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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
This post has content warnings for: fuck computers.

dosmeow
@dosmeow

Is NoteTab Light.

NoteTab Light is a basic text editor designed first and foremost to replace Notepad.exe. It is named because it has tabs, a novelty back in the day. I learned about it from watching The Screensavers on TechTV in the mid-2000s, and it has been my note taking program on Windows ever since.


The producers of this fine software have always sold a Standard and Pro version. You can buy these for $39.95, but I cannot imagine anybody ever having wanted the additional features.

Because it is at its core, Notepad, but with tabs to open multiple text files at once. It does more than that, and over the years I've had moments where some of its functions have been helpful, taking text files and auto wrapping them with paragraph tags for HTML and such.

NoteTab Light Setup Wizard The thing is, this program does what is is designed to do to such a degree that I just went and downloaded the latest version and installed it on Windows 10 for the sake of posting about it. NoteTab Light End User License Agreement (Version: June 2012) It is so complete, that the EULA was last updated more than a decade ago. NoteTab Light Components List It has its own "bloat" in the form of templates, and its clipbook system, plus, I'm sorry, a glossary of computer terms. I missed this, and I'm sorry I didn't take screenshots of that. (I'm on Linux and cannot use this perfect program, though it does mention that it works fine with WINE.) NoteTab Light End User License Agreement (Version: June 2012) The main interface looks like it would fit right in on Windows 95. The original copyright date says 1996 so I don't doubt it in the least. It has the usual things you would expect, file management, find/replace with regex support, some simple text transformations like making highlighting text all uppercase, word count, etc. Everything you could reasonably want. This is not a Microsoft Word replacement. This is a Microsoft Notepad replacement.

Even it is not immune to the creep of needing to do more. The optional clipbar component is a row of buttons along the bottom that bring up libraries, little commands with their own scripting language of course, to do some more elaborate work. These are absolutely ancient at this point.

Using a clipbar library to fill out an HTML template One library that a younger me appreciated was the HTML-CSS library. I used this to help learn HTML when I was 13 or so. Back then it did not have "CSS". The HTML template populated It's trying it's best to be relevant with its HTML5 doctype, but this output is trying to include a shim for HTML5 to be used in case your visitor is using Internet Explorer 6, the browser shipped with Windows XP at launch.

There's another library for Bootstrap 2.11. Bootstrap 2 came out in 2012.

You can yell about how wasteful these are, though if you look at the installer, you can see a fully bloated install is under 5 megabytes, with the core program being 2.6. These are more trying to make a relic relevant. Back when Notepad itself was often used to create web pages, these libraries were a lot more reasonable. Of course, even if you do install them, the program is happy to let you, the user, hide them entirely.

It's a program that's been so perfected however, that after I installed it on Windows 10, I took the same zip file with the installer, put it on a flash drive, and...

NoteTab Light Showing a list of Internet Acronyms now running on Windows 98

Installed it on a Pentium 3 machine running Windows 98. The same program will run just as well on recent hardware as well as something from the 90s. The latest version. It sounds absolutely absurd to imagine somebody compiling their code and spitting out a Windows 10 program and that same program being a Windows 98 program. But it shouldn't be! Because NoteTab is a Notepad.exe replacement! It's a minimal text editor! It edits text files. And you can edit text files on a Pentium or a rand new i7!

This program does not need to do anything more than it already does (and if anything, those cliplibraries don't need to be there) and so it doesn't! In fact, the latest release is from 2014, predating the release of Windows 10 entirely! It didn't need to be touched, and so it wasn't!

This is how I feel when I launch the program:

NoteTab Light Splash Screen stating Free your text with NoteTab!

(Okay, it did not have the ridiculous splash screen in the mid-2000s, but if you don't like this nice lady you can disable her from being displayed.)


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Because of things like this, I will never trust software updates ever again, and especially not automatic updates. "The computer always does exactly what you tell it to" this is a lie. The computer always does what someone else is telling it to do, and sometimes you're allowed to pretend you had a say in that

Because of things like this, I will never trust software updates ever again, and especially not automatic updates.

People get mad at us for always disabling Windows Update and auto-updates of everything else, but they don't understand that there has never been an update that fixes a problem, ever. It always does the exact opposite.

