[HN Gopher] PSPad: A freeware programmer's editor for Windows
___________________________________________________________________
PSPad: A freeware programmer's editor for Windows
Author : open-source-ux
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-04-20 07:05 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pspad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pspad.com)
| drej wrote:
| I remember using this editor in the very early 2000s, it was
| quite something back then. You could easily live edit files off
| of FTP. With PHP being all the rage, we were changing things
| pretty live :-)
|
| Good times.
| pc123 wrote:
| Does he really use ICQ still? :)
| https://www.pspad.com/en/author.htm
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I wish there were apps like PSPad and Notepad++ on MacOS. I
| really did not like any editor I used on this OS. Same with MS
| paint and the windows calculator.
| unicornporn wrote:
| And I still wish there was a text editor like BBEdit on
| Windows...
| stephenr wrote:
| For a text editor, what's wrong with any of TextMate, BBEdit,
| ubEthaEdit or CotEditor, to name but a few.
|
| Literally the only thing I've ever seen anyone in a
| professional setting use MS Paint for, is pasting the result of
| a screen dump, because apparently capturing to a file would
| have made it to convenient for the user.
|
| What exactly do you see missing from the macOS Calculator, that
| Windows has?
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > For a text editor, what's wrong with any of TextMate,
| BBEdit, ubEthaEdit or CotEditor, to name but a few.
|
| There is nothing wrong with those. I guess it is a matter of
| getting comfortable with the UI.
|
| > Literally the only thing I've ever seen anyone in a
| professional setting use MS Paint for, is pasting the result
| of a screen dump, because apparently capturing to a file
| would have made it to convenient for the user.
|
| I disagree. MS paint is amazingly useful in so many
| situations. And it is just simple enough that I can do
| everything without spending much time. Even the markup tools
| in macos's default editor are cryptic and hard to use. I have
| yet to figure out how which tiny inscrutable button crops the
| image.
|
| I downloaded paintbrush, but that is also way harder to use
| than paint. How do you resize the canvas? Why does drag and
| drop not work? Why are all the toolbars floating in the air?
|
| > What exactly do you see missing from the macOS Calculator,
| that Windows has?
|
| Literally everything! Macos calc is just one simple standard
| calculator with only 5-6 operations. On windows, the
| calculator has a button that converts it into various
| specialized versions. Like programmer, which has a nice bit-
| wise display also. There are many built-in unit conversions
| too.
| stephenr wrote:
| > There is nothing wrong with those. I guess it is a matter
| of getting comfortable with the UI.
|
| It's a text editor. The "UI" is a box you type in. What
| "getting used to"?
|
| > Even the markup tools in macos's default editor are
| cryptic and hard to use.
|
| If you say so.
|
| > On windows, the calculator has a button that converts it
| into various specialized versions. Like programmer, which
| has a nice bit-wise display also. There are many built-in
| unit conversions too.
|
| macOS built in calculator has had multiple modes and
| conversion tools (including e change rates using online
| lookup) for years. I don't know exactly how long it's had
| those features, but it's since the early days of Mac OS X
| at least.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| You can try SciTE, a cross-platform Scintilla-based editor
| (similar to Notepad++).
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| It looks good but it is a [?]3699 ($49) purchase! I usually
| don't hesitate to pay for the software I use, but this is too
| high a price for a text editor. I will see if there is a way
| to demo it. Thanks for the suggestion.
| [deleted]
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Oh, didn't know only a commercial macOS version exists.
|
| Edit: Not sure about tooling ecosystem in macOS, but IMO it
| isn't worth that much.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| PSPad has been my main text editor (not IDE) for almost 20 years
| now. Such a great piece of software.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| godaaaaaamn.
|
| This brings so many memories back.
|
| I'm donating to this project right now. as a guy learning to code
| from a poor country in 2006, this piece of software was super
| useful.
|
| My deepest thanks to the project founders <3
| ponyous wrote:
| Huh, blast from the past! It's been just a bit over 10 years
| since I donated to PSPad. My first editor when I got into
| programming as a kid.
