Notepad++ UI is really far from what you would expect for a Windows built in application. It would basically need to be rewritten. Then there's the professional translation, etc, etc.

I think the ship on built in apps has sailed. Everybody expects to open a web browser or app store to get anything of any use now. Heck, they even stuck ads in Minesweeper.

It made more sense when downloading software was slow or you might not even have an internet connection. I'm sure many Mac owners enjoyed playing Chess before going out and buying some software.

I am excited about this update since I am stuck using notepad a lot on systems at work where I cannot install applications without a change order and getting something like notepad++ approved is basically a non-starter.

There's portable versions of Notepad++, that run right out of a folder, if your antivirus isn't especially draconian, anyway.

Just use WordPad.

Notepad++ has its fans but it falls between two stools.

It is a bit overblown for editing your /etc/hosts file and a bit underweight as an IDE.

People get stuck using Notepad++ and never give themselves the opportunity to invest that time in a tool that best suits development. This could be a grown up IDE, vi(m) or Wordpress's admin editor.

Being lightweight is all well and good if you have a 486/DX33 running Windows 3.11 but most computers have Pentium chips inside them now.

One thing that will probably remain just as useless with Windows Notepad 2018 is use case number one - editing your /etc/hosts file. What else is Notepad really for?

In the rebooted edition of the classic text editor they will still make /etc/hosts only save if you are an administrator, or 'root' user as it is on more conventional operating systems. This is fine and good for security but it does not let you just type in the 'admin' password after you have opened the file and made your changes. With Vista they got the UAC mostly right but not for Notepad and /etc/hosts.

They also hide the /etc/hosts file in some subdirectory that only a young person could possibly remember the file path for. It is not in the conventional place that is expected. c:\wwindows\system32 is as far as I can remember. Then, when you have found the magic folder, it requires a change of the file type in the file dialog window before you can see it, and that is presuming you have file extensions enabled. There is a confusing hosts.isam file in the same folder. Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.

Really the line endings problem should have been fixed a long time ago, actually with Windows 95 as it was apparent even that far back that users might want to open files created on systems that were not 'Wintel' (as it was known then as everything else used different processors).

With Windows 2000 - no winsock.dll needed - they should have made efforts to make /etc/hosts editable that bit more easily. That would have sorted out 90% of real world use of Notepad.

Unix philosophy should apply to Notepad - do just one thing - and the Windows Write product should have been where to go for fancy line numbers and such like. That could have made a neat and basic Notepad++ style product with a print view and raw text mode like what early versions of Word had.

Notepad++ is great for handling config files and other miscellaneous files. I seldom use it to write code other than one-off Python scripts - that's VSCode's job. But it's pretty great for inspecting and making light edits. It also has lightweight capabilities for regex search/replace, diffing, and other batch capabilities. And multiple tabs are great.

If you map Notepad, Vim, Emacs, and heavyweight IDE's on a spectrum, I use Notepad++ as a replacement for Notepad and the simpler half of Vim/Emacs, and I use VSCode for the heavier half of Vim/Emacs and typical web dev, and I use heavyweight IDE's for heavyweight dev work (C#/Java/C++ mostly).

> Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.

These days with how easy it is to load a container into a publicly accessible site, I feel like that's a solved problem in most cases?

I use Notepad2 as a direct replacement for Notepad - it's a single binary that's a few hundred Kb in size, supports syntax highlighting (with customisation) for most major languages, regex search and replace, rectangular select, coding-friendly text tools (change case, toggle comments, indenting etc), code folding, and handles different encodings and line endings.

If I need anything more then I'll use VS Code, but for single file viewing and editing it's perfect for me.

> Who knows how you explain to your grandma over the phone how to add some IP address to her hosts file so she can see your development site.

If you need your gradma to edit her host file, you are doing something wrong.

Get a $3.99 domain during development, and point it to the IP you need. Problem solved.

Notepad++ loads more or less instantly so there is little point to going down the scale.

The #1 useful feature is just multiple tabs. Sure, syntax highlighting is also great for reading files and simple edits, but need not be part of windows.

It's not just the building part. If it ships with Windows, Microsoft needs to support it for a very long time.

Of course. That's why Windows 10 ships with a voice assistant and ads in the start menu, but no decent text editor. /s

I see zero value with good built-in applications. There are plenty of free applications out there and it's very easy to install them. May be package them and promote via Store for even easier installation experience.

Plenty of people work in environments where they can't install additional apps. On these machines it would a godsend to have a decent editor built in

As soneone who has to deal with systems like that at work all the time, I feel that point can't be hammered home enough.

Everytime you read about some sysadmin person that still uses plain old vi because "it's everywhere" or who actually prefers more unreadable syntax in shell scripts because the nice(r) alternative wouldn't be POSIX compliant, it's basically the same effect. Except that on Windows, you're usually screwed, because there's absolutely no useful tool that does the job you want and ships with the OS (as opposed to some no-pixie-dust tool that's been around for decades and has a bit of a steeper learning curve).

Tangentially related, but I've had jobs in the past where I had to build all-too-complex systems in VBA because of the needs of the business and having my environment too restricted.

I realize this isn't ideal...ever...but sometimes the needs of our department--our immediate needs--didn't align with the time require to navigate the massive corporate and IT bureaucracy.

"but sometimes the needs of our department--our immediate needs--didn't align with the time require to navigate the massive corporate and IT bureaucracy."

I battle this every day. Our systems are so locked down for "security" that we in R&D can't do our job without hacking around IT. Thank God they are not very good so there are plenty of loopholes for circumventing the "security" measures.

They own VSCode too.

And Atom

Ha! That definitely took me a second...

The sale has not happened yet.

It is supposed to be light-weight and simple for users. Of course they used that excuse to let it stagnate so long it didn't support things like Ctrl+S for years.

oh god, their plan might be identical to that for their Windows 10 Solitaire

you either pay a monthly subscription or you get ads

https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/07/windows-1...

Is that the reason why Windows updates keep removing the win7 games from my system?

Because you can get notepad++ on your own, if you want a fancy text editor from Microsoft just get VSCode.

Or Atom

Or this almost unknown gem which I used extensively in my ancient OS/2 days and later under Windows xp.

http://www.med-editor.com/indexus.html

They did. It is called vscode.