Posted by andreynering 5 hours ago
20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (804 points, 516 comments)
20260210 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
> "An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad"
Other recent Notepad issues:
20260207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927098 Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs? (187 points, 284 comments)
20260127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)
Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
It also signals the death knell for Windows native apps. Microsoft can't make them anymore. It won't be long until even Excel is a Electron sloplication.
20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials (666 points, 278 comments)
> the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally
Somehow in this timeline AI can only be used to make things worse and sloppier
step 2: omg there's demand for features
step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad
step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem
I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat.
My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example.
they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad.
It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit.
Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.
Plus this Markdown preview functionality just caused Notepad to have a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in it.
They can add as much AI and Markdown as they want to Wordpad as far as I'm concerned. Just leave my dumb featureless utility alone.
For a UI I’ve been using VSCode. It is quite quick when you disable all extensions and most settings.
> eMacs
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'.
(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!)
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.
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.
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.
Theyre also very political and giving them access to my machine now feels even more risky.
A key benefit of it is that it's not an electron app. It's an old C++ app that's still just chuggin' along.
20260202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46851548 Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors (917 points, 543 comments)
20260203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878338 Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown (384 points, 198 comments)
20250630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426049 High-Severity Vulnerability in Notepad++ (39 points, 14 comments)
20230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385920 Multiple Notepad++ Flaws Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Code (83 points, 39 comments)
20230830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37320304 Buffer Overflows in Notepad++ (68 points, 61 comments)
20230829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311068 Notepad++ v8.5.6 still vulnerable to possible arbitrary code execution (18 points, 3 comments)
20211209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499002 StrongPity variant hides behind Notepad++ installation (45 points, 28 comments)
20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395251 Notepad++ issues attacked by Chinese commenters (237 points, 110 comments)
20191030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400526 Notepad++ repository is being spammed after “Free Uyghur” release (82 points, 36 comments)
20190317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329330 Notepad++ drops code signing for its releases (496 points, 327 comments)
20170308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032 Notepad++ V 7.3.3 – Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ Issue (1101 points, 291 comments)
20150112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876823 Notepad ++ hacked for Je Suis Charlie comments(web archive link) (65 points, 74 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messag...
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.
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.
the moment software stops being neutral, it becomes a target
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?
as a program that tries to be used by others - stay in your lane, you are not an opinion cesspool, you are here to do work and let others do it too
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.
Interesting. This is not actually true anymore, even for the masses.
Nowadays everyone can just have their own tools made, "hand-tailored" with the features they want. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like everyday-software is now only a few sentences (and a python script) away.
FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...
Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter.
Welcome to 2026. You're late.
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++.
Are you moving the goalpost?
The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.
I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.
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.
But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?
>tkinter
so you missed the part where notepad starts instantly, doesn't choke on files larger than 25KB and uses native Win32 controls ?
What's next, in a few years we're rocking EDLIN when we need to operate on a text file safely?
edit.exe[1,2] actually. And it runs on Linux too! Linux had a real lack of good text editors.
This isn't bad at all given how most other software evolved in thr the intervening 30 years.
Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.
Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.
Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then.
Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.