For every week a piece of software lives, the programmers have more time to remove more bugs and quirks. The fastest most widely installed text editor on Windows has been around since 1985, which means more than a thousand weeks. It is not a very sophisticated program, but it has a nice cuddly name: Notepad. After a thousand weeks, one would expect it to be perfect in every respect. That is not quite true. These are some problems with Notepad:
I know some of these problems are particular to my machine, as other people do not always have them. But the program is written in such a way that all these five problems can occur on at least one machine - mine, and after a thousand weeks, that surprises me. One would expect exception handling to be a high priority for the world's biggest software producer.
But... I can live with these problems. I'm sure they will be fixed one day. I can wait another thousand weeks.
- It has ghost text. Every now and then I discover that the blank space at the bottom of the screen actually contains text. As soon as I resize the window, the text appears as a happy surprise.
- It moves the cursor position when saving. Almost (!) always when I press ctrl-S to save a file, the cursor moves three or four positions in the text, so I'm no longer at the end.
- It copies line feeds/carriage returns. If I have word wrap on, to make the text easy to read, and copy text, it keeps the line feeds. This means that when I paste into word, I get unwanted line fees in the middle of the paragraphs. There is an easy fix for this, of course: do not use word wrap. So I disable word wrap, copy and paste the text, re-enable word wrap, and I lose the cursor position, which is reset to the beginning of the file.
- Every file has to be defined as Unicode. Well, it does not have to. I can save as ANSI. However, if I want my files to be Unicode, there is nowhere where I can set that as default. For every single little text file, I need to start it with: File > Save As... > select UTF-8. It is not a big hassle for one file, but I have to do it for every single one.
- It does not lock files. If I double click on a text file to edit it, make some edits, go to another program, double click on the file again, make some different edits, I suddenly have two open versions of the same file. Not only that, but there is no warning when I save one of them that it overwrites the other modifications. I wonder how many gigabytes of data mankind loses each year due to this quirk.
I know some of these problems are particular to my machine, as other people do not always have them. But the program is written in such a way that all these five problems can occur on at least one machine - mine, and after a thousand weeks, that surprises me. One would expect exception handling to be a high priority for the world's biggest software producer.
But... I can live with these problems. I'm sure they will be fixed one day. I can wait another thousand weeks.