|
| Directly edit on FTP hosts was one of my favourite features. I
| would edit php websites directly... Until I lost absolutely
| everything one day and soon after switched the editor.
| drKarl wrote:
| For anyone who loves Vim but also the extensibility of Visual
| Studio Code I suggest you take a look to Onivim 2
| https://www.onivim.io/
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a user of Onivim 2 but I'm in no way affiliated
| with the author.
| dalaidunc wrote:
| How is this better than just using VS Code with the vim
| extension?
| bantunes wrote:
| Unrelated, but hope someone here knows: what was the name for
| Microsoft's design language around 2002? Example for Frontpage
| https://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/website/appdb/b7...
|
| Looking for any info on its principles, or anything really.
| recentdarkness wrote:
| What do you mean by 'design language'? It was a WYSIWYG (What
| You See Is What You Get) editor, at least as far as I know.
|
| What 'design language' are you speaking off? It was supposed to
| be HTML in the end (well whatever that meant in those editors
| :D)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Examples: Microsoft's current design language is called
| Fluent Design. Google's is called Material Design, and
| Apple's... idk, their old one was Aqua and their current one
| is referred to as Cupertino I believe?
|
| Not sure if they even gave names to designs back then though,
| I believe it only became a thing during a design transition
| era some time ago (moving away from 'skeuomorphic' to 'flat
| design').
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, XP, etc. There wasn't
| a cohesive design language it was just referred by the OS
| name. You had garish colorschemes (remember hot dog
| stand?... yeah) and lots of silly things. Win32 programming
| back then was barely one step above pushing pixels on a
| canvas and it showed. VB and OLE, then COM started to
| standardize prebuilt components like dialogs and such that
| could be shared and used between apps but it was still a
| wild west of design. Into the 90s it got worse as Windows
| 98 gave more control over rendering to apps and we had
| things like Winamp skins that looked like a modern stereo,
| or a (thankfully) brief period where non-square windows
| with ovals, curves, and all kinds of junk were in vogue
| (track down an old copy of Bryce 3D if you want to see
| something really wild). It's an era of computing that's
| probably best left forgotten. :)
| 1_player wrote:
| I couldn't find much about it. I was learning to program MFC at
| the time, and just before Windows XP appeared Microsoft started
| experimenting with that flat buttons style, which I really
| wanted to adopt my apps.
|
| I don't think it was an actual design change from Microsoft,
| just some transitional look-and-feel they adopted which sits
| between Office 2000 with the classic Windows 95+ look, and
| Office 2003 inheriting the Fisher-Price oversatured cartoony
| look of Windows XP.
|
| https://bcgsoft.com/featuretour/tour163.htm
| tralarpa wrote:
| > flat buttons style, which I really wanted to adopt my apps
|
| Everybody wanted them :) 2000 or 2001, right? It was
| TBSTYLE_FLAT.
| nereye wrote:
| There is a snippet linked to from Wikipedia's article on Office
| XP (see section on streamlined user interface):
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050930195959/http://download.m...
|
| The overall UI still uses the Command Bars concept (merging of
| menus and toolbars) first used in Office 97.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| I like that the screenshot you picked actually shows FrontPage
| running under Wine/CrossOver, most likely on Linux + KDE
| (judging by the title bars).
|
| It speaks to how successful Wine is that this is easily
| confused with a native screenshot.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The icons and color scheme remind me of Office 2000.
| pantulis wrote:
| My first PHP code was written on PSPad. I didn't love it but I
| also didn't hate it and it worked. It's really nice to know that
| it's still going on.
| Arkanosis wrote:
| PSPad is probably the editor in which I've written most of my
| code as I was learning programming on my own (mostly PHP on
| Windows XP, old times...). Before that, I had used Notepad (yes,
| I did!), Notepad2 and Notepad++, but PSPad had so many features,
| so well integrated together that I used it almost exclusively.
