Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings

Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings

6 years ago
Anonymous $CLwNLde341

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/notepad-gets-a-major-upgrade-now-does-unix-line-endings/

Notepad, the text editor that ships with Windows, is not a complicated application. For many, this is its major advantage—by having virtually no features, it cannot go wrong—but especially for software developers, it has often proven an annoyance.

That's because Notepad has traditionally only understood Windows line endings. Windows, Unix, and "classic" MacOS all use different conventions for indicating the end of a line of text. Windows does things correctly: it uses a pair of characters, the carriage return (CR) followed by the line feed (LF). Two characters are needed because they do different things: the CR moves the print head to the start of a line; the LF advances the paper by one line. Separating these is valuable, as it allows for effects such as underlining to be emulated: first print the text to be underlined, then issue a CR, and then print underscore characters.

Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings

May 9, 2018, 1:22am UTC
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/notepad-gets-a-major-upgrade-now-does-unix-line-endings/ >Notepad, the text editor that ships with Windows, is not a complicated application. For many, this is its major advantage—by having virtually no features, it cannot go wrong—but especially for software developers, it has often proven an annoyance. >That's because Notepad has traditionally only understood Windows line endings. Windows, Unix, and "classic" MacOS all use different conventions for indicating the end of a line of text. Windows does things correctly: it uses a pair of characters, the carriage return (CR) followed by the line feed (LF). Two characters are needed because they do different things: the CR moves the print head to the start of a line; the LF advances the paper by one line. Separating these is valuable, as it allows for effects such as underlining to be emulated: first print the text to be underlined, then issue a CR, and then print underscore characters.