[jeffmill]

> For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them

Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember those?) had a cow and my lead pulled out all of the changes.

I'm still at MSFT, now as an architect, so it turned out not to be a career limiting move, but I certainly should have discussed my plans more broadly rather than just "cowboying" those changes in.

[Randor]

Hey Jeff,

Small world, I worked with you on the Windows Update team. Hope you are doing well. Good to see you here on the HN forum. I also remember the notepad incident!

[tasogare]

Why not releasing it as NewNotepad or something? This way it keeps the old one working but provides a newer alternative. Like Paint and 3DPaint or whatever it is called.

[vitorgrs]

People always complain about the new apps. Microsoft in fact had like, 3 paints. Now they gave up on that idea and refreshed the main Paint.

[jhgb]

Yestepad.

[lpcvoid]

I would be have been pretty sad to hear that so much enthusiasm to improve the product resulted in problems regarding your career. That's promotion material, in my book. Glad it worked out.

[watersb]

If I could upvote you ten points, I would.

I love Notepad. I love the .LOG feature. I hit F5 for fun.

For some reason, the dead-simple text editors have always fascinated me. It's damn near good enough.

[UnFleshedOne]

First thing I do on any windows machine is replace notepad with notepad2 [0], there are installs of it that hides original notepad and uses notepad2 in all the "Edit" context menus etc.

https://notepad2.com