Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/05/08/extended-eol-in-notepad/

by dEnigma • 8 years ago

327 193 8 years ago

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

m_fayer• 8 years ago

This year's build is rather underwhelming.

cptskippy• 8 years ago

Yes. I'd have much rather they just used the release to fix all of the little quirky annoyances about Windows like this.

3steve• 8 years ago

They could have just depreciated Notepad in an effort to push their app store.

nvr219• 8 years ago

This will, surprisingly, make my life easier. Awesome.

edgarvaldes• 8 years ago

I dual boot on my work and home computers (Windows 10, Linux). I use a lot of txt files as todo list, reminders, quick notes, etc. This are good news for me.

joshuaeckroth3• 8 years ago

Almost feels like an April Fool's joke. For 30 years Notepad had this bug and I've always wondered why they never fixed it. It was just "one of those things" like the unusual arguments to Unix find or tar commands. I find it very surprising that someone finally bothered to fix it!

yiyus• 8 years ago

I would not consider it a bug. It was working as intended. This is a new feature.

Stratoscope3• 8 years ago

When "working as intended" means "doesn't work at all", I consider it a bug.

Take a look at the first screenshot on the announcement page and then tell me it's working as intended.

joshuaeckroth3• 8 years ago

I'd entertain an explanation of how the original behavior was a feature :)

rootlocus2• 8 years ago

The article disagrees:

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have fixed this issue!

rogerbinns• 8 years ago

Correct. The existing Notepad is top level Window and menu bar around the existing [edit control](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...). It has always had the same limitations - eg in way earlier versions of Windows it was limited to 64kb of text.

Addressing the "bug" is not simple - the edit controls behaviour could be changed in which case it could cause existing programs to behave differently, or extra code would have to be written for notepad to do its own text editing. Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

Anyone curious about the Microsoft side of this should find Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog interesting (about 5 posts a week). For example here is content tagged history: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history and here is how there are actually two copies of Notepad on each system: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090312-00/?p=...

jl6• 8 years ago

I think “bug” used to be slang shorthand for the more professional term “defect”, and under that definition the Notepad change would accurately be described as a new feature.

But the word bug has been coopted by the masses to have the wider meaning of “doesn’t meet user expectations”.

bleke• 8 years ago

It would be more unreal if they introduce "Windows 9x" desktop shell, probably for me it would be reason even to consider to dual boot to windows

megaman22• 8 years ago

How much would it cost Microsoft to buy Notepad++ and Classic Shell, and remove two of the biggest annoyances in modern Windows?

Meaning, of course, that they would use them in Windows, so there would be a text editor and a start menu that work. Not buy and kill.

rasz• 8 years ago

It was never a bug. For \r\n you had WordPad, for more you had Word.

KSS42• 8 years ago

I see it as a natural result of the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" effort. Also Azure Sphere uses Linux.

I expect Windows to become more Linux friendly.

Rondom• 8 years ago

On 32-bit versions of Windows, EDIT (the MS-DOS Editor) reads Unix file endings fine. So finally notepad reached feature-parity with that one...

I am not sure, when they introduced it. It might be that it happened in Windows 95, when edit became a stand-alone program. Not sure if the QBasic-based editor in DOS 6.22 or earlier supported it.

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

It wasn't a bug. I actually liked the predictable nature of notepad, even if it did support a line ending I never use and run on an OS I never use.

nextweek2• 8 years ago

I cannot fathom a reason why someone would disable this feature.

It has been 25+ years in the making.

ilogik• 8 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1172/

mark-r8• 8 years ago

The hover text on that one is priceless.

lopmotr3• 8 years ago

You sort of answered your own question. People's workflows tend to morph around the idiosyncrasies of their tools. There'll be somebody doing something weird like using LF to keep lines separate for Linux but wanting them condensed to fit on one screen in Notepad. Notepad does preserve LF characters, just doesn't display them, so you can think of it as a no-wrapping display mode.

userbinator4• 8 years ago

More practically, it could be as simple as checking whether text files actually have CRLF line endings. That's one thing I personally use Notepad for.

swebs2• 8 years ago

It's really surreal to see how far behind basic Windows tools are compared to counterparts in other operating systems. Compare Notepad to something like Gedit or Kate that comes with most Linux distros and are much more advanced. I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE. It's also pretty silly that you have to hack registry keys just to change some basic settings.

joshuaeckroth3• 8 years ago

The registry key hacking is to support backwards compatibility... for those workflows that require opening Unix text files in Notepad and inexplicably NOT seeing linebreaks...

ams61103• 8 years ago

Notepad is a very basic editor. Likewise, most Linux distros come with nano or some other very feature-limited editor.

