I disagree. I mean, it could be worse, but notepad has become feature-laden enough that it almost eliminates the usefulness of the program. I may as well use a full text editor.
tabs and autosave are pretty essential features. they make notepad a single window app (no need to fiddle with a bunch of windows) and easy to open and close while keeping all tabs/files open (no need to save every file on exit, no need to reopen every file).
it improves the usefulness of previous notepad, which was clunky to use for lack of those features and prone to data loss (no autosave, duh), which would actually make the old notepad almost useless. it improves it so much, it's probably the easiest way to quicky note something, and be sure that it won't go anywhere.
it's just the right amount of actually useful features that makes it so much more usable. and lack of those features would just immediately prompt one to look elsewhere for something that has those (like notepads, which is pretty good as well). some other editors might not be as quick and not even as good at autosaving and actually keeping stuff. (like sublime, which would lose sessions and data in them with absurd regularity, which hasn't happened once in a year of use of notepad (sure, not saving manually is bad, but having functionality just not work and fail with regularity is worse)
Not for me. Tabs and autosave are features I absolutely don't want in Notepad. The entire value of Notepad to me is that it's simple and basic. The tabs are irritating, but at least I can pretend the tab bar doesn't exist (although I wish I could hide it), and autosave as well as restoring the last document can be disabled.
But even having to start configuring Notepad to restore some of what makes it valuable to me reduces its utility. There is great value in having a bare-bones text editor. In those cases where more features are desired, using a more featureful editor is possible. That's what I do.
All that said, there are plenty of simple editors out there that I can use instead, so it's not really an earth-shaking deal. It's just a little sad to me. Notepad had managed to maintain its value proposition and avoid feature creep for a very long time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually.
Notepad was and always had been a simple and light application for viewing raw text files. Text editing is secondary and justifiably quite limited. If you wanted a real text editor you used Wordpad.
Microsoft has absolutely no concept of the value that anyone gets out of anything they make. The one and only question they seem capable of asking is "how can we monetize this?"
Autosaving introduces it's own dataloss problem, though, because now you might accidentally overwrite a file you didn't actually want to change.
Inside my IDE that's not a problem because my software projects are under version control and I can easily revert unwanted changes, but for general files somewhere on my hard disk… hm.
it's not really hard to separate between 'vague notes that can just hang' and 'files that should be just saved to avoid ambiguity'. for me, autosave works better for 'text that isn't in a file and is yet to be put together and saved into a file'. it's fine for quick notetaking that isn't pressing enough to plug into an IDE or to even launch it for just that.
I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs in different places and it wastes more time for me having tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the monitors instead.
In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest time.
It still works like that but combined with autosave you really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not already open in another instance or different tab lots of times.
Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open Notepad days or weeks later.
Even though for like 40 years when you opened a new instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a blank text window.
And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file to open without having some other text on some other tab that came from somewhere else you might not remember that well.
So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you type now by default.
No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that, nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.
I guess that's why they're going to call the next level Rewrite.
I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but what can you expect anyway?
