Notepad++ is unnecessarily complicated for end users. It’s not only developers who use Windows.

Having developer tools preinstalled is awesome. When you can launch editor, write some HTML/CSS/JavaScript with proper highlighting, launch it in browser, it greatly reduces gap to start programming and it'll increase number of people who're doing that. Those days I think preinstalling python would be very useful. And that python will be much more valuable than 90% of junk shipped with OS. It's only 25 MB. Sure, it's not about professional-level IDEs but it's not required for useful work. Now typing programming code in notepad.exe is what's terrible.

Apple ships Python with OS X, which ended up becoming a big problem because they wrote system utilities that depended on Python2.7, and 9/10 people would want python3 (especially now), so they'd have to go install it anyway and make sure to put it in the right place so that the system uses it's version of python instead of the version the user wants for their applications. (This may have changed in Catalina, but I don't have a Mac at the moment to check). Granted, the Python installer corrects for this, but more versions of python on your system means you have to tell all of your python files that python==python3 or run them in virtualenvs (which you might not want to do in production).

Microsoft, in newer releases of Windows, includes a shim that'll grab python3 from the Microsoft Store if you type python into a terminal, which is a lot nicer, and since they don't have code that requires python2, you can't accidentally break the system if you want a newer version of python around.

Back in the DOS days Microsoft shiped with a decent editor and a programming environment, alas from DOS 5 onwards.

Was that EDLIN? I have some very vague memories

No one liked EDLIN.

I assumed the poster meant EDIT.COM and QBASIC. I'd also argue that Notepad has about as much editing capability as EDIT.COM, even if nostalgia does seem to want to color EDIT.COM as a more capable IDE than it really was simply because I too spent a lot of time building dumb apps in QBASIC.

I am sure if someone actually cared they could add more functionality to their built in editor without confusing people. They could also increase its performance so it’s possible to edit large files.

So then they can use MS Word or Wordpad (for a built-in and free option).

Notepad++ is still too heavy. I prefer Notepad2. It doesn't need to be installed and there is a portable version that saves its options in a file instead of the registry.

Fine with me :).