|
| At some point, I had to switch because... you know... NetBSD. And
| it was a real pain to start working with Emacs. After years of
| practice, I'm finally used to it and wouldn't switch to anything
| else, but PSPad remains the friendliest and most easily
| discoverable powerful editor I've ever used.
|
| Thanks Jan, I might not be the programmer I am today without
| PSPad!
| anthk wrote:
| >NetBSD. And it was a real pain to start working with Emacs.
|
| You could use any other editor, both for GUI and CLI.
| Arkanosis wrote:
| Well, maybe. Didn't know that back then. I also used the
| default shell I was provided with (tcsh), if it helps
| understanding how lost I was.
|
| In retrospect, I'm probably a happier coder now because of
| that.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Looks cool though I've never heard this before and doesn't come
| up in editor recommendations. Also the
|
| >Link on the donation page can be published as reward for $50+
| donation for one year.
|
| seems to be working as there're many donations at exactly $50.
| vram22 wrote:
| Another text editor I had used for a few years, and liked, many
| years ago, was PFE - Programmer's File Editor.
|
| It was lightweight, fast, and could edit large files (for the
| time) easily.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer's_File_Editor
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| just like that vscode died
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Searched for "LSP" and "Language Server Protocol" and did not
| find any mentions.
|
| Unfortunately, I think the programming languages are getting too
| complex for an editor to try to maintain smart browsing, smart
| formatting, code completion, etc. Language Server Protocol allows
| this language work to be done once by people who are generally
| actively tracking the language.
|
| I think in 2021, a programmer's editor without Language Server
| Protocol support is hopelessly hampered.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| I for one am happy that PSPad takes less than half a second to
| launch and has a memory footprint of less than 10MB. If I
| wanted a fancy IDE with perfect syntax highlighting, I wouldn't
| be using PSPad. I have other tools for that. There's a space
| for editors that are more complex than Notepad and less complex
| than your average IDE, and PSPad fits right into that space.
| TeddyDD wrote:
| My editor supports LSP, takes 400 ms to load and uses less
| than 1mb of memory (300mb+ when LSP is active) -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Pelic4n wrote:
| Let me tell you about my knives:
|
| -A swiss army knife that I always carry, for small fixes,
| opening packages & bottles (the scissors are amazing).
|
| -A small foldable knife for slightly heavier duty or eating on
| the go.
|
| -A bigger foldable knife for outdoors, camping, ang general
| purpose work.
|
| -A rescue knife I keep in an emergency kit, with cord cutter
| and glass breaker.
|
| -A huge chef knife for general cooking.
|
| -A small cooking knife for cutting veggies precisely.
|
| -A small fixed-blade outdoor knife with scandinavian grind,
| solid, easy to sharpen, and very precise for things such as
| wood carving.
|
| -A bigger outdoor knife in stainless steel.
|
| -A relatively cheap, thick and huge carbon steel survival
| knife, which is extremely though but require taking care as to
| not rust.
|
| -A less cheap huge carbon survival knife because I like toys
| after all.
|
| -A little hobby knife for crafts and very precise work.
|
| All of these tools do the same basic thing (cutting), yet aside
| from that and being made in some kind of steel (ceramic knives
| are bad), all of them have no common attributes, and they are
| not appropriate for the same kind of work.
|
| And cutting is much, much simpler than writing code :)
|
| Thanks for reading my blog.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| I am more of an axe guy myself, though I reckon I rarely use
| them for cooking :)
| Pelic4n wrote:
| Oh yes, my favorite tool by far is actually a small
| hatchet. You can do almost every life-or-death things a
| knife do with one. Properly sharpened, the head absolutely
| can be used for roughly cutting veggies and shaving very
| thin timber from logs.
| dw-im-here wrote:
| Do you use a different computer for each editing task too?
| Pelic4n wrote:
| That's a sophism, sorry.
