When I used Windows for a month because you people paid me to do so, the utter lack of consistency in the way applications and the operating system itself looks, feels, and behaves was a major sticking point. It turns out, though, that I was only scratching the surface of just how bad things really are on Windows. Case in point: the new WinUI Notepad application that replaced the classic Win32 one. I had no idea just how bad it really is.
It’s been seven weeks since I last complained about something in Windows on this blog. That feels like too long, so here’s a post about menus – specifically, the menu bar in the modern version of Notepad in Windows 11.
That menu bar has, unfortunately, quite a few regressions compared to the menu bar in the old Win32 version of Notepad.
↫ Reupen Shah
I’m not going to spoil any of it, because there’s no way you’d believe any of it without the videos Shah provides. I’m aghast.
During Microsoft’s UWP phase, IBM CUA standards for cut (Shift+Del), copy (Ctrl+Ins) and paste (Shift+Ins) were absent or intentionaly removed. Only Control+C,V,X was working.
With keyboard changing shapes, they might not care much about this older compliance (the F10 key) anymore.
Edit: previously commented on wrong post.
IMHO this is sensible. We’re talking about ancient (at this point) keyboard shortcuts that probably less than 0.1 percent of users have even heard of (I certainly hadn’t, and I’m a pretty technical user with plenty of experience on multiple platforms). On top of removing maintenance costs for the OS devs, for the end users getting rid of extraneous shortcuts means those keys are freed up to be used in other applications without accidental conflicts. Sounds reasonable to me.
F10 take it or leave it, seems easy to keep in, but does it actually do anything different than just pressing Alt? If not then it’s unnecessary.
Moochman,
I don’t know if you are referring to shift+del and shift+ins shortcuts, but I use them and would be annoyed if they disappeared. I understand that people who don’t use them won’t really care. I see many people who were never able to pick up keyboard shortcuts at all because they use a laptop where designers are notorious for gravely botching the layout with missing keys and making some shortcuts downright unusable. I hate those keyboards that lean heavily on FN modifiers and making touch typing a real pain. For better or worse I notice that many people IRL have replaced hot keys with the mouse. It’s fine for beginning, but the problem is that it’s a slow way to work long term.
In old school windows software interfaces were more conducive to learning shortcuts because they had menus with shortcuts listed. New interfaces, especially modern UIs that do away with menus are harmful to discoverability and results in less efficient computer interactions. IMHO UI design plateaued decades ago and has been highly regressive ever since.
I even found a client struggling to move a modern excel window because MS took away the title bar and he had to pixel hunt for a window anchor point between the items. It look him several attempts and reminds me of an old sierra adventure game, haha.
https://www.exceldemy.com/learn-excel/screenshot/
It was simultaneously comedic and sad.
It’s that kind of information that makes me wonder why some people want Win32, the last bit of common sense still left in Windows, gone.
Kochise,
I deal with a lot of windows clients who hate new microsoft windows releases and try to stick with older versions as long as they can until they get forced to upgrade. Often they’ll tell me they hate microsoft’s changes even without prompting. I haven’t conducted a poll or anything but I think this could actually be the way a majority of microsoft users feel about windows.
My brother and mother in law were both willing to give linux a shot and they’ve been linux users for many years now. They didn’t mind switching. Obviously web based tasks work well on other operating systems, but if users are locked into the windows ecosystem with software/hardware that’s not supported by linux or macos, that’s obviously a source of frustration. I’m happy to support those who want to give linux a try, but I’m honest about software compatibility and I find it’s not usually productive to push people into a new OS – they should decide this for themselves.
I even “saved” my good old Wordpad from XP as it is way enough for me : https://github.com/Kochise/win_portable/tree/master/Editor/Accessoires
Back in the day Apple, Microsoft, IBM, etc, used to do proper usability research (such as Start menu or Apple menu at the edge – basically an infinite target easy to reach), and publish usability and interface guidelines that themselves and developers would follow. Now it’s basically no research and things get shipped without testing.
I remember when I moved from mac os 9 to mac os X one thing would drive me insane: when you would glide from a menu to a submenu, there was a small delay before the menu would disappear, so you could follow a straight path between menu and submenu. In the first 1-2 releases of OS X, this delay was zero so you really had to do a 90 degree angle between menu and submenu and it was MADDENING.
Shiunbird,
Yes, this. I think this is the problem in a nutshell. I’m pretty sure those teams got fired/reorganized. The work they did really helped refine UI design and we all benefited, but it rather naturally resulted in software becoming “boring” once it was optimized. This consistency was a great thing for many users, but a bad thing for sales. The suits strongly associate change with progress and were willing to do away with strong UX guidelines in order to get their change.
For their part customers largely lament these changes – the push back on windows 8 was so great that microsoft was in crisis and literally started forcing unwilling users to upgrade. That’s the position of modern microsoft. When something is unpopular, it’s an easy fix: force the updates. When people protested the anti-features of windows 11…worry not because microsoft has a fix for that: back porting the most hated antifeatures to windows 10 even past EOL to remove their incentive to stick with windows 10. Problem solved.
Sometimes I STILL see this and consider it a bug. It is incredibly maddening and can take several attempts to select the desired submenu.
I get the feeling a lot of people are able to relate to this topic, haha.
This is one reason why I use Metapad as a Notepad replacement.
As for Notepad++ and its ilk, I don’t need a programmer’s editor with tabs and syntax highlighting just to open simple text files. Metapad is small, fast, and gets the job done.
I don’t understand your argument because if you open a simple text file you don’t get syntax highlighting, you have syntax highlighting only if you open source code and if you really really want to turn off tabs then you lunch with -multiInst.
But the real reason that people use Notepad++ is because it is an excellent text editor. Youou can edit columns of text and move columns of text together and there are trivial ways to move multiple lines around, plus you can bookmark and move around bookmarked text. Also it has a built in full text search for files and you can replace text in multiple files with ease.
Plus you don’t need to save the file for it to remember your edits, such a great feature. It is a lightweight and easy to use Emacs for Windows. Or rather is it a modern Wordstar?
My point is that Metapad is 192kb. Perfect for opening a readme file, which is really what Notepad was designed for. I don’t need a full-blown text editor for that purpose.
It’s the same reason I use irfanview for viewing photos, instead of, say, Gimp or Paint.net.
Should the WinUI3 menu bar be fixed? The messed up keyboard operability and misplacement of shortcut tooltips is a serious problem for accessibility, therefore the answer is yes, 100%, and it’s pretty irresponsible that it hasn’t been addressed in all these years.
That said, will most mouse-using users, who I guess account for at least 90% of the user base, notice these issues? In truth, probably not.
Add this to the list of things I DO NOT UNDERSTAND about Windows. It’s not that there are errors. It’s that they are totally unforced and would (a) have been easy to catch had someone been testing for them, (b) would have been easy to test for, and (c) end up in software that does not need to be released until it is finished.
Notepad is mature software. MS does not need to show the world that it Notepad is under intense, active development, and nobody using Notepad is asking for anything other than bugfixes.
Brainworm,
It’s not about what customers want, it’s about microsoft’s agenda. Microsoft are updating all their software to tie into the “cloud” and deprecating traditional applications that run locally. The goal for all new applications is for them all to get new hooks for advertising, telemetry, and AI. Even though most of us would agree notepad would be better off not getting this treatment, Basic software like notepad and mspaint don’t get an exception. Executives want to apply these changes to everything and unless you take steps to install an old version or alternative, this is what users are getting.
Apparently the superduper AI that’s going to take over the world doesn’t have the time to put itself in charge of Windows.