> Why introduce legislation that is so complex and hard to understand that people seem to be confused wether or not they’re affected. It’s highly irresponsible and arrogant thing to do.
Really? Google to this day refuses to do business in China, and Apple at this very moment excludes the EU from multiple new iOS 27 features that launch in the rest of the world. And with the current direction the EU is taking (e. g. even more regulation, more economic recession, even fewer competitive tech businesses), I wouldn’t bet on US companies getting "more favorable" towards the EU.
Looking forward to the Apple quarterly earnings call where Tim Cook (or soon the new guy) explains why they decided to let go of the EU, leading to a 30% fall in revenue and net profit. I'm sure investors will be delighted.
...and the iOS 27 features are not anything actually important, while China never was an established market for Google since 2009. Things have changed.
> A related issue solved along was Windows string representation of paths. std::filesystem::path stores its text in wchar_t encoded as UTF-16 (Windows native). But p.string() narrows it down to the active code page, rather than UTF-8 which is what the formatting library expects. The result was a non-ASCII path could get transcoded to gibberish. The C++26 std::formatter<std::filesystem::path> converts Windows native UTC-16 to UTF-8 using Unicode transcoding and avoiding code pages, therefore solving the problem.
> Ill-formed UTF-16 is replaced with U+FFFD by default, or escaped under {:?}.
Silently corrupting the path seems an odd choice in this day and age, when WTF8 has existed for many years and fixes this round trip bug / security vulnerability
Yeah, but picking utf8 over wtf8 for this in 2026 feels a lot like picking utf16 over utf8 in 1995. You know the choice is broken and you know there is a correct fix already out there.
Also, MS does absolutely support EoL versions of their OS - it took MSVC's STL until 2024 to finally drop support for Windows 7 (whose final ESU update was 2023): https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/4858 - it isn't unlikely that they (STL maintainers) are not going to get approval for dropping Windows 10 support before 2029.
> Lately Alternative für Deutschland has been getting a lot of votes in Germany; what kinds of rules (on top of the existing ones) do they think should be in place for people in southeast asia trying to immigrate to Germany?
The AfD is in no position to put legislation regarding immigration in place, that is federal law. Nevertheless, southeast asian immigrants are not particularly in the eyes of the public.
> After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
Depends on whether you actually want to enter the US. If you don't, its citizenship is a burden like no other citizenship: Banks want nothing to do with you and you pay extra taxes that no other nation requires from you. Oh, and should you decide on giving it up - that's cumbersome and costs a bunch of dollars, from what I've heard.
So from someone that at a max would want to visit the US only as a tourist: Having only european citizenship is better than dual european/US citizenship to me.
Whilst I agree, to be fair, a passport is usually only needed when entering a country, not leaving one, right? Under the cited rule, the US needs to allow you to leave, not help you in entering some other country.
That's mostly because transport companies have to pay to ship you back if you get turned away at the border, so they will want to see your permission to enter your destination country before you leave. I've traveled internationally a fair bit and I've never had to show my passport to government officials when leaving the US.
Would they do that for an international departure? They know where you’re flying, and I’d think they’d just tell you to stop being an idiot and show them the passport you obviously must have. But policies can be weird, so maybe not.
Yes, that's what I said above. The US government doesn't give a toss, but the airline has to fly you back if you're refused entry at your destination, so they will do their best to ensure you have the documents you need.
Ok, fair enough, but if I were German - I don't really think I would asylum anywhere on the basis of Germany maybe intending to conscript me in the future.
You generally do present your passport when leaving. Most places you get an exit stamp (which matches your entry stamp). They usually confirm things such as not overstaying a visa.
ex:
overstaying in Thailand results in a on-the-spot fine
China lately has exit checks when traveling to SEA (they try to intercept people traveling to scam centers)
They’re turning Notepad into what Wordpad was (or was supposed to be). Now everyone looking for the light weightiest *.txt editor must find a new tool...
Oh it's still pretty stupid, and I think they should have simply resurrected the Wordpad name for this, and maybe a conversion utility for opening doc/rtf files to markdown in the editor for older file support.
Edit is unironically one of my favorite text editors these days. It opens incredibly fast compared to everything else I use, it's easy to use, works fine on Linux. It's not going to replace emacs or VS Code, but it's incredibly handy for basic editing chores.
