WinUIpad: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Sideways ⭐

An AI-generated Petzold-style Notepad, a new Windows App SDK tutorial, a title bar experiment, and a cleaner text box kept me busy this past week.
Dave’s “un-improved” Notepad
Picking up on the latest outrage over nothing in the Windows community, former Microsoftie Dave Plummer made a video about how he used GPT Codex Max 5.1 in Extra High mode to generate what he calls “a perfect clone of Notepad” as it used to be in the old Win32 days, as opposed to the modern version we have now in Windows 11 with the Fluent UI and multiple tabs. Given what I’m doing with WinUIpad (and, before that, .NETpad) and that I literally wrote a book about the history of Windows app programming over the decades, I was of course interested to see what this was all about.

Depending on your view of these things, this is either exhilarating or deflating. But my key takeaway is that this is pointlessly inflaming a pointless controversy. The modern Notepad is a terrific app that looks and works fantastically. You can remove/disable all of its new behaviors (except for the tabs) using its built-in settings. And if you’re literally pining for classic Notepad, it’s still there in Windows 11 anyway: Just open Settings, navigate to Apps > Advanced app settings > App execution aliases and uncheck “Notepad” to get it back.

Plus, this doesn’t impact WinUIpad. My goal is to create a modern Notepad clone or alternative, not recreate the classic Notepad yet again. (I’ve done that several times.) His version of the app is written in old-school Petzold-style C, so it’s an unreadable and unmaintainable mess. But to give him (or ChatGPT) some credit, it of course does things my apps never did, like handle all the weird text file formatting that Notepad supports. If you’re curious, you can download the code from GitHub and build the app for yourself. But I will just keep going as before.
Experiments with the Titlebar control
Moving back into the 21st century, there’s a decent new Windows App SDK tutorial on Microsoft Learn in which you build an app called WinUI Notes. And because this app is similar to a text editor like the one I’m trying to build, I stepped through it last week. There are some interesting concepts in there that may impact WinUIpad, and I’m still on the fence about using the first one that comes up in that tutorial: It uses a Title bar control that’s still fairly new to the Windows App SDK.

Title bars have come a long way in recent years. If you think about “classic” Win32 apps like the old Notepad, there was a clearly delineated title bar at the top, and then the so-called client area of the window, which usually included a menu bar, a toolbar of some kind, and the rest of the app. The title bar is where the title of the app was usually displayed, but it also included an app icon with a right-click menu and, on the right, the standard Minimize, Restore/Maximize, and Close window buttons.

But apps look different now. Modern apps like the new...