Windows notepad possibly being the most prominent text editor that ed is unambiguously superior to.

Still blows my mind that projects like notepad++ have been around for the literal lifetime of younger users and somehow MS just did not give any sort of shit about their terrible editor.

It's purpose is be able to open a text file and encourage you to buy word and visual studio.

A user who has an grade F and many grade A and B options may not be better off if upgraded to a default D or C. In fact if they don't move on to one of the A options they may be worse off.

For me, its finest purpose is to be a buffer that I can paste formatted text into so that it can strip the formatting. There are many programs that do this natively, but there are many that don't or are really inconsistent about the hotkeys, and Notepad is always there.

“Notepad.exe too crappy for you? Buy Word!” This is why.

Word is a replacement for notepad like a chainsaw is a replacement for a pair of dressmaker's shears.

They do superficially similar jobs, but the similarities end the first time you try to use one for a job that requires the other.

I took one look at notepad++ and deleted it many years ago because the interface was cluttered and ugly. Notepad is fine for simple use cases.

> Notepad is fine for simple use cases.

Maybe now, I'm told it has been improved in windows 11. But for decades, it was the only "mainstream" text editor I'm aware of that didn't have multi-level undo/redo (that is, it remembers your last action, and that's it). The fact that it stuck around this long without that feature is amazing, really.

It's use is really limited to modifying ini/properties files, unless you really hate yourself (and many of us did in the 2000s with our "made in notepad" website banners)

That is awesome. This might be my weekend project to do something similar.

compile to Jscript instead and you won't need node.js.