In Defense of Notepad (Premium)

Several years ago, I was working on the Programming Windows series that I later turned into the book Windows Everywhere. As I progressed through that history, I started collecting themes, or ideas, that might define specific eras. And one I remember distinctly was the notion that Rapid Application Development (RAD) environments like Visual Basic enabled a new style of programming in which you would spend more of your time creating an app's user interface and would only need to write a minimal amount of software code.

Like so many bad ideas, this one was dangerous specifically because it felt true. And without getting into the technical details of why this is so, I'll just say that, leaving aside the simplest and least professional of classic VB apps from 30 years ago, I was wrong on that point, And that I've spent the past several years in what might reasonably be described as a manic push to prove myself wrong again and again.

In the unlikely case that you don't know what I mean by that, I am referring to .NETpad (pronounced "dot net pad"), my partial clone of the application Notepad that Microsoft has bundled with Windows since the beginning (and beyond, as its immediate predecessor was written for MS-DOS). I have created what now feels like an uncountable number of .NETpad versions in various programming languages and application frameworks. As such, I am in some ways more knowledgeable about Notepad and its capabilities than almost anyone.

A lot of that knowledge has come from failure.

You are of course familiar with the famous John F. Kennedy quote, "We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." I'm not that inspirational: I started copying Notepad specifically because I believed what many still believe today, that this is a simple app and it would be easy to copy as I learned each of the .NET-era frameworks, in turn, while writing that series that became a book.

During this years-long process, I came to really respect Notepad. It's a deceptively powerful app, full of little features loved by those who know it well, but also approachable to beginners and minimalist. I also maybe got a little caught up in my own successes: I was surprised by how much of Notepad's functionality I could replicate, and while I never got to 100 percent of its feature set, I did add features that Notepad didn't have (some of which Microsoft later added, like text zoom).

The problem with Notepad until fairly recently was that it was technically old-fashioned. It was a classic Win32 desktop app because it came out of an era in which that was a developer's only real option. It was updated only sporadically during its first 20 years, at first because there was little reason to do so, and then increasingly because its code base was so out of date. The move to Unicode with Windows NT in the 1990s was particularly problematic, with Unicode-related issues popping up again and again over the intervening years.

Making NT...