And yet I've had people argue that automatic updates are Good, Actually, which, maybe for the not tech savvy, but it just feels like consent means absolutely nothing these days. I just want to know that the update I'm about to install isn't going to break everything including my internet connection, to actually have a say in how I use the computer

Prompt+ on iOS also does voice follow! It does, however, also suck. I run it on an old iPad and if you leave it running for more than a few paragraphs it starts to get very slow.

Literally thought about this earlier today about website apps. Even the android forks are so fucked with features arbitrarily added or removed between phone manufacturers that when i got a new phone i found out the hard way that there was no innate music app, which my older phone from several years ago DID have. So i had to trawl the shitshow of a google play store for one that just did what it was supposed to without cramming ads down your throat for daring to not pay them for something that was standard for at least a fucking decade.

I wouldn't go so far as to say phones and tablets are toys, but my trust level plummets the second I have to leave the native apps for any sort of feature or functionality.

Broadly speaking though, I'm in full agreement. As a CorpInfra dinosaur, I especially struggle to beat it into the skulls of people that "as a service" means A) we don't own it, B) we cannot depend on it remaining this way, and C) we will continue to pay for it whether it works or not. Apps as a service work for things constantly in flux and expensive as hell to do on your own (think huge-ass databases or always-online services like e-mail) at scale, not for stuff that's just supposed to fucking work at this one fucking thing for-fucking-ever.

I feel like in addition to my actual day job, I have an obligation to try and advocate for finished software, better user experiences, and feature complete product roadmaps since I work in an XaaS company. At some point we have to say "this is done" and move on until and unless there is reason to go back and update it. Hell, it's why I'm prepared to yeet Windows off my home computer after being a loyal user since 3.1: I want an operating system for software, not a shell for apps and ads like 11 is.

Total argument is aces. Fuck apps, give me software, give me containers, give me ISOs, give me images. Let me give you money to buy the thing I need to accomplish the task, and then politely go away until and unless I need a new feature you've added or support for a newer operating system your old product doesn't work on for legitimate reasons (and not because you hard coded an OS check). If you're an XaaS vendor, don't shove arbitrary UI updates down my throat just because some VP wants to add a belt notch on their resume for an SVP promotion.

Just...ugh. Big mood.

My partner worked at the news desk at a very real and not youtube-vlogger-selfie-stick local television station for several years and was very occasionally pulled from her job to run the actual htg TelePrompTer for the actual tv newscasts and it consisted of furiously twiddling a little knob to manually scroll words across a mirror in front of a ludicrously expensive, fully robotic studio camera at a pace that was just fast enough for the anchors to read it but not too slow for them to lose their cadence. This is to say that even that shitty app is somehow more advanced than what they use in production at a station in a top 30 DMA. Cold comfort I'm sure.

I'm still unreasonably pissed off that a sublime text 3 "update" installed sublime text 4 on my machines along with a passive aggressive "LICENSE UPGRADE REQUIRED" message because enabling automatic updates is piracy apparently

immediately disable automatic updates or you're gonna get bitten again

i love MediaMonkey as music software but MMAv2 is a huge downgrade from MMAv1 and i have had to rebuild my database 3 times now from forgetting to disable automatic updates

On windows? Because on Android if you install something from apk, you don't get updates for it even if it's also available on Google play. The reason is because updates and auto-updating is handled by the app store, and you only get updates from Google play if you install through Google play. There are third party app stores, like F-Droid, that also check for and offer updates on things you install through them, but they can't install them automatically because Google only wants Google play to be able to do that.

on android. yes, that was my impression as well, I was certain I had done that in the past

and then i installed the apk directly and got hit with automatic updates and association

figured I must have clicked update as a fluke

uninstalled, reinstalled again

actively showing as available in the google play updates list

in reply to @dosmeow's post:

It's probably not proper, but I've just gotten in the habit of using Visual Studio Code as my notepad/story writing program.
Like, yeah, no autocorrect and technically not for it, but when I look around every once in a while for something that functions identical to notepad but is darkmode and like...not quite as miserable to use, (SINGLE STEP UNDO, WTF) I get nothing good.

I'm using Geany for my own writing as it all gets published in HTML format anyway and it's nice to have the syntax highlighting. Whenever I'm done I open the file in a browser and copy/paste it elsewhere to do the spellcheck so it's not catching "href" and things, but even then I really like having a notepad program for the notes and a heavier program for writing/coding and just having both windows up simultaneously instead of tab-flipping