So, they went from not updating in forever, to finally updating it in some meaningful ways a couple years ago, to adding crap that no one wants pretty much right away. Too much, MS. Shoulda quit while you were ahead with tabs.
The first apps I need to replace on any new windows machine (after installing FF) are Paint, Notepad, Photo/Image viewer and MediaPlayer. The funny thing is their replacements are all ancient as well, and still awesome because they've been thoughtfully upgraded over the years without destroying their conceptual integrity, or they've just been "done" for decades.
My main OS is macOS but I use Windows for gaming. The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows is actually kinda depressing. Everything newer is garbage for various reasons, and everything old is ugly as hell.
Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
> The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows is actually kinda depressing.
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
VLC is pretty damn crusty, especially to anyone not familiar with that particular....design ethos.
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
> The guy who requested the feature then went ahead and implemented the feature in a weekend. Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
They eventually did credit "the guy," Casey Muratori, who's a very accomplished game engine developer. He has a series called Handmade Hero where he writes an engine and game from scratch and streams it live.
I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything more to it than playing media. It always seems to have the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.
I've used VLC for a long time as well, and while I wouldn't call it crusty, I would call it odd. Powerful, super capable, but doesn't seem to follow standard conventions. Honestly, it's odd but I would rather they don't do some overhaul to standardize or modernize it. Software, hardware, etc. don't have to be homogenous or turn into bland corporate-ware.
Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do way too much at once.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
Yeah mpv is great on win; I switched from VLC because VLC had trouble with playback combined with large subtitle offsets. mpv just works and the couple things I need for UI were easily configured as hotkeys
It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
I always thought this, but used it for a while for work and found it was actually quicker work-flow-wise than Photoshop (though Photoshop was better for photo editing) or Krita (and krita is way better for painting).
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
I agree. I too am a VLC hater. It's not just crusty, but often buggy and worse[1] than alternatives (I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema myself, despite it being dead for almost a decade). VLC is also ugly in a non-platform specific way. It's like a web app developed before web apps were a thing and doesn't feel at home in either Windows, MacOS, or Linux.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
The only problem I've ever run into with VLC was on their Android app they hid the audio sync setting for basically no reason. Other than that, I've never had a problem with it. Maybe i just haven't been exposed to the magic of perfect media players but VLC is vastly more feature rich than the defaults, "just works", and i don't think it looks bad at all!
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
Have you used VLC on MacOS tho? Full screen video looks very slick and is tough to differentiate from native quicktime other than having support for more codecs and features.
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I have always thought the decision to keep Notepad and Paint as they are is a nod towards the developer community. Thanks to this, there's a large market for affordable and better alternatives.
I don't know about depressing, but eg grep is slow and lacks some quality of life features working with modern toolchains (aka git, but also codebase size). ag and rg both read .gitignore if there is one (disable with rg -uuu); for today's multi-language repos, ag can look inside a specific language's files eg ag --go or ag --js.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
If you care about beautiful interfaces macos and linux will always be way ahead, for sure.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.
Apple Notes on MacOS have been crashing for me constantly since shortly after Apple Intelligence beta started rolling out. Even though I'm not even on the beta.
To be clear, i’m not saying they’re new, but rather that they are beautiful because they have been continuously modernized to match the look and functionality of the OS.
Mentioning all these programs and seeing the trouble people have I will never really understand why there are any men at all that still use Windows and Mac.
I mean Haiku is the best OS in my opinion. But nobody really uses it because it lacks the software support. Sometimes you got to put up with the BS to get what you want done.
I never understood the need for Notepad++. If I want to edit text quickly, notepad works fine, maybe I'll use vim or something if needed. If I want to view code, again vim works fine, and maybe VSCode if I know I'll be actively working on it. I don't see the usecase for Notepad++ personally speaking.
Notepad++ is an alternative to Vim, so if you are using Vim you are covering most use cases of Notepad++ already.
In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.
[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters
- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory
- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each
- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs
- colors
- allows tail -f (the eye icon)
- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)
- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments
- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)
- lets you see and change encoding very easily
There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.