Notepad++ is solid but they had a recent kerfuffle involving their security practices and the response didn't inspire much confidence. But if you turn off auto-updates then it's a good alternative if you're still on Windows.
The issue Notepad++ is having, is the same as a lot of open source projects: They don't have a ton of money, don't have a business entity, and are struggling to get/keep a software-signing key in those circumstances.
So the people taking pot shots at the developers, I guess, maybe be more specific with what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. Because if you actually understand the history/circumstances (and the fact it was a third-party hosting provider compromised), one would expect more blame on the systemic under-funding of OSS than "developers bad."
Are people wanting them to create a business, monetize Notepad++, so that they no longer have issues with hosting/certificates? I'm guessing not.
And yet notepad++ is installed by default on millions of development machines across the globe. This one of those cases that Microsoft should take over the project, keep as open source and give it proper prime time attention.
More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.
I'm worried a political activist might go off the rails at some point for whatever their cause is and I have their software running on my computer... I don't want to be part of someone else's crusade.
I didn't realize until recently that the very popular Notepad++ was such a lightning rod over the years for controversy and (though I can't guarantee correlation is causation) security issues.
The problem is usually when you're using notepad, it's in some situation where you don't want to install another exe. Like you're using someone else's PC or a random one in a library or something. This needs to be built in.
If not anything else, I guess it could be added :) Makes me wonder though if that's a limitation of text boxes in Windows (so a translation will need to be made during loading/saving).
While I probably haven't played either in a decade, I bring sol.exe and winmine.exe on general principle, as both had their "Copilot in Notepad" shark-jumping moments all the way back in Windows 8 with the introduction of achievements and in-app purchases.
You're not wrong, and I could have elaborated. While loaded with stuff, I find the ui can be pared down, and has a similar load time and screen space as notepad.
The subscription isn't awesome, but it works fine without it, and doesn't pester alot
I love Emacs, but I don't see how a Lisp platform with a web browser, a Tetris implementation, and 4 terminal emulators (shell, term, ansi-term, eshell) can be considered 'lightweight'.
Notepad was just a wrapper around some default win32 controls. Judging alone by exe size is not right, although probably a “statically linked” notepad would still be smaller than emacs
Anything with a scripting engine isn't lightweight compared to (classic) Notepad!
(Also, a lot of that stuff comes bundled with Emacs out-of-the-box, further disqualifying it. Having a scripting engine is one thing, but having a scripting engine along with the whole rest of the jet is something else entirely!)
If by vi you mean vim, then I agree, real vi is rather lite.
As someone famous said, "everything is relative" :) Compared to the new applications that have been coming out, Emacs and vim are a paragon of lightness.
I agree with you that vi is lighter than vim. I’ve seen more than a few instances of an OS just aliasing vi to vim.
On that note, why are the keybindings for vi on a “modern” Ubuntu different from fedoras? I remember having to mess with ^H in a vimrc or something to that effect to mimic the behavior I was expecting.
I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.
FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...
⟩ dnf install --downloadonly --installroot /tmp/yourmom python3
…SNIP…
Transaction Summary:
Installing: 59 packages
Total size of inbound packages is 33 MiB. Need to download 33 MiB.
After this operation, 118 MiB extra will be used (install 118 MiB, remove 0 B).
The operation will only download packages for the transaction.
Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.
(( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))
while this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter,
adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc.
Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.
It’s also sort of a given that anyone on this site is pretty well versed with technical stuff so maybe results would vary with Tina over in HR, for instance.
I think that sort of “last mile” problem is what agents like claw etc are supposed to help with.
Also, any reason you prefer Perplexity? Haven’t really used that one before TBH
Thanks for the detailed response, lol. Seems like it’s more personally tailorable than some of the others. Gonna give it a try with some similar vibe coding ideas
I mean you did originally claim that this was something that was "for the masses" and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.
Not that I doubt it couldn't one shot something this simple with a .exe wrapper.
Well at least 10-15 you could just copy pasted exact same thing in a few minutes yet. But regardless even a basic notepad app is significantly more than a tkinter window with an input field.