While I did once know a developer who used notepad as his primary editor, it was never intended to be anything but a very simple editor for INI files and the like.

mappu4• 8 years ago

Nano has syntax highlighting, auto-indent, spellcheck, regex search/replace, and overwrite prevention. It's clearly in a class beyond Notepad.

Analemma_2• 8 years ago

Compare Notepad to something like Gedit or Kate

This is the wrong comparison. Notepad is like nano or ed. More powerful editors are available on Windows too.

I just assumed any programmers still on Windows would be using Notepad++ or some sort of IDE.

Usually we do. But notepad can be invoked quickly from the command line, tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs, and is opened by default by a lot of utilities like git (you can change this, of course, but you might miss one). So it ends up getting used a lot for quick one-line changes and improvements are still welcome.

liveoneggs• 8 years ago

notepad isn't even close to ed in functionality

userbinator4• 8 years ago

tends to handle huge files better than N++ or other IDEs

That's been my experience too --- I've opened several hundred MB files (mostly logs) in Notepad, mostly for searching through, and it handles it quite well. Inserting characters at the beginning can get a little laggy, but that's still nothing compared to a lot of other IDEs/"industrial strength" editors that choke on much smaller files.

...and yet the standard Windows edit control that Notepad is based on does nothing fancy at all; its data structure is basically one array that holds the entire file contents. No ropes, gap buffers, or other "advancedness" --- just one big buffer. It also means extremely low memory usage, a tiny amount of fixed overhead + file size.

(I am one of those programmers whose main source code editor on Windows is Notepad. I also mainly use the cmd for compilation. I've never felt the need for anything more complex, and I do use an IDE (VS) mainly as a debugger, but if I just want to open source code and read or edit it, I use Notepad. Then again, I don't use those languages where an IDE is almost mandatory for navigating through source code, so it works well. In the time it takes for an IDE to load, parse, and display a file, I could've opened, edited, saved, and compiled with Notepad.)

andyjpb• 8 years ago

It's a welcome addition but all was not lost on a Windows install before. write.exe has managed to do this even if notepad.exe couldn't.

sebazzz• 8 years ago

The most common case for needing an external editor on Windows Server is default Notepad not supporting non-CRLF line endings. Unfortunately licensing would not allow transplanting the insider Notepad.exe to Windows Server, preventing the need for installing external software on the OS.

ams61103• 8 years ago

I thought wordpad was also part of a standard windows install? It does support the unix style line endings. Or am I misremembering and wordpad was an add-on?

dEnigma• 8 years ago

Definitely part of a "normal" Windows install, but I don't know if it's part of Windows Server too.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

Wordpad is part of Windows Server, but it is a rich text editor not a plain text editor. Therefore there are some file formats that it will interpret and corrupt on save.

lopmotr3• 8 years ago

This change will eliminate most of my need for Notepad++.

It feels a bit wrong that it supports old MacOS CR though. Isn't that thoroughly obsolete, and encouraging its use only going to prolong its death, making it harder for everyone else to have to keep supporting it?

PhasmaFelis• 8 years ago

You could say the same about using CRLF instead of just LF.

lopmotr3• 8 years ago

No because it already supported CRLF so that would be a step backwards for CRLF users. CR is a new feature so it would be no worse than before if they didn't add it.

jakobegger• 8 years ago

Microsoft really goes the extra mile when it comes to backward compatibility. "Just in case you depend on Notepad being broken, we added a setting for you!"

dmannorreys• 8 years ago

And they even made the setting easily accessible, just hit [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Notepad] and change some registry key

Spivak2• 8 years ago

I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but that's pretty standard in the Windows world. Your ops team wouldn't blink at tweaking reg values.

codazoda• 8 years ago

I was pretty surprised that editing the registry to change stuff like this is still a thing.

notatoad2• 8 years ago

Weird settings are supposed to be hidden in weird places. There's no reason that a setting like "use broken line endings" should be in a nice easy to find place.

skullt• 8 years ago

Now just let us change the tab width.

teddyh• 8 years ago

No! Just add elastic tabstops support!

