We need to talkt about the "modified file" bug
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Notepad++ is a really useful tool for… everything. But the last few months I was travelling for my consulting job and literally everyone in corporate is laughing at Notepad++. It’s literally useless when you have multiple tabs open and one of the files was modified.
- “Hey, one file of your 500 tabs was modified, wanna see it?”
- “No”
- “Ok but I will switch to this tab anyway because I don’t know how to write sane code”
Maybe you want to revisit computer science 101 and implement that only currently selected tabs trigger that message? I can donate 5 dollars for your 40 seconds to fix that bug :^)
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Notepad++ offers you a few modes for File Status auto-detection:
- Disabled.
- Enabled. Which is what you describe.
- Enabled and update silently. Which is my default.
For every mode some user can come with some flavor of your “hey” comments:
Disabled - “hey I just checked out my latest git repo and then overwrote by mistake 5 files with old versions”.
Enabled - “hey, see your example above”.
Update silently - “hey I just checked out my latest git repo and lost 4 hours work for unsaved file”.
Your proposed notify on tab switch mode = “hey I checked out my latest git repo and 2 hours later I still get a modified warning when I switch between my 500 open tabs”.All of these comments are correct in the right context. And all of them are also wrong. Notepad++ gives plenty of choices and a user has a responsibility for his choices.
Forgive me for quoting myself from another ticket: Try to be a little less egocentric and realize that Notepad++ needs to balance different requirements of thousands of usage patterns.
So we don’t need to talk about the non-bug you describe. But you may politely offer a well thought improvement to Notepad++. But also expect some push back from other users with different use cases.