The possibility of software being a personal, creative, expressive endeavor (which often includes politics), something I believed in back when I was in university twenty years ago, is a feeling that's receded deeply into the past. That might be as much about me as it is about the world, but I miss it.
I think that different people want different things. It seems to me like these days the idea of software being a personal expression is in vogue more than not, but there are always going to be those who want that and those who don't.
That said, if software is a personal creative expression, one must be prepared for the possibility that some people aren't going to like what one has to say. Often when the politics angle comes up with Notepad++, people will say "it's his software project, he has the right to put in political messages if he wants" as if that somehow compels people to be ok with the political messages. The author certainly has the right to use Notepad++ as a platform for his political opinions, and I would never dream of saying otherwise. I don't want him to go to jail, or get fired by his employer, or anything like that. But I similarly have the right to decide that I don't want to see his political opinions and use another piece of software. You pick up both ends of the stick, as the old saying says.
On their blog I guess? Not in my text editor, that's for sure. I'm busy trying to get work done; I neither have time for nor want to hear about the author's opinions on current events.
Imagine the result if everybody took to this mindset. Look at everything that's on your desk right now, and what percent of it was made in e.g. China. Imagine if they decided to just start jamming political slogans onto everything. Or for something closer to home, surgeons and anesthesiologists are largely conservative. [1] Imagine if they started signaling their politics. Many people, ironically often those most predisposed to try to make their own political views highly visible, do a poor job of tolerating the views of others. This sort of behavior would just cause complete chaos and disorder and make everybody even more pissed off at each other than they already are.
And political signaling can also make you look bad even to the audience that might ideologically agree with you. For instance notepad++ takes a position on essentially every big controversial US geopolitical issue, but they are conspicuously silent on the Gaza issue. If they hadn't taken on any political positions, this isn't an issue. But when they take a position on every divisive issue, suddenly their not taking a position on one like this effectively is taking a position, but it's one that (for once) they don't want to say.
A few cosmetic names for patch versions and political banners on websites seems pretty mild. I was a constant user of Notepad++ for more than a decade (until moving my last computer to Linux a few months ago), and never had any idea that they did any of the messaging listed on their Wikipedia.
If anything, I could stand for most things to be just a bit more political than them. Most things are way more political than that.
What non-political things would you say are "way" more political than what they're doing? What I mean by non-political is that you kind of expect this sort of nonsense in the media or whatever, but not a text editor. They also have their schtick in the documentation, and at times have included it as 'easter eggs' in the program itself.
It's already made the software a target for hacking amongst other things. Taking positions that resonate with perhaps half the people in 15% of the world, and piss off a sizable chunk of people in the remaining 85% of the world is not a great idea. And, from my perspective, it's not just about self defense - but why do you even want to do that?
I hold some fringe views relative to many on here at least, and I don't make any secret of it either - but imagine by username was like 'IllegalImmigrantsAreIllegal' or something. It'd be like 'oh cool, I see you're 13.' I see this as something along the same lines. If the topic comes up, it comes up, but making it a part of your identity is childish and antagonistic.
I guess this is true in a professional context - you don't want your user's or company's data somehow becoming compromised because of your choice of text editor.
But, at the same time, that's exactly the sort of thinking that's killed off that feeling I'm sentimental for. As a free human being, I don't want to live in fear of expressing my political views; and as someone who wants to view the software I make as a form of art or expression, I don't want to be afraid to express my political views through my software either. Should a writer avoid being political for fear of becoming a target? For fear of their books or readers becoming a target?
There's another reason to avoid agitating massive numbers of people, beyond fear. It's just not a reasonable thing to do. Like what do you really accomplish? There was that one guy who's mind was somehow changed by a random slogan. Unfortunately, he changed to the other side after seeing their even catchier slogan (it had italics!) a few days later.
You're not changing people's minds and you're simultaneously agitating both many of those who disagree with you as well as plenty who are neutral or even agree with you, as seeing politics shoved somewhere it doesn't belong is something many people do not appreciate, regardless of how those politics may or may not align with their own.
I remember a few years back there was an update where it would actually type the political message when you created a new text document. I abandoned it ever since.
The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.
> The creator is also very selective about the type of politics he supports.
Why would someone express political messages without being selective? It’s understandable not wanting overt politics in your software, but this line is odd.
You must be new to Europe :)