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> tabs and autosave are pretty essential features

Not for me. Tabs and autosave are features I absolutely don't want in Notepad. The entire value of Notepad to me is that it's simple and basic. The tabs are irritating, but at least I can pretend the tab bar doesn't exist (although I wish I could hide it), and autosave as well as restoring the last document can be disabled.

But even having to start configuring Notepad to restore some of what makes it valuable to me reduces its utility. There is great value in having a bare-bones text editor. In those cases where more features are desired, using a more featureful editor is possible. That's what I do.

All that said, there are plenty of simple editors out there that I can use instead, so it's not really an earth-shaking deal. It's just a little sad to me. Notepad had managed to maintain its value proposition and avoid feature creep for a very long time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually.



Notepad was and always had been a simple and light application for viewing raw text files. Text editing is secondary and justifiably quite limited. If you wanted a real text editor you used Wordpad.

Microsoft has absolutely no concept of the value that anyone gets out of anything they make. The one and only question they seem capable of asking is "how can we monetize this?"




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