. Which I started using later on.
But edline looks pretty similar
 
macOS has Notes - it's their version of Notepad. They improved it quite a bit over the years. I use it frequently. (I use a Mac for my job).
Notepad++ on Windows wins the day.
 
Hey, now *this* is the kind of update that Microsoft need to do more of. Nobody asked for tiles, or Cortana (ok, maybe a few). Nobody asked for forced updates or deceptive installation prompts or completely scrambled Settings/Control Panel.
 
While there are numerous alternatives available, Microsoft has decided to revisit and improve its stock text editor for Windows users who prefer the default, barebones app. One significant change is the ability to search for a string in the entire document with the “wrap around” setting; the current Notepad only searches in one direction from the location of the cursor. Text zooming has also been added to improve legibility.

Other improvements include line and column numbers being displayed correctly when word-wrap is enabled, line and column numbers are no longer reset to one when saving a file, lines that don't fit on the screen are now displayed correctly, pressing CTRL + Backspace deletes the previous word, arrow keys functionality has been tweaked to unselect text before moving the cursor, and work has been carried out to improve the performance of Notepad when opening large files.
They'll probably make the application better but require something stupid like a Microsoft sign-in to use it.
 
Don't mess with what's not broken. Anyone doing any writing isn't using notepad. It's for people to make small NOTES, like on a PAD.

Yep.
 
They'll probably make the application better but require something stupid like a Microsoft sign-in to use it.
Yep if it's not proper Win32 notepad.exe, but instead a UWP/mobile store app with a splash screen or popup nags to rate it, then they can keep it .

Notepad++ will continue to reign supreme regardless.
 
Yeah maybe they will finally get ascII with Unix for memory text editor...thing.

Jesus Christ guys its frickin Notepad.
 
Hey, now *this* is the kind of update that Microsoft need to do more of. Nobody asked for tiles, or Cortana (ok, maybe a few). Nobody asked for forced updates or deceptive installation prompts or completely scrambled Settings/Control Panel.

You are right, I never asked for that scrambled mess of a control panel that Windows 7 icon mode made it.
 
Amazing. Maybe someday they will get notepad out of the dark ages and bring in support for unix line feed.

That being said, I still find Notepad useful for stripping out all hidden formatting. A lot of editors will preserve at least some useful formatting (like hidden characters as you mention). But not Notepad, it strips the fuck out of everything. So I will copy some text from a website or excel, paste it into notepad, then copy it again and now I have just the clean characters. I also like that it doesn't insert stupid line spaces like Wordpad or Word does.

Outside of that, ya little purpose.
 
Once I started using Notepad++ I never looked back.

learning Regular Expression has made Notepad++ such a joy to work with. I can construct all kinds of replacement lines from a given source line my manipulating the regular expression. I have constructed hash tables for scripts using Notepad++ and a regular expression replace. Or even made shell batch scripts for manipulating files, using the output of a grep or ls command and then constructing something with Notepad++.
 
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