| imiric wrote:
| My experience with LSP (gopls specifically) in Emacs has been
| abysmal. It makes navigation even slower, opening files
| sometimes takes a second or two, but the worst issue is
| frequent crashing. lsp-mode with gopls is the only plugin I've
| used that crashes Emacs altogether. I've never lost much work
| thanks to autosave, but to say it was annoying is an
| understatement. Since I disabled both a few weeks ago, crashes
| stopped entirely.
|
| I probably should open an issue about it, but with the
| complexity of the entire stack I'm not sure what component is
| responsible, and frankly didn't have time to dig into it.
|
| So I'm glad that simple editors still exist that don't have LSP
| integration. There's a lot that can be accomplished with plain
| old ctags and grep.
| tapland wrote:
| Landing in a mainframe team a few years ago most devs swore by
| pspad.
|
| It's a nice piece of software, built in ftp support and can push
| new versions on save (combined with VMS style versioning).
| desktopninja wrote:
| Old but not obsolete.
| Nursie wrote:
| That's a name I haven't heard in many a year! Completely forgot
| it existed.
|
| I used to use this extensively about 15 years ago I think, as it
| was a very capable free editor. It was one of my go-to installs
| on windows.
|
| Now ... I don't use windows for much more than gaming.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Wow, I'd totally forgotten about PSPad... it used to be my editor
| of choice back in the XP days. These days I use Notepad++
| (doesn't everyone on Windows?).
|
| I think PSPad could benefit from new screenshots on its website,
| even though it's clearly still being actively updated, the
| screenshots make it look like it stagnated 10 years ago.
| maccard wrote:
| > These days I use Notepad++ (doesn't everyone on Windows?).
|
| I did 10 years ago, but I'm now using vscode (with a stint of
| sublime in the meantime!)
| Jonnax wrote:
| Sublime is what I moved from Notepad++ from. It has good
| extensions and is very fast.
|
| These days I use Visual Studio Code. It's separate to Visual
| Studio. Code is open source and runs on Linux and OSX as well.
|
| There's a ton of extensions and it's super flexible.
| JediPig wrote:
| ST4 is about to be released. The LSP plugin in ST4 brings it
| to the level of VSCode.
|
| I find this good news, mainly, i hate electron apps. ST4
| speed is legendary.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Technically vscscode isn't open source completely, it has
| many proprietary features.
| dagw wrote:
| Which features are closed source? I thought the only
| difference the source on GitHub and the binary you download
| from Microsoft was branding and configuration.
| oaiey wrote:
| Some of the extensions .. C# Debugger, Remote Server on
| WSL, SSH, Docker, whatever, Liveshare
|
| The modern magic stuff. but the core editor is like you
| described.
|
| Oh, and the market place itself.
| jhgb wrote:
| Apparently the official C++ extension is not licensed to
| run in Codium either...although technically it seems to
| work in Codium just fine. Don't ask how I know. ;)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also C++ language server, Python language server...
|
| Which is kind of annoying to me, because the whole value
| proposition of VS Code to me is that it drives language
| sever development, which lets me use Emacs instead of VS
| Code :).
|
| Fortunately, Clang can cross-compile for Windows while
| pretending to be MSVC, so I figured out how to make
| clangd work with MSVC-specific codebases, and I'm good
| for now.
| oaiey wrote:
| I think they are factoring some core capabilities of
| Visual studio into language servers and vscode gets a
| subset. Do they are protecting big VisualStudio.
| drKarl wrote:
| For a version of VSCode without the telemetry you can use
| VSCodium
| poisonborz wrote:
| > These days I use Notepad++ (doesn't everyone on Windows?)
|
| In terms of souped up text editor, the exact transition that
| "everyone" made since:
|
| Notepad++ > Sublime Text > Atom > VSCode
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If by "everyone" you mean "developers _when doing development
| work_ ".
|
| I work in a Windows shop these days, and I see Notepad++ used
| by everyone - developers and managers alike - for poking
| around various configuration and log files.
