Notepad - Boycott Longhorn?

If Microsoft are smart enough to improve notepad would
you boycott Longhorn?

I was just reading a very interesting discussion where
a MVP said Microsoft "has to" add more functionality
to notepad and seemed to miss the entire point of a
low level text editor...

So the question is does anyone have any strong feelings
for or against notepad in its current form? What, if
anything would you like to see added (or removed)?

Notepad is the lowest-level text editor.

If you want more, use Wordpad. That has many more features.

If you want more, buy Microsoft Word.

Microsoft offers Word if you want features - so what possible reason would there be to add features to Notepad?

I always thought that a Notepad with more features was called WordPad or, even better, Microsoft Office.

I like having Notepad around because IT HAS NO FEATURES!

Don't mess with a good thing. Want more features? Use Wordpad or something else.

Just my own opinion.

Although I love notepad as is, I would like to see *NIX and Mac new lines supported.

Actually that's one of my favorite features of Notepad is that I can mix \r and \r\n and Notepad will tell me the difference.  Useful for importing data into database where values have embedded newlines.

I'm not entirely happy with the way Word Wrap works, if I had to dislike something.

No, Wordpad is like Word-lite. It's not a text editor, it's just a poor attempt at a word processor. There is a big difference between a word processor and a text editor.

Notepad could be improved a lot. At the moment it's just a very minimalist wrapper aound the textbox common control. I hate the dumb "simplest is best" attitude - it *is* possible to add a lot of features to a program and still have it be as simple in appearance as a no-feature program like Notepad. It's just a question of good UI design.

As was said above, my one request would be support for UNIX (\n) and Mac (\r) line breaks. Add a menu with checkboxes that allow the user to set their line break style. However, I've been using Notepad2 to do some coding lately and it's been fantastic (and has support for UNIX/Mac line breaks) as well as syntax highlighting. It adds a lot of power while keeping the Notepad simplicity.

I would also like better new-line support.  That's really all I would like to see, though.  Notepad's minimalism is great.  If I need more than what Notepad offers, I have no problem moving up to WordPad or Word.

I would like to mention a feature I would like to see for WordPad, while I'm on the subject.  'Go to line' and line numbers on the status bar.  Most of the time that I need to use WordPad is when I want to read source code that uses Unix newlines.  Upon doing so I usually want to jump right to a specific line.  As far as I can tell this can't be done without counting as you press the down arrow.

They need to fix the darn drag-drop in wordpad, it shouldn't
add the file to the document (wtf?!) it should attempt
to open it!

Here's my wish list:

• A better search and replace functionality (an index of all matches found would be nice, and Regular Expression search would be wonderful)
  
• The ability to open multiple text documents in tabbed format
  
• Ability to toggle line numbers
  

Those three features that Faraz has mentioned should be a requirement for the Longhorn notepad.

Another quick plug for Notepad2. I opened the source code for GNU cp which uses UNIX line breaks. It also shows off the line numbering and syntax highlighting.

Picture

Faraz wrote:

Here's my wish list:

• A better search and replace functionality (an index of all matches found would be nice, and Regular Expression search would be wonderful)
  
• The ability to open multiple text documents in tabbed format
  
• Ability to toggle line numbers

Line numbers is good... Tabs would suck (isn't that
what the task bar is for? Does notepad really need its
own sub-taskbar?) RegX would confuse nubs when they
search for * and get everything returned.

PS - Notepad2 is crappier than wordpad IMO... Just a
hidious bloated mess, worst GUI ever. It is too poor
to be a replacement for Visual Studio and too bloated
to be a replacement for notepad. So it has no usefulness.

I like notepad as is however that isn't to say I wouldn't like to see line breaks improved.

I have opened many a file in notepad only to see little squares where line breaks should be, while those files display perfectly in WordPad.

Apart from that I use notepad because it is simple and doesn't have many features. Line numbering could be an interesting addition, however there would have to be an option to turn it off (also I would prefer it to look nicer than it does in notepad2 screenshot.)

And on the subject of that notepad2 screenshot it does look real crappy, I think should stick to just drop menus like file no buttons, its useless for a program that just edits plain text as far as im concerned.

I tried Notepad2 many times before I finally bought into it. The final motivator was having to write some PHP. The syntax highlighting with line numbering really helps cut down on bugs and speeds up debugging. It really cut down on development time vs. Notepad. I don't really see how having a toolbar makes it clutter. Running at 1280x1024, the toolbar takes up a very small portion of the screen and all the Notepad key shortcuts are intact so you can use it just like Notepad. I would recommend trying it out (it's only a 200 KB download if I recall). I could see using Notepad to do HTML, but for me Notepad2 has replaced Notepad for all coding that I need to do with a text editor.

I wasn't aware it was up for download, got a URI?

I'm fond of EditPlus, m'self.

UltraEdit fo' life, yo!