> And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...
What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or something else?
Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of the box?
I don't think people would complain about a decent text editor vs. adding yet another text-like editor. I appreciate the new calculator...
notepad++ is one of the first apps I install on a new windows machine. VS Code is great for when you move into coding tasks but not as snappy and quick as notepad++ for texty things
Notepad++ is one of the first things I install as well, and I think it is even a little more than necessary at times. Unsaved file persistence, Regex, File Encoding, Syntax coloring, and Tabs are about all I truly need from Notepad++. The other 80% of it is excess in my opinion.
A decent text editor doesn't mean VS Code, or anything like that complicated. Just something not as teeth grindingly sucky as Notepad. It wouldn't even have to be all that much better. An 'advanced mode' in the same way that calculator has a scientific mode might be nice as an extra. To be fair Notepad is gradually improving, but this has been an issue for literally decades.
Notepad may look the same, but it has seen some small feature updates in Windows 10. The biggest: it finally understands Unix-style line feed only (\n) files.
Wordpad is a completely different thing, it’s a basic word processor. I’d be quite happy with a slightly better text editor, though as I pointed out Notepad has improved recently and isn’t far off a reasonable set of basic features.
Something like Notepad++. VSCode is too heavy. It’s a real pain to edit text and configure files with Notepad in environments where you can’t install additional editors.
Having developer tools preinstalled is awesome. When you can launch editor, write some HTML/CSS/JavaScript with proper highlighting, launch it in browser, it greatly reduces gap to start programming and it'll increase number of people who're doing that. Those days I think preinstalling python would be very useful. And that python will be much more valuable than 90% of junk shipped with OS. It's only 25 MB. Sure, it's not about professional-level IDEs but it's not required for useful work. Now typing programming code in notepad.exe is what's terrible.
Apple ships Python with OS X, which ended up becoming a big problem because they wrote system utilities that depended on Python2.7, and 9/10 people would want python3 (especially now), so they'd have to go install it anyway and make sure to put it in the right place so that the system uses it's version of python instead of the version the user wants for their applications. (This may have changed in Catalina, but I don't have a Mac at the moment to check). Granted, the Python installer corrects for this, but more versions of python on your system means you have to tell all of your python files that python==python3 or run them in virtualenvs (which you might not want to do in production).
Microsoft, in newer releases of Windows, includes a shim that'll grab python3 from the Microsoft Store if you type python into a terminal, which is a lot nicer, and since they don't have code that requires python2, you can't accidentally break the system if you want a newer version of python around.
I assumed the poster meant EDIT.COM and QBASIC. I'd also argue that Notepad has about as much editing capability as EDIT.COM, even if nostalgia does seem to want to color EDIT.COM as a more capable IDE than it really was simply because I too spent a lot of time building dumb apps in QBASIC.
I am sure if someone actually cared they could add more functionality to their built in editor without confusing people. They could also increase its performance so it’s possible to edit large files.
Notepad++ is still too heavy. I prefer Notepad2. It doesn't need to be installed and there is a portable version that saves its options in a file instead of the registry.
Line numbers, file tabs, syntax highlighting, visible whitespace, a better find/replace with support for patterns, etc. Multiple cursors would be nice too.
I don't think it needs to have plugin support, a file explorer, VCS features, or any featurs that involve analyzing, building, or debugging code.
Really? I love TextEdit for making quick changes or viewing a file when I don't want to wait for VSCode or Sublime to start up. I just wish it had regex find/replace support.
What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or something else?
Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of the box?