| drKarl wrote:
| For small edits, look at logs, scratchpad, open JSON or XML
| files Notepad++ > UltraEdit > Sublime Text
|
| For FrontEnd development Atom is nice but bloated > VSCode
| (arguably > Vim)
|
| For Java development Eclipse (or variants like RAD, STS) >
| IntelliJ Idea
|
| for other languages your mileage may vary...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You're not wrong; my only regret there is Atom, which never
| got the performance right when I used it.
|
| VS Code is not great in performance compared to ST either,
| but it does more and it's got a much bigger ecosystem and
| developer activities.
|
| ST feels more like a black box, irregular updates, vague
| provenance, etc. It works, and it worked really well for me
| back when (in the days when Javascript didn't have proper
| modules, documentation or types, think early days of NodeJS /
| NPM, Bower, BackboneJS, etc). But nowadays I'm not sure if
| it's keeping up with VS Code or IDE's. I'm mainly using
| intellij at the moment, but it's slow in its critical path -
| editing code (the main reason from moving away from it in the
| first place). An editor should NEVER lag or block when the
| user is typing. ST did this Right. Notepad++ probably does as
| well.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Sublime is still the most _performant_ text editor I use.
| Its plugin ecosystem is not particularly healthy, but LSP
| helps bridge the gap with more advanced code editing tools.
| I mostly use it for quick edits, configuration files, etc.
| Sometimes I just want a break from Neovim I guess.
|
| I don't regret buying Sublime at all, but I do feel like
| some potential was wasted there.
| kreeben wrote:
| For me, ST is still the only editor in the world that
| works with really, really large files.
| madhato wrote:
| I went from Metapad > e - Text Editor > Sublime Text. Did
| anyone else use e? I still haven't seen another text editor
| that handled the undo buffer as well. The buffer had
| branching and a gui to view the edits and switch branches.
|
| It also saved your undo buffer on close so you could still
| undo next time you opened a file.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| One of the good things about Windows is the backwards compat.
|
| I know this particular code has been updated in 2021, sure, but
| in general, you can take binary from early 2000s and it will run
| on Windows 10 most likely. (OK, games and rich "multimedia CD-
| ROMs" from that era have problems, but it holds in general.)
|
| In linux, it kinda holds, because everything is open-source
| anyway, but binaries in general are not compatible.
|
| In macOS, it _really really_ doesn 't hold, Apple likes to move
| fast-break things. They changed just the architecture like 4
| times, and macOS and OS9 are entirely different. (They did things
| like Rosetta 1, Rosetta 2, Classic, Carbon, but they never
| maintain them for long.)
|
| Windows is rock solid in this way. Windows 10 still has 32-bit
| version, and it can still run MS-DOS code apparently. (Although
| 64-bit Windows apparently cannot.)
| type0 wrote:
| And Wine is better than Windows 10 for the use cases you are
| describing.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Just because you can doesn't mean you should run something that
| old. I would not want to run a 21 year old native application
| written in C or C++ from a different era of security
| consciousness on any modern machine. Certainly not anything
| connected to the internet--remember that was the hey-day of
| massive worms that crippled entire networks of machines. If the
| source hasn't been touched in decades, treat it like an antique
| and keep it in a museum of a virtual machine.
| passivate wrote:
| Our industry (biotech) relies heavily on Windows and
| specifically Windows backwards compat. Heck just this last
| month we put in some used analytical equipment that came with
| software that was first released on XP. It runs like a champ
| on W10-32bit. The software we use is often crazy expensive -
| when you add in the compliance addons, it routinely exceeds
| USD 10K. I can tell you unequivocally that Windows' backwards
| compat has saved our company tens of thousands of dollars.
|
| Software isn't magic, security isn't magic either. You can
| employ physical protections (air-gap) and hardware/software
| (firewall, etc) protections to contain the threat. All
| software has the potential to be vulnerable, and so a
| sysadmin would be wise to treat them equally - new or old.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like UNIX?
