back to article Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices. "This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end …

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  1. Nate Amsden

    relief arrived a long time ago

    Open the file in wordpad instead of notepad. Though I suppose it's good for the newbies that probably never knew that.

    1. handleoclast

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Open the file in wordpad instead of notepad.

      Last time I tried that (I admit, it was many years ago) I found that Wordpad had "intelligently" changed the text when I saved it.

      It's a long time back, but I have a vague memory of it seeing something it thought was HTML (it wasn't) so it added extra tags to make it comply to Microsoft's standards. Something like that. It saw something in there that made it decide it needed to add its own secret mix of herbs and spices instead of just saving the fucking text AS I WROTE IT (apologies for going full bob-mode there).

      Oh, the memories just came flooding back. It decided, for no damned reason at all, to add Microsoft half-baked DTP formatting to it. Something like that. These are repressed memories, after all. Notepad (back then) couldn't handle the "large" (over 32K) file, so I used Wordpad. I thought I could trust it because it wasn't Tord¹.

      I never used it again. For anything. That wasn't much of a hardship because back then (as now, and all times in between) I rarely used Windows anyway.

      ¹ Rhymes with "Word" but describes that piece of crap much more accurately.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        It was more a case of open file in notepad... Oh ffs. Close notepad. Open wordpad...

        Of course of it was your own system you'd have n++ on it, but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

        1. Florida1920
          Headmaster

          Re: relief arrived a long time ago

          Of course of it was your own system you'd have n++ on it, but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.
          N++ is a game; I assume you meant Notepad++, which is my default for .txt.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: relief arrived a long time ago

            N++ is a game; I assume you meant Notepad++, which is my default for .txt.

            Well, my default is not to use Windows at all. Granted, the notepad thing is but a minor pain (as I also soon found a notepad replacement), but it all adds up :)

          2. This post has been deleted by its author

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: relief arrived a long time ago

            Downvoted for pedantry - Sorry, but everyone knew what he meant..

            1. TonyJ

              Re: relief arrived a long time ago

              "...Downvoted for pedantry - ..."

              Welcome to The Register forums. You must be new here :)

            2. DiViDeD

              Re: relief arrived a long time ago

              Upvoted for pedantry. This is the sort of thing we expect from our commentards.

              Moar of this!

        2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
          Unhappy

          but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

          And when the s**t hits the fan you need stuff you don't have to p**s about with installing that does what you expect when you expect it.

          Interesting this this fix got the biggest cheer.

          "Bout f**king time" it took so long to do it.

          1. AMBxx Silver badge
            Thumb Down

            Re: but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

            I'd have hoped MS had better things to worry about than a trivial text editor for which there are an infinite number of free, better alternatives.

            1. Adam JC

              Re: but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

              I'd say the fact it took 30 years to fix means they did have better things to worry about ;-)

              I do agree though, if I have to reinstall Windows, Notepad++ is always one of the first slew of utilities to go on there.

              1. Dave K

                Re: but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

                "News of the change at Microsoft's Build developer conference on Tuesday prompted the loudest cheer of any of the announcements."

                When the announcement of fixing a simple issue in a text editor gets the biggest cheer, you've clearly (as an organisation) got your priorities wrong.

                Still, this sums up MS perfectly. Windows 10 is full of annoyances that could be fixed without too much trouble, yet MS prefers to focus on improved AI, 3D Paint and other gimmicks instead of fixing core things like the Control Panel/Settings mess etc.

                1. rcw88

                  Re: but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

                  OMG they might even fix the UI they screwed up completely with digit sized controls, but no, there's even more UI nonsense to come with 'Fluent Design'.

                  It wasn't broken, M$ borked it and now there's more white on platinum white on bright white coming. Makes my eyes hurt and gives me a headache trying to find buttons that HAD colour but now look like everything else.

                  Oh and don't get me started on Edge perpetually hijacking PDF file associations.

