Microsoft is giving its Notepad app for Windows a surprising amount of new features. While the software giant hasn’t updated Notepad for years, the next Windows 10 update will include some highly requested additions. Microsoft is clearly listening to Windows 10 users who use notepad for development, logs, or simple text manipulation.
You’ll soon be able to do wrap around find and replace alongside the ability to zoom into text by holding down the ctrl key and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Microsoft is also adding in extended line ending support so that Unix/Linux line endings (LF) and Macintosh line endings (CR) are supported in Notepad. The status bar will now be enabled by default in Notepad, and it includes the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled.
I’d like to make a request for what Windows 3.11-esque application Microsoft should tackle next.
They praise every single little shit they are touching as a great response to customer feedback. And the press is sucking it up because it is deemed newsworthy that _anything_ is happening on that front.
Look at this ridiculous shit: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11679397/b767cced4…
What year is it?
Reality is, too little, too late. Again.
Edited 2018-07-15 22:21 UTC
Thanks for reminding me to add Ctrl+Scroll text zooming to the hybrid notepad/desktop stickies app I’m working on.
(I’m hacking it together in PyQt, so it was just a few lines to catch Ctrl+Scroll, scale the delta, and map it to the existing zoom in/out slots on QPlainTextEdit.)
Edited 2018-07-16 06:59 UTC
The real reason they’re updating Notepad:
Push Bing.
Seriously, they’re integrating their search engine with Notepad. While they’re in there, they happen to be doing some other minor tuits as well, but that push would be the real motivation for touching the code.
I’m amazed it’s not an “only opens in Edge” thing – though the lack of availability of UWP apps on Server and LTSC/LTSB builds is probably why not there.
I wonder how much of these new features are updates to the TextBox control, and how many exist in Notepad.
UNIX-style line endings are probably in Notepad, as is wrap-around find & replace.
Whole-word deletion, and right-click search are probably in the textbox control, which means they should show up everywhere.
Not sure about text zooming, though.
We have also updated Boulderdash. Now in 4K!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOwDIocQuo&feature=youtu.be
Nope, this is Microsoft, Boulderdash is now 4G because in AR through Hololens.
Blimey. Take your time.
macOS has TextEdit which even allows proper formatting, tables and the like. It’s not so clever in raw text mode but is still OK.
TBH – If MS really wanted to borrow something from the Mac they could do worse than cloning Preview. Now that is a seriously useful app!
I just want to know who these people that use Notepad for development are.
Nice, now notepad will become laggy like the rest of the interface.