Comment by BLKNSLVR
8 hours ago
> It is to do with link handling:
Notepad? Link handling?
That's like my pencil having a CVE that's to do with how it loads the ink. That old saying about 'if Microsoft built a car' is more true now than it was then: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/
I was really hoping this CVE would have been caused by the Copilot integration into Notepad.
Calculator hasn't been infiltrated by Copilot yet, but I'm sure the day is coming.
Hey Calculator, how many R's are there in strawberry?
It's hard for me to imagine anyone balking at this feature. My core note taking workflow frequently involves:
1. Note about blah 2. Paste link to blah 3. Open that link later when reviewing my notes.
Blah is sometimes a web link, sometimes a link to a doc on my system, and sometimes a link to an item in my todo tracker. The better analogy is this is like a pencil having an eraser built in.
I use Drafts instead of Notepad, but if I used Notepad I would want to be able to easily open links in my notes. When I do find myself in Notepad, it's because I double clicked on a readme file that often contains links to resources I need.
But then notepad wouldn't be fetching the content. While I would still prefer notepad to be simple, and just making you copy paste the link, I would expect it to forward a link a browser, or something. I would not expect notepad to go out and fetch random content from the internet.
> Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light.
> Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
> Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
> You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.
If you live long enough, satire eventually becomes reality.
Unpopular opinion: rudimentary Markdown support is not entirely far-fetched even for a dumb text editor.
Even though I’m all against feature bloat, I think that making Markdown hyperlinks clickable is still within the Overton window of what a simple editor should be doing.
You cannot claim you're "against feature bloat" while then in the same breath say that it is acceptable that a basic text editor have an entire additional render pipeline.
If you want Markdown use VSCode, it is a first class citizen. Don't take an intentionally stripped down text editor and bolt on VSCode-like features.
As I posted in a sibling, I thought the whole point of markdown was that it was simplified to the point that rendering it was easy to do from scratch. But we fumbled that because we (collectively) have no idea what we are doing.
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How do you know they said it in the same breath?
The main problem with "Markdown support" in Notepad is that "Markdown support" is an ill-defined phrase. The closest thing to a well-defined definition is to support CommonMark but that is far, far from universal. Microsoft being Microsoft they'd probably still half-ass the job then just declare their new half-ass support a newly embraced-and-extended standard and leave it that way for the next 20 years, so asking Notepad to support Markdown is in practice asking for yet another effing Markdown dialect to come into existence and join the shambling hoard of other dialects.
Markdown is more properly understood as a family of related-but-mutually-incompatible standards, like CSV, and like "supporting CSV" is a lot more complicated than meets the eye. And supporting Markdown is already clearly non-trivial compared to the baseline of Notepad we've come to expect over the past few decades.
I might be dumb, but I thought the whole point of markdown was to get rid of all the bells and whistles of styling, having a really simplified and dumb format that only outlines structure. The follow-on being that many tools could parse, transform and render said markdown files in a way that makes sense for them. That way there's lots of tools that don't share code, but a shared definition of the format. I.e. markdown is a format (!?).
The problem is that overall we seem to have fumbled both the concept and the implementation. There a bunch of vaguely similar but incompatible markdowns and apparently rendering them is too hard and people immediately reach for an enormous pile of software (usually a web stack) to render it for them.
It should have been entirely possible for a person to write a markdown parser in a couple hours and e.g. render paragraphs, bulleted lists and tables into a terminal.
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Just... no... not notepad.. Notepad should be the single-simplest of text editors, always has been, always should be... it should be "safe" much like "task manager" it should be as simple and bulletproof as any application in Windows are... these are essential tools that should never, ever, ever break.
MS has WordPad... fck around with that to make it support markdown or whatever else beyond rtf you want it to support. For that matter, it's probably that much more appropriate to do so.
Do I typically use Notepad, no.. not really... I actually use the new rust based edit terminal app more than Notepad. That said, I expect notepad to do one thing... edit text files, and to not break doing so. The ONLY* addition that might be acceptable would be a HEX Editor mode, so you can edit any file.
There are maybe 5-7 applications in Windows I expect to never break... task manager, notepad, registry editor, file explorer, command prompt are at the top of that list... these are the golden tools that should never fail, even if everything else does.
Old notepad is still there, it's just in System32 and you have to disable app execution alias for notepad.exe (apps > advanced app settings > app execution aliases)
WordPad was discontinued.
Except notepad was the safe option for editing files and making sure what you see is what gets saved. Not any more?
Not. They want it to be Notepad + Wordpad and, in the future, Wordstar.
Maybe I don't understand what markdown support will imply, but doesn't this hide text?
Like, if I have a h2 or url, its going to show as special text rather than the h2 tag?
There's a toggle in the status bar and the View menu that switches between displaying Markdown as formatted vs. plain text
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