[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Worthless... old stuff touted as new after it was broken on purpose...

I've been reading up on the Windows 10 October Update. Some of the 'new' features...

<...>

- Notepad gets tabs (apparently) and some new features, including a big _performance update_ (??) and it will supports Unix line endings. (Why did this take nearly 25 years? Still, Notepad stays next to useless.

I routinely replaced notepad in the Win3.X days, and have continued to do so since.

The biggest annoyance for me was no support for Unix line ends. At one point, I was admin for company Solaris boxes. I had to implement email nightly progress reports on the status of current jobs on the system. Emailing from Solaris to the Windows network wasn't a problem. But the reports were text files that showed up as attachments to the emails in Outlook. Users would double click the attachment to read them, and Notepad would be called to do the display.

Notepad was stupid, so when it saw the line feed char Unix uses as the EOL marker, it advanced a line, but didn't home the cursor because there was no corresponding carriage return. The users saw a stair step effect in the reports. I had to add a step to the script that sent the email converting the LF characters in the file to the CRLF combo Windows used by default to provide sanity.

Having Notepad finally grok Unix line ends is Microsoft being late to the party, but that is no surprise.

What I use here is Notepad2-mod. It's a fork of Florian Balmer's Notepad2 product. It's built on the Scintilla edit control, which adds code folding and syntax highlighting (and is also under the hood in Notepad++.) It can be set using a registry hack to replace built-in notepad, and I did. It does not have tabs (a deliberate design decision on Balmer's part), but I can have more than one instance at a time, and it invokes instantly. I have Notepad++ here, but Notepad2-mod does what I normally need, and I can live without tabs. I'm normally only editing one thing at a time.

See https://xhmikosr.github.io/notepad2-mod/

Just like Wordpad, Paint, Paint3D, and Mail. I don't know ANYONE who uses those programs on a regular basis.)

I haven't used Wordpad in years, never used Paint3d or Mail, and havent used Paint in some time. My Paint substitute is the open source Paint.NET. I have minimal image processing needs, and normally just crop, resize, and do minor color correction. Paint.NET does what I need, and is free and open source.

See https://www.getpaint.net/

Granted, there ARE some useful features in there such as "Open Linux Shell here" (I'll have to look into that; I still use MSYS2 or Git Bash for a lot of shell tasks as I REALLY don't like the verbosity of Poweshell, and I'm disinclined to learn it because I have known the Unix commandline for almost 20 years.

I used to use MSYS, and currently use Git Bash, and have an Open Git Bash here entry in the right-click Explorer menu. The Open Linux Shell here is more problematic.

I've run software intended to add desirable Unix commands since the MSDOS days. I had a Unix machine at home (an AT&T 3B1) before I got an actual PC, and when I got one I went looking for ways to make it more Unix like.

The solution I clutched to my chest was a commercial product called the MKS Toolkit. The developers were a consulting engineering firm in Toronto who wrote the Toolkit for internal use. When it got mature enough, they decided to release it as a product, and it became the "tail that wagged the dog" and thier main business.

The Toolkit implemented every Unix command that made sense in a single user, single taking OS. The selling point for me was a full DOS implementation of the Unix Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous background processes because DOS didn't do that. I was delighted.

When you installed the Toolkit in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit INIT.EXE program replaced COMMAND.COM as your boot shell. INIT was loaded, pit a Login: prompt on your screen, and waited for a userid and optional password. The ID you provided was passed to the LOGIN program, which checked the ID against a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file. If it found a match, it changed to whatever was defined as that user's home directory, and ran whatever was defined as that user's shell. Exit that shell, INIT was reloaded, and you got a Login: prompt.

I had userids defined to run the Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, the shareware 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, and the multitasking DesqView environment. RAMdisk, cache, and mouse drivers were all loaded from CONFIG.SYS and common to all. I could switch environments without rebooting.

When Win 3.1 joined the party, the Toolkit was still in place. The default UI for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but you could use something else by changing the SHELL definition in the SYSTEM.INI file. I defined MKS ids that ran a script that copied a modified version of SYSTEM.INI with a different SHELL specification over the real one, then ran Windows with the specified UI. Worked a treat, and gave me the option of not running Windows and using one of the defined DOS environments.

The Toolkit did take a little fiddling. DOS used \ as the directory separator character, and / as the option delimiter. The MKS shelled expect / as directory separator character and - as option delimiter. There was a DOS function that could change what the option delimiter char was, and an MKS command called SWITCH that would make the change, like "switch -". Once the option delimiter char was remapped, you could use \ or / as the directory separator. Unfortunately, some DOS programs I used were hard coded with the DOS defaults, so I had to implement wrappers that did "switch /" before running the program and "switch -" when it exited to make things work as expected.

But for the most part, I was ecstatic. The DOS PRINT command, for example, loaded a resident extension that did time slicing, and let you send a job to teh printer in the background so you weren't twiddling thumbs waiting for the print job to complete before you could do more in your word processor. I used Korn shell aliases and functions in the Toolkit to implement the Unix [ilp[/] command on top of PRINT.

Open Linux Shell here presumes you have the Windows Linux subsystem contributed by Ubuntu parent Canonical installed. This is an extra install, and not part of the other Win10 updates (though the most recent one broadened Linux compatibility beyond the Ubuntu flavor.) The issue is that when you are in that environment, you are in Linux land, not Windows, and you have the issue of somewhat incompatible environments. Staying entirely in one or the other works fine. Communications and interoperability between them are more complex.

I have the Windows Linux subsystem installed here, but the Git Bash shell isn't gong away. It's compiled to use Windows runtimes, and is more useful in a Windows terminal session.
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Dennis