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

jimnotgym• 8 years ago

There was a thread on here at the weekend criticising Windows 10 for not making enough progress, and also MS for not properly testing updates. I hope this silences those critics. A thoroughly tested change that is fully backwards compatible, but also adding genuinely useful new features. If you were wondering whether to upgrade to Windows 10 I think this settles it.

seba_dos1• 8 years ago

Not sure how you go from "finally catching up with support of a basic text format that's around for decades" to "making enough progress". This won't silence anyone - it just shows that Microsoft is finally starting to do things it should have done 20 years ago.

thieving_magpie• 8 years ago

I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.

Moru• 8 years ago

I see it more as a platform war that's finally settled. No more Mac/Linux/Windows linebreaks, now we can at last talk about "Linebreak".

I mean there is only so many ways of putting together two different characters. Is it supposed to be \n\r or \r\n? Or just \n? Or mabe it's \r? So much of the last 35 years have gone to writing the wrong line endings for the intended platform...

yjftsjthsd-h• 8 years ago

The criticism was that they had failed to test updates which proceeded to crash machines and break applications. That they managed to test this one feature is hardly a persuasive argument to the contrary.

userbinator4• 8 years ago

If you were wondering whether to upgrade to Windows 10 I think this settles it.

As long as the telemetry/phoning home is still pervasive and difficult to disable completely, no. Ever since ~2K/XP or so it's always been one step forward, many steps back.

pjmlp6• 8 years ago

Using a Google OS?

thomastjeffery4• 8 years ago

The day I can set the font in cmd.exe without editing the registry is the day I will miss your sarcasm.

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

People don't actually use notepad, do they? The last reason I'd think of to upgrade a Windows OS is "I'll be able to use notepad".

pjmlp6• 8 years ago

Sure we do, quick editing txt, cfg and ini files.

pcunite• 8 years ago

Nice, I actually had a customer ask about a configuration file (that one of our product produced) as not being readable anymore.

Turns out that an update did not properly write out "\r\n" but rather "\n". Looked fine in Notepad++ of course, but sure enough in MS Notepad ... things look garbled.

AdmiralAsshat• 8 years ago

Microsoft was clearly upset at the number of SysAdmins installing Notepad++ onto their freshly-imaged Windows PC's.

krylon7• 8 years ago

Well, Notepad++ still has lots of other features to stay ahead of its little brother.

kalleboo2• 8 years ago

Or rather Microsoft's own engineers were upset at Notepad being useless at debugging their new linux subsystem on clean testing VM installs

jimrandomh• 8 years ago

For pretty much as long as I can remember, it's been a fact of life that Windows had these little embarrassments, and Microsoft was too dysfunctional to address them. Everyone just sort of learned that Notepad didn't work and you weren't supposed to use it, then forgot it was there.

mark-r8• 8 years ago

Now if they'd just give me resizable fonts in the Character Map app, I'd be a happy camper.

kerng• 8 years ago

I think Notepad is used pretty extensively. A lot of people are joking about it and its quirks, but use it at the same time. Its like this little weird thing people become fond of.

dash2• 8 years ago

So, today the Google news is "robots that automatically phone businesses and have conversations on your behalf", and the Microsoft news is "Notepad can now cope with Unix line endings". Symbolic or what?

Zelizz• 8 years ago

Pretty sure that Google is advertising a service that you might pay for, whereas Microsoft is adding a new feature (in reality, many features) to an OS you already paid for.

Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft, this post doesn't reflect my employer in any official capacity, etc.

GordonS• 8 years ago

FWIW, Microsoft also made an AI related announcement today about their new, OSS, cross platform machine leaning framework, ML.NET: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/introduci...