              2. jelabarre59

                Re: but just like vi you know that notepad and wordpad will always be there.

                I do agree though, if I have to reinstall Windows, Notepad++ is always one of the first slew of utilities to go on there.

                Usually it's install Chocolatey, then run a command that installs everything else.

          2. Unicornpiss
            Flame

            Now if..

            ..they would just fix it so it can handle moderately large files without hanging. (or at least warn you that the file is too large for humble Notepad to deal with)

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: relief arrived a long time ago

          "Of course of it was your own system you'd have n++ on it, "

          Even at work Notepad++ is a standard part of the build...

      2. NogginTheNog

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        Yes Wordpad is a freebie document creator and NOT a text editor. Handy for RTF files though.

        1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

          Re: relief arrived a long time ago

          I've recently found it kills RTF files' layout. Something has changed....

    2. JohnFen

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Yes, this is what I do. I only use notepad to actually take notes. If I'm opening text files in Windows, I always use wordpad because I work in a mixed-OS environment and you never know what sort of file it might be. I'd rather use notepad, though, so yay!

      1. Whitter
        Boffin

        I only use notepad to...

        In my case, my only regular use of notepad to strip out formatting from copied text. Swiftly followed by a copy/paste to where I was going in the first place.

    3. Jamesit

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago....

      In notepad++. Works great for me.

      1. 89724605708769238590784I9405670349743096734346773478647852349863592355648544996313855148583659264921

        Notepad++ is a star!

        Add extensions and it's even moe bloody useful.

      2. matjaggard

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago....

        Notepad++ takes far too long to open on older hardware. Notepad2 is the way to go, much simpler interface and fewer bells/whistles to distract. Also, and importantly, it installs by replacing Notepad.

    4. sisk

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Open the file in wordpad any non-MS text editor instead of notepad. Though I suppose it's good for the newbies that probably never knew that.

      FTFY

    5. Boo Radley

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      I've been using NoteTab for as long as I can remember, specifically for this reason.

    6. Mage Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Yes, download a non-MS free text editor for windows. I think 20 years ago?

    7. Primus Secundus Tertius

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Others have mentioned Notepad++. Not only for CR versus LF versus CRLF but for ASCII versus UTF-8 or UTF-16.

      I also use One Note - the useful version that comes with Office rather than the free version limited to the cloud. Makes tables trivially easy, for example.

      1. teknopaul

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        dir > file.txt

        notepad.exe file.txt

        Still does not work because the filesystem uses utf8 and notepad.exe is still notepad.

        Vim.exe is part of my standard build.

        All fixing the \n issue does is remind us how poor windows toolset is.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      Why bother supporting a Unix text file format from back with the Dinosaurs? I hope it converts it to a more standard format when saving it.

      1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        "Why bother supporting a Unix text file format from back with the Dinosaurs?"

        Why expose your ignorance to that degree?

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        "from back with the Dinosaurs?"

        seriously?

        1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

          Re: relief arrived a long time ago

          Yeah. The guy thinks using a sequence of two characters is superior to using one to tell us the line ends there. Clearly pre-stone age stuff! LOL!

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: relief arrived a long time ago

            "Yeah. The guy thinks using a sequence of two characters is superior to using one to tell us the line ends there. Clearly pre-stone age stuff! LOL!"

            Well, if you're going to be anal about it, CR is Carriage Return and without a Linefeed, LF, will cause the next line to overprint the first. Likewise, LF, Linefeed alone means drop down to the next line at the same character position so you keep printing till you reach the physical end of line and then lose everything following. If anything is odd, it was whoever decided that only one of CR or LF should act as both CR and LF in the days when many people were still using Teletypes.

