Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad
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@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Incredible as it sounds: the internet was a thing before Al Gore.
Damn those time-traveling inventors.
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@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
man arpanet
So you're going to tell me that because arpanet existed, obviously Macintosh 1.0 and DOS 1.0 were designed with it in mind? Because they were not. Apple used AppleTalk if they were networked at all, DOS had absolutely nothing at all.
Yes, I know it existed. I didn't include that in my comment not because I'm a stupid idiot dummy moron, but because it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. If you're trying to tell me that the first Macintosh was designed to connect to arpanet back in 1984, well, then you're plain 100% wrong.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
man arpanet
So you're going to tell me that because arpanet existed, obviously Macintosh 1.0 and DOS 1.0 were designed with it in mind?
No. If you had said "some barely out of highschool kids named Bill and Steve didn't have any clue about the internet so they didn't give a damn" I wouldn't have objected. However, the mere existence of the ARPANET (which predates UNIX) is evidence that there were significant efforts to have computers of different vendors talk to each other since more than a decade before DOS. There were even several online newspapers the year DOS came out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQI'm not blaming Bill for not grokking at the time that crafting your plain text format for a historic output device your target hardware doesn't even support is a really daft idea. But it's a generation later now and as Apple has demonstrated, one can switch.
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@laoc I also didn't say "Granny Smith is a type of apple" in the post, or "water tends to flow downhill due to gravity", or any of a billion other things I know.
That is because the post was making a specific point and the information you're calling me a dummy idiot moron for not including was not relevant to that point.
@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
grokking
Oh fuck off.
@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
I'm not blaming Bill for not grokking at the time that crafting your plain text format for a historic output device your target hardware doesn't even support is a really daft idea.
Anyway you're looking at it wrong. It's more "don't fix what's not broken" than "this computer isn't intended to connect to a teletype, therefore what should we go in and dick around with?"
Not fixing shit that isn't broken is not a "bad idea" by any stretch of the imagination. It's actually quite pragmatic. Especially since the characters used to end a line are implementation-detail anyway.
Macintosh was created from scratch 4 or 5 years later, so it's not surprising they chose a different character for ending a line.
@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
But it's a generation later now and as Apple has demonstrated, one can switch.
One can do a lot of things, but what would be the point to it?
Apple only switched because:
- They hired on a new set of developers who hated all Macintosh development that came before and conspired to destroy all those programs as soon as possible (at least it looked that way from the outside)
- Those developers were idiot Unix-heads who were used to Unix-style line endings
They didn't switch due to any rational reasons.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
At the time there was zero interest in computers to talking to other computers.
That's why nobody invented the modem and started mass-producing them in 1958.
And BBS didn't let computers talk to other computers
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@laoc I also didn't say "Granny Smith is a type of apple" in the post, or "water tends to flow downhill due to gravity", or any of a billion other things I know.
That is because the post was making a specific point and the information you're calling me a dummy idiot moron for not including was not relevant to that point.
You dummy idiot moron. You made an overly general statement that turned out to be completely wrong and you got called on it. Be angry at reality, not the people who mention it.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@laoc I also didn't say "Granny Smith is a type of apple" in the post, or "water tends to flow downhill due to gravity", or any of a billion other things I know.
That is because the post was making a specific point and the information you're calling me a dummy idiot moron for not including was not relevant to that point.
"At the time there was zero interest in computers to talking to other computers" was certainly relevant. It was also wrong.
@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
I'm not blaming Bill for not grokking at the time that crafting your plain text format for a historic output device your target hardware doesn't even support is a really daft idea.
Anyway you're looking at it wrong. It's more "don't fix what's not broken" than "this computer isn't intended to connect to a teletype, therefore what should we go in and dick around with?"
Unless they just copied code verbatim from CP/M they could have picked either existing standard. It's not like there's much to "go in and dick around with" when you're writing something from scratch.
Not fixing shit that isn't broken is not a "bad idea" by any stretch of the imagination. It's actually quite pragmatic. Especially since the characters used to end a line are implementation-detail anyway.
If you read it like that, what isn't an implementation detail?
But it's a generation later now and as Apple has demonstrated, one can switch.
One can do a lot of things, but what would be the point to it?
Avoiding the problems they're trying to fix with this update for instance.
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@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
It's not like there's much to "go in and dick around with" when you're writing something from scratch.
They didn't write DOS from scratch, they bought QDOS from SCP on July 27, 1981 and released DOS 1.0 in August of the same year.
Blame QDOS for using CR/LF
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@timebandit said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
It's not like there's much to "go in and dick around with" when you're writing something from scratch.
They didn't write DOS from scratch, they bought QDOS from SCP on July 27, 1981 and released DOS 1.0 in August of the same year.
Blame QDOS for using CR/LF
I don't blame Bill nor any QDOS coder at that time, only the management of the last 20 or so years.
