Microsoft

Notepad, of all things, is getting major updates in Windows 11.

Apparently windows has a first-party app to remap your keyboard keys (among other power-usery stuff):

Caps lock esc here I come!

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I’ve been using this for years. I didn’t realize people didn’t know.
Do people also need to know about Mouse without Borders?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35460

Last time I actively looked (years ago) it seemed like you had to be installing shadiness or fucking around in the registry, so I never bothered.

I specifically use this at work and at home for the fancyZones part of the app. Windows natively splits horizontal screens fine, but isn’t able to split a vertical screen in half in a useable way automatically. FancyZones lets me delineate a 50/50 (or any custom split layout) on my vertical screens so I can have them automatically snap.

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I’ll echo a “oh man I 've been using these tools for years and they’re awesome, I thought everyone knew about them?”

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Microsoft is trying to fast-track Windows 11 adoption.

If you already have W10, don’t worry–it won’t reach EOL for at least another two years.

Even if they kept both available, why would anyone want Windows 10? Is it really worth having a computer running older software just to avoid some minor UI changes?

I’ve run into a lot of people adamant that 11, 10, and even 8 are horrible versions and devolve into long rants about reletively minor things.

That said, I did have a friend who was super happy when I showed her how to de-center the Win 11 taskbar, which is an oddly common complaint.

ETA: I think it’s a lot of people who haven’t learned how to computer, they’ve just learned “this one exact interface for the five things I need to do”. It’s like someone in a video game, unable to walk off the very narrow path the devs created for them. They learned this, and refuse to move even a step further with it.

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Even if you couldn’t move it, and even if Windows 10 is technically still supported, that still makes no sense. Why use a computer with outdated, older, software that’s worse in all the ways you can’t see just to move an icon a few inches to the left?

Don’t be that person who makes poor decisions simply out of resistance to change.

Oh, I’m not justifying, just explaining. I’m on your side on this. I find it a little irresponsible not to update, myself.

I’m just thinking about this topic right now because I came across this post earlier today.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/BackportsAreHard

You know what’s easier than backporting to keep all the old versions functioning? Telling those people using the old version to update to the newest one. As long as the updates are free and the new version has the same hardware compatibility, there’s nothing they have a right to complain about.

Backports I at least vaguely understand because there’s a lot of stuff where it’ll break from one version to the next; Java’s notorious for this. It should be a last-resort kind of thing as a stop-gap though, not an expected thing.

Then again, think about how long the move from Python 2 to Python 3 took.

That’s the point, though. It didn’t have to. They were too conservative and could have forced the issue a lot more quickly than they did.

UPDATE:

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