That’s a particularly buried lede

the demise of Perl

You imply this is a bad thing

Which one’s in the Linux kernel?

My main use is skipping the blank page problem when writing a new suite of tests—which after about 10 mins of refactoring are often a good starting point

Yeah IIRC you’re right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.

It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I’m not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too

Oh I didn’t actually realise that, I thought they’d just gone full Adobe with office 365

Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!

I’m curious about the plugins as obviously I’m not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what’s special about the ones you listed?

Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don’t they? Or does this not do what I think?

Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings

I just don’t get the love for notepad++

I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it’s windows only. Every editor I’ve used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO

Time for another court to finally set the precedent the EULAs and Terms & Conditions are bullshit because it’s expected that no one will read them, and therefore no one has actually agreed to anything

And so the bloodline of windows write is extinguished

This is kinda sad that if you want to do even basic word processing with Microsoft software, your only option now is an ongoing subscription to do so.

Japanese courts have a 99% conviction rate or something. Saying you’ve not lost in a Japanese court is like saying 99% of the time you’ve been to the airport, you got on a plane.

That’s the case for most people

This is getting to the point where it goes to court and rightfully, Nintendo should get slapped and a new bleem-like precedent is set.

I remember thinking twitter was bad before he took over

It’s now a complete shadow of what it was even just a couple of years ago. Just a quarter of its value seems generous

So the party that’s ostensibly supposed to be pro business, sides with shitty anti-business conmen?

It’s hard to see how their guiding ideology isn’t just “be shitty and make things worse” now

One thing you consider is concurrency, it’s always good to have headroom if you can.

It’s kinda nice to not have the internet speeds of every device on your network grind to a halt just because you’re downloading something on your computer, for example. Particularly if you live with anyone else using the connection too

Flat design may be less distracting to you but that also means it’s less clear, because there are fewer obvious demarcation.

I despise flat design, it’s downright awful design, and done for looks rather than functionality.

to you

Flat design dominates for a reason—the less visually busy something is, the easier it is for users to wrap their heads around it. This gets proven again and again in user studies, the more busy and dense you make things, the more users miss stuff and get lost.

People’s opinions on the ribbon specifically are obviously all subjective, but I would say the less distracting design would be the one done less for looks, rather it’s a pretty utilitarian design if you pick it apart. This is an interface for productivity tools, and as such the interface should get out of your way until you need it—the ribbon just does that better IMO.

Microsoft also did this to obfuscate features, which is pretty apparent when you consider new users used to “discover” features via the menu system. I supported Office for MS in the early days, and this was a huge thing at the time. It was discussed heavily when training on new versions.

Why on earth would Microsoft want to obfuscate features? There’s no way that motivation would ever make sense.

IIRC one of the main reasons Microsoft introduced the ribbon was that grouping functionality contextually helped users discover features, because people kept requesting features that already existed, but they just couldn’t find. I remember there being a blog on the Microsoft developer site about the making of it that went into this.

Weirdly as someone who has used both styles heavily, I’d say the ribbon is more practical than the old toolbars. There’s more contextual grouping and more functional given the tabs and search, plus the modern flat design is less distracting, which is what I’d want from a productivity application. Also for me two rows of toolbars & a menu is about the same height as the ribbon anyway, and you can collapse the ribbon if you want to use the space

Now now, AJ may not know everything, but he’ll learn

Equating Linux enthusiasts to offal is a bold move on this site

Who let you out of hell?