Comments on: Software design rant – Notepad ++

By: AJG

AJG — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:18:13 +0000

Ah, that is a good point and I agree with you. Dialogs pertinent only to one tab/document probably shouldn’t modally block the entire application. My guess is that it’s not so much a design decision as much as just the easiest way to do it for them: One call to whatever the MessageBox function is versus creating a custom dialog, or widget, etc.

Regards.

By: hugo

hugo — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:39:04 +0000

Thanks for your comment.
You are right, “No” is the safe answer and generally Npp handles this well. But my main complaint is that dialog which is relevant to only one tab, prevents me to use any other tabs until i make a decision, be it easy or not.

By: AJG

AJG — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:54:45 +0000

I believe you are mistaken. I’m not completely certain because it’s possible that Notepad++ behaves differently, but, all other text editors I’ve used that have that feature (e.g. Visual Studio, gedit, etc.) follow this design:

The dialog offers two choices, only one of which is destructive — namely, “Yes.” Yes is destructive because you lose whatever unsaved changes you’ve made to the file (that is, if you’ve made any.)

“No,” however, is not destructive. It simply means, “keep my local changes in memory.” It does not mean that the file itself will be overwritten or modified in any way. So the changes that the “other application” made will not be lost. You get to have your cake and eat it.

Therefore, if you don’t want to lose any possible data, choose No, and manually inspect the changes to the file. Hope that helps.

Regards.

By: hugo

hugo — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:17:46 +0000

I love Notepad++ too, I wouldn’t use it otherwise. And the alert feature is useful too, just as I wrote.

My post is just about how some minor design choice be a major obstacle in some scenarios.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:50:01 +0000

Hey I love Notepad++ and I love this alert feature.
The feature you don’t like (or you don’t need) doesn’t mean that it’s useless for anyone else.

So why don’t you save this opinion for yourself, or better than that, use another editor since it’s not good enough for you.