I've since migrated to Linux 100% (outside of work) and whilst there are the odd annoyances, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to Windows. And I can have a good chuckle almost once a week these days with each new Windows consumer hostility coming across the HN front page.
Oh, a kindred spirit!
I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.
(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)
Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.
Shh, please. If MS find out, they'll add a parrot to "improve" it.
If you’re going to have a custom config, you might as well have a custom executable.
Not saying that spending the first days on a new project configuring your custom setup with the company's stack is bad, especially if you are categorizing as employee and are looking for a multi year long run. But I tend to do small contracts, 1 to 6 months, and starting right away is a nice boost.
now that llms exist I am learning with dotnet, that now comes with windows, (or at least it comes with winget, and you can install a lot of kosher software, which is almost as good as having it preinstalled.)
If I ever hop onto an older machine I'll use the gpt to see what I get, i recall there's vbscript, apparently a .net compiler+runtime, and I saw a js interpreter in very old OS too.
A big inspiration in this realm is FogBugz historical "Wasabi". Their idea of compiling to PHP and c# i think it was, because it's what most OS come with, and their corpo clients can use it as it. It's in a joel spolsky blog post somewhere.
I’ve been fighting this for the last couple of weeks but it just doesn’t stick
Edit: Fedora has it available as "msedit". What a time to be alive.
What's your day job? Are you self employed?
Btw, nano is only 50/50 chance that's it's pre-installed. Learn some vim, will ya? ;)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3845356/...
You basically have to find the "execution alias" setting and disable notepad and you get the ole reliable :D
OLD POST:
This has hurt me specifically. Since I work without IDEs, no VIM, no vs code. On linux I use nano, on windows I use Notepad. I like the minimalism and the fact that I have absolute control, and that I can work on any machine without needing to introduce an external install.
Last couple of years notepad started getting more features, but I'm very practical so I just ignored them, logged out of my account when necessary, opted out of features in settings, whatever.
But now this moment feels like I must change something, we need a traditional notepad.exe or just copy it from a previous version, I'll try adding NOTEPAD.exe to a thumb drive and having that. But it's a shame that it breaks the purity of "working with what's installed".