Small Things Matter

I was running Windows 10 for, well, close to 10 years. Since it's original release in 2015 almost till the end of 2024 when I had the motherboard in the 2018 MacBook replaced. It was the original install which then survived two Lenovo laptops and was then cloned to the MacBook. Unlike the older Windows releases (the unfamous Vista and earlier), Windows 10 has never suffered from the problem of getting slower with use. And it was super stable.

The motherboard replacement triggered me however to perform a clean install of Windows 11, prompted mostly by the Windows 10 line nearing its end of life, meaning mostly the end of support and security patches.

There was the initial disappointment of not being able to move the taskbar to a vertical position (most monitors today are wide, so it really really makes sense to have the taskbar on the side), but other hat that Windows 11 runs just fine. Overall cleaner here and there but generally the experience has been as great as can be.

There are small improvements in many system behaviors and the included apps. One that I really love is the Notepad which has a couple of things nobody writes home about in the age of AI. But I still love them.

One is - the Notepad application now has tabs. Meaning I can have multiple notes opened in one window, same style as multiple web pages on different tabs in a web browser. That helps keeping the whole desktop clean, even when I have multiple windows opened on a large monitor. 

The second is the persistence of the Notepad's contents. No need to use the pesky "Save" option anymore. Type something in, close the window, shut down the computer, boot up again, open Notepad, the text is there. Isn't it beautiful?

The whole concept of "Save" (Yes/No/Cancel) was dumb from the very beginning. It was one of the most profound features of any computer application driven purely by how the underlying technology works (edit in memory, save to disk) while ignoring the millennia of human civilization since the invention of writing. I remember in the early days of personal computing people losing hours of work after moving from typewriters to word processors and forgetting to "save".

The 2025 Notepad finally ends this 40-year era (I guess it started around 1985....). Now the things you type on a computer stay on the computer. Small things matter. Ah... and BTW there is no need to NAME a FILE when you type in some adhoc notes.