            1. Scott Wheeler

              Re: relief arrived a long time ago

              Character 10 could mean drop down to the next line at the same character position, as you say. It could also mean feed a line and return the carriage - either were permitted by the ISO standard for teletypes. IBM used character 15 to do the same two jobs. But that misses the main point: these are printer or teletype codes, and there is no particular reason why the OS should use the convention of one variety of printer internally. These days we would use device drivers to abstract that away, and even in early Unix, there were ways of removing that device dependence. Which is obvious, if you think about it, otherwise printers wouldn't have worked with Unix.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        I hope it converts it to a more standard format when saving it.

        I think your understanding of what a standard is may need some help. The NON-Microsoft version was a standard long before one Bill G added notepad.exe to the Microsoft toolset..

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        "Why bother supporting a Unix text file format from back with the Dinosaurs? "

        Presumably because Windows now supports such legacy software via services for Linux.

    9. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: relief arrived a long time ago

      open the file with ANY editor on a Linux system, or in Cygwin. Fixed.

      And I suppose I'd have to install Win-10-nic to get the notepad fix, right? No back-ports to 7?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: relief arrived a long time ago

        "And I suppose I'd have to install Win-10-nic to get the notepad fix, right? No back-ports to 7?"

        Not sure what your network card has to do with it, but as Windows 7 is in extended support, yes no new features. However if you copy the executable it will probably work.

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    That's why someone made Metapad.

    P.S. Does notepad still take forever to open any file of size? Metapad literally loads at disk speed even on an SSD. I can bring a machine to a halt just opening a 1Gb log file on Notepad because it tries to read the entire damn thing into memory first.

    1. DavCrav

      "P.S. Does notepad still take forever to open any file of size?"

      Yes.

  3. handleoclast

    Is this the end of unix2dos?

    1. asdf

      Re: Is this the end of unix2dos?

      No because Geany on windows can't handle some exotic encodings unless you do a unix2dos first. Of course now you can just open it in Notepad and resave it as well (do actual work in Notepad not so much). Still prefer to drop into a cygwin command line to fix it than open through UI.

  4. artem

    For opening Unix files in Windows I've always used Wordpad which does handle Unix line endings. Of course, if you have a working Internet connection Notepad++ is the first choice but sometime I'm just too lazy to download it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Windows...

    lol! does anyone still use that old thing?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Windows...

      people too lazy to download better software, just like the people who don't use better text editors

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows...

        ‘people too lazy to download better software‘

        ... or working for a company with 30k+ servers built over the last 15 years, strict restrictions on software downloads, where the only thing you can be sure will be there are the default Windows tools.

        Some commenters really do seem to demonstrate a cluelessness as to real-world limitations sometimes!

    2. Unicornpiss
      Meh

      Re: Windows... love/hate

      "lol! does anyone still use that old thing?"

      Well, I know you probably meant that tongue-in-cheek, but a lot of us are stuck with it at work and for gaming and whatnot. I personally have a love/hate relationship with it, as it does keep me employed.

      That said, Microsoft can't seem to release an update these days without shooting itself in the foot. And using Win10, I can say that Microsoft seems to have lost its grip on what is important: the user experience. Look at all the mindless garbage included with each release, and the way you're forced to use whatever menu system MS wants you to use when it would have been trivial to include the functionality offered in 3rd-party apps like "Classic Shell" as options and you'll see what I mean.

      I personally feel that MS's developers and management are so bound up in bureaucracy and appeasing upper management on the warpath, that no one communicates and things are rushed to market (even more than usual) before they've been fully vetted.

      The sad thing is, MS's marketing is so efficient that they've got most companies to sign their contracts in blood, and companies are so deep in bed with them that there is no escape. Linux is a great alternative, but not many are willing to take a leap of faith like that and restructure their company's IT systems.

      1. Greencat

        Re: Windows... love/hate

        In fairness to Microsoft, I'm not sure they have ever prioritised the user experience. Windows 10 is at least consistent in that respect.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Windows...

      "lol! does anyone still use that old thing?"

      Well over 1 billion users apparently. 700 million of those on Windows 10.

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