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| Not everything is internet connected.
|
| http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/ -> Regex Coach is a very
| impressive Windows application I've used for debugging
| regexes.
|
| > The program hasn't changed since 2008 and this page is also
| essentially still the same. But I can confirm that in
| September 2019 the program still works fine for me on Windows
| 10.
|
| There are many apps like this one and even older apps. Some
| can be from the early 90's or even late 80's.
|
| The equivalent MacOS app would have been unusable, I imagine,
| as well as many Linux desktop apps. Especially those before
| the Great ELF Transition (1996?) as well as those before the
| Great ABI Breakage (I don't remember the year, it was a major
| glib change, maybe in 2005?).
| romwell wrote:
| You are aware that not _all_ applications listen to the
| Internet, or need to, right?
|
| My audio editor (GoldWave) is from 2000. It works fine. I
| can't even think about what "security consciousness" would be
| on a software that runs locally and doesn't have (or need)
| accounts.
|
| Text editors fall into the same category.
| sp0rk wrote:
| If you load outside data into the program, it has the
| potential to be exploited. There is no shortage of exploits
| for editors, media players, etc. that only require the
| victim to open a specially crafted file.
| passivate wrote:
| Well, if you're facing a targeted attack like that, there
| is little you can do anyway. They will survey the
| hardware/software you use and find/purchase a
| vulnerability to exploit. Its always wise to treat any
| software (new or old) with caution.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| What makes you think exploit crafters are waiting around
| for you to load their random JPG into an old version of
| Paint Shop Pro?
|
| It's not like these exploits are one-size-fits-all
| sp0rk wrote:
| Waiting for victims to run your malware is not an active
| process. It requires no resources on the attacker's part
| beyond maintaining a server.
|
| Maybe it will connect to a server that has been dead for
| five years or maybe it's pointing towards a domain name
| that the attacker still maintains. Maybe instead of a
| trojan, it's a cryptolocker or old school destructive
| malware. I don't know why anybody would want to gamble
| with something like this.
|
| Also, some of the exploits _are_ one-size-fits-all
| because they target the underlying libraries that the
| software is using.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Yes but the mechanics of exploit crafting aren't generic
| at the slightest. Everything is bespoke. Which means that
| for the random bystander the probability that your
| specific-combination-of-old-software-and-data being
| exploited is extremely low.
|
| If you've reason to be paranoid, sure. And if you're
| trolling old warez archives with software contemporary to
| the time, sure. But otherwise? The odds are too low and
| the possibility space too high for anyone to bother
| romwell wrote:
| >Waiting for victims to run your malware is not an active
| process.
|
| Except that's not what we are talking about. The old
| piece of software here is _known_ to _not_ be malware.
|
| >I don't know why anybody would want to gamble with
| something like this.
|
| _Everything_ you do in life is a gamble. _Everything_ is
| a risk.
|
| And the risk of opening an external file in a common
| format that just _happens_ to have a carefully crafted
| exploit for extremely uncommon, outdated software that
| you _happen_ to use to open it is so, so, low, that the
| risk of the computer _exploding in your face_ on power-up
| becomes significant compared to that.
|
| Yet people aren't deterred from booting up their machines
| just because there was this laptop one time that did
| explode.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It's all fun and games until a rootkit finds a vulnerable
| executable to elevate privileges and really get going...
| just one mixed up bound check, missing end of string, etc
| in 20 year old code and oops!
|
| Don't run any of those old apps as an admin at the very
| least.
| romwell wrote:
| If the said rootkit is already running on my machine, I
| probably have larger things to worry about than a
| possible vulnerability in 20-year-old software.
|
| And yeah, there is very rarely a need to run apps as
| admin anyway.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Is this really people's attitude? Those of us actually around
| at that time will remember it was not that bad.
