So Microsoft recently decided that Notepad, the simplest text editor ever that has been a wrapper around a multiline edit control and a few common dialogs for basically ever, needed tabs. Because everything needs tabs now, I suppose. The measure of a complete program is no longer “it can send e-mail”, but “it has tabs”. Or something.
Not only does it have tabs now, but it remembers the contents of those tabs so it can display them again next time you start it. It was not good enough to remember the files to load them again, no, it caches their content.
This means that one use case for Notepad is made massively useless by this highly not-sought-after misfeature: Looking at secrets. It goes like this:
- Open a file that has a secret key in it or something.
- Use it.
- Close Notepad.
- Remove the removable storage that the file is on, or “lock” the encrypted volume, or whatever, so the key is isolated from the outside world again.
- Start Notepad again.
- Stare in horror at the secret key you thought was safe, but which Notepad copied to insecure local storage without asking.
- Frenziedly search for where that copy is
(
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad....\LocalState\TabState) and delete it. - Work out that the abomination now called Notepad has a settings window (via the gear menu on the right of the menu bar) and that you can disable the caching by setting it to open a new window on startup (this also deletes the cache) and even get rid of the tabs by setting it to open files in a new window.
Have a nice day.