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@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
If you read it like that, what isn't an implementation detail?
Stuff the user actually gives a shit about.
@laoc said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Avoiding the problems they're trying to fix with this update for instance.
Here's the enormous number of people this problem effects:
- People who download applications written for other OSes
- Which haven't been properly ported to Windows
- Which include text files
- Whose filenames end in ".txt"
That's... not a lot of people.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
If you read it like that, what isn't an implementation detail?
Stuff the user actually gives a shit about.
You mean like not seeing gibberish when sharing text files with other people? Yeah, they're probably Holding it Wrong.
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@mott555 said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@dangeruss said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@mikehurley said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
One exception is it's probably not worth supporting old Mac \r line endings. But then again, it's not that hard to do so.
I think that's the funniest thing here. Unix had \n line endings, MS came by and said... why don't we add \r for good measure? Otherwise, the printer may forget to return the carriage to the beginning of the line.
Apples come along and says "Screw you guys, we want to be different. Even though we're just some pretty GUI on top of debian, we're going to use \r. Screw any printers that don't understand that we want a line feed too. We'll make our own printers and sell them for lots of $"
I recently learned that you can use
\r
to return the cursor to the front of the line, same line, when doing a C++ console application. I used it to overwrite a line to update a text-based progress bar without adding lines to the output. Nifty. (At least on Windows. Who knows what other OS's do...)Only as long as you've written less than a line of output.
And now I'm reminded of a particular tool which 'suppresses' terminal output by writing a backspace, a space, and a backspace after each input character it reads. Very effective if you're copying the output to file.
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@pleegwat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
And now I'm reminded of a particular tool which 'suppresses' terminal output by writing a backspace, a space, and a backspace after each input character it reads.
We've got specialist input modes for things like passwords for a good reason…
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Teletypes used CRLF because they literally were just electronic typewriters with no processors on them, and so each character mapped directly to one action. (Carriage return then line feed.)
...sort of. The real reason is that they set it up that way as a hack, because a carriage return all the way from the end of a line to the beginning of a new line would take twice as much time as typing one character. So they added a "line feed" character instead of just making CR do a normal Return action, so that it would waste time sending that character instead of the next byte of the actual input, and so the input wouldn't be lost.
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@masonwheeler Nope; they needed a separate carriage return so they could do type-overs. Like crossing stuff out with XXXXXXXXXXXX. Or underlining stuff with ____________. They were two separate functions for a purpose, it wasn't just a hack to deal with a timing issue.
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@topspin said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments: You can enter a URL in the File Open dialog and it'll download the HTML source to a temp file and open that temp file. Mind blown.
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@heterodox said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments:
And in the actual article itself. I think that's a feature of the File Open dialog though, and not the individual application, as in my experience it works with everything that gives you a standard File Open dialog.
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@heterodox said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@topspin said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments: You can enter a URL in the File Open dialog and it'll download the HTML source to a temp file and open that temp file. Mind blown.
I had to immediately test that when I read it!
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@lb_ said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@heterodox said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments:
And in the actual article itself. I think that's a feature of the File Open dialog though, and not the individual application, as in my experience it works with everything that gives you a standard File Open dialog.
Yeah, that's it. I use that feature with Imgur links all the time when a website doesn't have a link option.
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@heterodox said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@topspin said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments: You can enter a URL in the File Open dialog and it'll download the HTML source to a temp file and open that temp file. Mind blown.
Yes. II believe it uses Internet Explorer, and works with anything that's publicly available (or supports being logged in via URL alone, probably with no redirects but I haven't checked).
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@heterodox TRWTF is that you can unknowingly bypass an exclusive file lock without any elevated privileges, only depending on a slightly unorthodox (though not really uncommon) way of reading your files.
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@laoc File locks are a synchronization mechanism, not a security feature. Privileges are handled by ACLs.
If you need to disallow reading, set proper access controls.
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@topspin said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
@laoc File locks are a synchronization mechanism, not a security feature. Privileges are handled by ACLs.
If you need to disallow reading, set proper access controls.No doubt. Thing is, it doesn't work properly for synchronization. An application setting an exclusive lock is trying to say "don't even read this until I'm done with it because you'd get inconsistent data (or I don't feel like it)", that's how Windows file locking is documented (
LockFileEx()
: "Locking a portion of a file for exclusive access denies all other processes both read and write access to the specified region of the file."). Just that it works for regular reads but not for memory mapping.If an application tried to prevent other applications running under the same account from reading a file using access controls, it would itself be unable to read it.
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@heterodox said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Seen in the comments: You can enter a URL in the File Open dialog and it'll download the HTML source to a temp file and open that temp file. Mind blown.
Mind blown? Pretty sure that worked even back in Windows 98.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft Adds Proper Support for Line Breaks in Notepad:
Mind blown? Pretty sure that worked even back in Windows 98.
Cool story, bro. I didn't know that.