|
| Old apps of all stripes did not generally require internet
| (or even network) access -- a lesson we could learn from
| today.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I'm using Paint Shop Pro 7 as my main image editor[0], it has
| the best UX of any image editor i've used, was released 21
| years ago and i have zero concerns about its security - not
| because i expect it to be secure (chances are it is using,
| e.g., a jpeg library with security bugs) but because there
| isn't any use case where that would matter.
|
| Similarly i use Delphi 2 and C++ Builder (both around 25
| years old) now and them for making small utilities (e.g. [1]
| and [2]) - again no internet connection nor any reason to
| worry about their security. Also i use Adobe PageMill (21
| years old too) as a WYSIWYG word editor and simple site
| editor (like the sites i linked to) - that one can connect to
| the internet to upload stuff, but i use a separate (and under
| development) client for this.
|
| Also aside the possibility for security issues there is also
| the probability for you to face them: after all just because
| a program has an issue it doesn't mean you'll encounter it -
| if anything, nobody is going to spend any time targeting such
| old software.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/wakdMXK.jpg (random shot i took some
| time ago)
|
| [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/pastepreview/
|
| [2] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/winless/
| 51Cards wrote:
| Paint Shop Pro 9 user here, and I dread the day it no
| longer works for me.
| teh_klev wrote:
| > I'm using Paint Shop Pro 7
|
| Same here, and TextPad from the same era still works (I
| occasionally try the version in my download archive saved
| back around 2001).
| open-source-ux wrote:
| TextPad is still being updated and available for sale
| (the latest release was on 11 April 2021). It's even
| older than PSPad. Wikipedia says it was first released in
| 1992, that's almost 30 years ago.
| (https://www.textpad.com/products/textpad/features)
|
| I'm impressed by the longevity of both PSPad and TextPad
| and it's refreshing to encounter fast, native, nimble
| desktop programs.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| On Linux, so long as you have the older versions of any of the
| app's dependencies pretty much anything will still run. Getting
| all the right dependencies set up (and hopefully not opening
| yourself up to numerous security vulnerabilities as a result)
| is the hard part.
| noja wrote:
| Well yeah of course. But on Windows you don't need to do any
| of that. I think that was GP's point.
| levosmetalo wrote:
| You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is
| somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to
| package almost all dependencies with the application, while
| on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part
| of the distribution.
| [deleted]
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| No. On Linux, the only stable ABI is the kernel. On
| Windows, the stable ABI and API includes many platform
| components outside of the kernel (in fact, the syscall
| interface itself is undocumented and NOT backward
| compatible on Windows). The Windows platform APIs are
| very expansive and cover a lot of territory that on Linux
| is covered by non-ABI-stable dependencies.
| passivate wrote:
| How is it not better for the end user?
| aruggirello wrote:
| You can also use containers for that.
|
| I'm running Phatch under Ubuntu 12.04 via LXD on an Ubuntu
| 20.04 machine (which was maybe 14.04 or 16.04 when I first
| set it up to do some batch image processing), and it's
| working fine.
| whalesalad wrote:
| It is a double-edged sword. I believe the primary reason
| Windows has so many 'issues' in general is the sheer amount of
| hardware and ancient software that is supported. Keeping the
| surface area small is easier to maintain, more secure (less
| attack vectors), etc...
|
| I am not saying one approach is better than the other - but
| when it comes to Apple it makes a lot of sense that they did
| what the did considering they have full control over their
| entire stack top to bottom. That being said, they did extend
| Carbon compat for a really really long time. AFAIK Photoshop
| was still Carbon for a long time after the switch to x86.
| blinkingled wrote:
| > believe the primary reason Windows has so many 'issues' in
| general is the sheer amount of hardware and ancient software
| that is supported
|
| The hardware part in the old days maybe - they have solved
| that problem. I am not sure beyond people's opinions there
| are any real issues directly attributable to backwards s/w
| compatibility.
| anthk wrote:
| >and it can still run MS-DOS code apparently.
|
| Use ReactOS NTVDM, it's far more compatible. Just copy the DLL
| in the game folder and voila.
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