Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2020/ Win10 Usability Improvements

Win10 Usability Improvements

I don't know when this happened, but somehow Microsoft made some usability improvements to their tools that I deeply appreciate.

Regedit

Regedit comes with an address bar now! You can finally take a registry path and just paste it into the address bar, instead of navigating down some twisty maze of pseudo folders. The lack of an address bar ha frustrated me for years.

Notepad

Notepad finally understands UNIX line endings! If I open a file created in Linux, Notepad will finally open it in a sensible way instead of vomiting one giant unreadable line of text on the screen.

Notepad is never going to be a great text editor, but it is good as a copy-paste buffer -- much better than "Stickies", which are inexplicably slow and unusable. I can launch Notepad quickly and paste in working notes easily. Now that Notepad handles line-endings properly, I can also use it to quickly preview text files without getting frustrated because I accidentally opened a file with UNIX endings in Linux. Furthermore I can launch Notepad from the commandline and it just works, which is not the case for Wordpad.

So what?

Microsoft has been moving to Powershell as its One True Interface for systems administration. I mostly support that initiative, but sometimes it is easier and faster to just click through a GUI than looking up esoteric syntax for mapping a registry. Given this initiative, there is no reason Microsoft was compelled to fix regedit, except that it made the tool so much better. Probably some dev finally got frustrated the way I was frustrated and decided to fix the tool.

Similarly, Powershell comes with its own IDE, which isn't terrible but also can be frustrating. Given that, there was no compelling reason to fix Notepad, but somebody finally got frustrated enough to do it -- and they left rest of Notepad a simple, quick-loading desktop app instead of whatever tiled, slow-loading monstrosity app Windows 10 prefers.

Neither of these two fixes were high-priority, but for people like me who do a lot of systems administration on Windows, they have been great, and I want the world to know there is at least one person who appreciates the effort.