Just a tad less dramatic that a robotic telephone assistant, but still :)

nxc18• 8 years ago

Take a look at their other keynote(s) yesterday. Much more impressive demos for developing consumer and Enterprise experiences. Today's keynote was about the windows and office platform specifically.

tbob• 8 years ago

Can't understand why Window still uses CRLF line endings. Just to be different?

vbezhenar• 8 years ago

Why not? If something works, why break it? HTTP uses CRLF as well. Should we redesign it?

cesarb2• 8 years ago

HTTP uses CRLF as well. Should we redesign it?

We did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

ksk6• 8 years ago

Because thats what people did on serial terminals, which preceeded CP/M which preceeded Windows.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7812142/how-to-toggle-cr...

kbumsik• 8 years ago

Backward compability really matters. Windows has been always obsessed with compability. Guys in MS keeps max 255 characters long path just because of backward compability.

Right after Windows give up CRLF line endings, it will be immediate compability disaster.

reaperducer2• 8 years ago

Welcome to 1974, Microsoft.

maltalex2• 8 years ago

I don't understand all the negativity in this thread.

Is this Microsoft's crowning achievement? No, it's just a stupid little historic decision that someone remembered and decided to fix. They even took the time to enable admins and power users to use the old behavior. I too don't see who'd want it, but who knows? People do unexpected things sometimes.

Why bash them for that? There are enough good reasons to bash Microsoft... There are Microsoft products that fill me with a fiery rage of a thousand suns. But they did something cute here, someone there deserves a good word.

andrewmcwatters• 8 years ago

The interesting thing is this change was almost without a doubt done by some random developer at Microsoft rather than an institutional luminary for certain, and yet here we judge the change based on the institution rather than who may have produced it.

maltalex2• 8 years ago

The backwards-compatibility is probably an institutional thing.

I've dealt with a Microsoft storage library for Java once that had an absolutely idiotic bug - you'd store a certain value, but would get something slightly different when retrieving it in 100% of cases [0]. I reported the bug and it was quickly fixed. But what amazed me was that the next version came out with a page long description [1] and analysis of the bug, its meaning for compatibility with other storage clients in different cases, the fix, and astonishingly a new flag you could enable if you want to keep retrieving screwed up values.

[0] https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/issues/30

[1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/wiki/Java,-Andro...

notatoad2• 8 years ago

I have a really hard time believing that this is the first time some random developer at ms has gotten fed up with notepad's lack of line ending support and tried to do something about it.

This is the first time Microsoft has actually released it though. And that's an institutional thing.

ajross3• 8 years ago

I think it's mostly humor. Bugsmithing and interoperability impedance of this form was almost Microsoft's raison d'etre in the 90's. Stuff that was simple and obvious everywhere else just didn't work on windows, even though the fix would be 100% trivial and probably result in better standards compliance. And MS liked it that way.

So sure, this is good. It doesn't exactly undo all those decades of grief. So we're laughing grimly at the "progress".

jameshart• 8 years ago

It's a very parochial read of the 1990s that remembers Microsoft Windows as a place where 'obvious things' just 'didn't work'.

From Microsoft's point of view, when they held >90% of the PC market, what would be the point of even thinking about interop?

logicallee4• 8 years ago

What is "bugsmithing" - did you just make this word up?

(I googled "define bugsmithing" without quotes, and this HN thread I'm typing in was the top result behind only an unrelated site called the bugsmith, an exterminator. I didn't see any relevant hits.)

KC8ZKF• 8 years ago

To be fair, U*nix editors in the 90's had problems with line endings other than strictly newline. Even agnostic editors like Emacs had problems. It was a three-way mutually cultivated impedance.

scrollaway• 8 years ago

I think it's hilarious this announcement is in the middle of 30 different huge GoogleIO AI and Machine Learning announcements.

Confession: This is the one I care about.

vatueil• 8 years ago

I was more surprised and impressed by this than by any of the announcements at Google IO so far.

Granted that's mostly because I already knew what to expect going into Google IO.

dx034• 8 years ago

And yet it'll probably have a bigger impact on many people than all those AI announcements.

j45• 8 years ago

I suspect some of the less positive comments are folks commenting are likely on their 15th or 20th laptops, over just as many years.