> I don't see the usecase for Notepad++ personally speaking
Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.
Try notepad2. It's an decent improvement from notepad while not going full notepad++. I install it on new Windows boxes and have it replace notepad.exe (there is an option to do this in setup.)
Be careful with Irfanview and XNView as these are free strictly for personal use (non commercial). An open-source alternative I've been using is: https://nomacs.org/
After Visual Studio 2008, they rewrote the UI in WPF and started writing large components of the program in C#. This dramatically regressed performance, especially on a cold start (it runs decently if you've had the program open for a while). I'd probably still be using Visual Studio 2008, except it limits you to C89 and C++03.
C# is working hard to be Rust-like in certain areas of performance. Part of Visual Studio's problem is that they can't yet take advantage of it in some key areas because they are still dependent on the Legacy Framework and Legacy WPF and have to migrate to modern .NET.
Cold boot perf is a good yard stick but it’s not that important in your workflow. Except when it crashes. They really should work on that. Quality as a feature.
They have already onboarded a scrum team on the code base. They've got to burn those points on something to argue for their payroll and the PO and the lead dev thinks AI is cool.
The default Windows taskbar doesn't haven't given you tabs for a very long time, has been mostly unusable if you use it as tabs recently, and only has 1 level of tabs, while keeping tabs inside the application gives you another.
To answer seriously, because workflow is a tree. And the outer levels need task-specificity. Browser tabs need different display options and available actions from text editor tabs, etc.
A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).
Oh, great, they added a "Users Resistance is invalid" button - so everyone can go along with it, until they remove it in 2 updates and then, well you had a choice and the choice was to swallow whatever you get served.
We've run into an issue with the new versions of notepad saving your edits to a temp file in the background so that you can continue where you left off without losing changes if you close notepad before saving.
The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening the file to verify that they remembered to save the information will be fooled into thinking its there.
All it needed was a way to work with other newline formats cleanly. Adding much more than that (even tabs) makes it into a different thing that leaves a gap in the niche it used to fill.
When I was a windows user 20 years ago I was using scite, the Scintilla demo editor. It had the lightness and simpleness of notepad with syntax highlighting.
That, and finally getting rid of keeping a lock on the file handle of the opened files. Sooo many times I needed explain someone that their directory could not get deleted or their apps failed to uninstall simply because they were still reading its readme.txt
It's not the lock on the file, it's the lock on the directory. The common file dialog in Windows changes the current directory of the process to the file that was selected, and a Win32 process holds a lock on its current directory. So when you open readme.txt in a particular folder, Notepad.exe's current directory is changed to and holds a lock on that folder.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
Wow, so notepad++ and vscode quickly change the cwd after opening a file via a win dialog?
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
It's not too much. It's a storm in a teacup, until major user migration happens. And I think that their business strategy is working way better than that.
Prediction: All corporate-backed general-purpose LLMs/AIs will eventually include ads. They won't even always be obvious ads like we have on the web, sometimes they will just be product placement. Ask the AI for an example of a linked list, and it will give you one, but the sample items in the list will be Coca-Cola, Lexus, the name of the closest marijuana dispensary, etc.
If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the content and the ad.
There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain somehow.
AI can feel more like a novelty than a truly helpful tool, especially when it comes to getting real work done. When I need a real boost, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola. It’s amazing how it instantly lifts my mood and keeps me going!
You’ll be warned when you accept the terms and conditions. And after the first lawsuits, there will be some fine print on the bottom of the page for you to ignore.
They must be completely toothless laws considering the amount of product placement that is easily visible. The only thing that will change is automating product placement in what used to look like organic conversation, including on HN.
Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
In the US, the laws just say that if you do product placement, you have to disclose you're doing it. If you do that, then there's no restrictions on product placement.
I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.
It's not quite that simple, it's if you have a relationship with the seller of the product that the average viewer(tm) would not expect. So, e.g. product placement on daytime TV or quiz shows doesn't require disclosure, because the regulators/courts have decided that's what the average viewer would expect anyway. But anything on social media does require it, it seems. I think produce placement in LLM chatbots would probably qualify as unexpected, though.