When the death count gets that high - it's easier to call it buying the eventual death of a new laptop. Buying a new laptop has become a somber affair to go along with the eventual reinstall of your entire setup far too soon.

Luckily there are tools today that make this much less painful.

This particular bug, however, required use of Notepad++ instead for years. Repeat for every other missing or broken piece of MS tech. Vista was so bad I was willing to suffer on the spot switching to Mac.

I'll accept this is as a symbolic peace offering - years of having to install a separate text editor and lots of other unnecessary won't get back that time.

There's a lot of innovation coming out from MS, something we normally wouldn't have said even 3-4 years ago.

Looking forward to the increased linux integration to continue, and have a good look. Until then, MacOS, despite it's aging warts, just works and stays invisible for the most part.

sangnoir2• 8 years ago

No, it's just a stupid little historic decision that someone remembered and decided to fix.

Kudos to them, interoperability is always nice. Maybe they can acknowledge the existence of (and respect) other bootloaders, while they are at it.

thomastjeffery4• 8 years ago

Now that would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, it seems their hearts are set on running everything inside windows, including GNU/Linux minus Linux (WSL).

Side note: I think we should just start referring to WSL as GNU/Windows.

spilk• 8 years ago

There are Microsoft products that fill me with a fiery rage of a thousand suns.

Sharepoint?

cannedslime• 8 years ago

Personally I think this should have been done decades ago. Its simply too little too late.

kristianp• 8 years ago

I imagine the reason this was done after all these years is to improve compatibility with Bash for Windows/WSL.

pradn• 8 years ago

Notepad seems like the perfect candidate for open-sourcing. It provides no competitive advantage to Windows. So might as well have the OSS community improve it. It's possible it might be too hard to remove it from the Windows code base and put it online.

userbinator4• 8 years ago

Notepad is literally just the Windows EDIT control with some trivial code to transfer the data in it to/from files, and a menu to change some of the edit control's options.

I don't think it needs much improvement, really. Anything besides fixing bugs in its own code (i.e. this "extended line endings support" is in the edit control) would go against its core principle. There's Notepad++ and all the other "heavier" editors if you want more features.

jdblair• 8 years ago

It's worth pointing out that CR-LF is the original ascii standard behavior, from electro-mechanical teletype. It took two characters worth of time to return the print carriage to the left of the paper. Rather than implement buffering (expensive at the time) the designers split the operation into two characters (Carriage Return and Line Feed).

hzhou321• 8 years ago

Will I be able to find an exe download and fix my old PC?

calebm• 8 years ago

I appreciate this gesture of heterogeneity.

omarforgotpwd• 8 years ago

This is huge.

ComputerGuru• 8 years ago

We developed an open source notepad clone (feature, keyboard shortcut, and look compatible) replacement basically to address this one gripe with an otherwise fast and barebones text editor. It’s nice to (mostly) no longer need this!

https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/hello-betterpad/

(Only other features iirc are hyperlinked URLs and unsaved document persistence after reboot/kill a la text edit on macOS.)

mixmastamyk2• 8 years ago

Hard to believe, but the neglected issues of DOS/Windows are being squashed one by one, almost thirty years later.

Too bad about the telemetry and lack of privacy, or I might actually be tempted to use it. :-/

pjmlp6• 8 years ago

Better stay away from Google OSes then.

mixmastamyk2• 8 years ago

I do.

NVRM• 8 years ago

[FIXED] « The default editor can't read text files »

Wildgoose• 8 years ago

Hallelujah!

I am so sick of having to tell people not to use Notepad because it is badly broken and always has been.

You shouldn't have to tell people to download Notepad++ or use WordPad if they want to read a text file.

gymshoes• 8 years ago

MS is on track.

Edge, WSL, open source powershell, open source dotNet Core, VS Code and now a Notepad with line endings.

Windows is consistently getting better as a developer's Operating System.

AnnoyingSwede• 8 years ago

I could have really used this feature when editing php back in the day.. Now, not so much. It's mildly amusing that such a trival feature took this long.

colanderman• 8 years ago

No love for U+2028?

(I slightly kid; that's the official Unicode "line separator". Never actually seen it in the wild, and not entirely sure how the Unicode consortium expected it to come into usage.)

Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad

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