Notepad Lag

Thought about downgrading back to the old Notepad.exe?
I pretty much HAD to redownload the old Paint.exe for obvious reasons, but I am unsure if your lag issue would be improved by trying the original on your new machine

 

I'm using notepad.exe a lot to trim vgms, so I work with quite large files. And I always had the feeling that it works a lot slower in Win7 than in WinXP. (It seems to work faster even on my old Pentium II with Win2000!)

I'm using a laptop with Intel i5 2.4 GHz and 4 GB RAM and when I read your post, I had to test it by myself.
So I used vgm2txt to make an 8 MB txt-file, opened it with notepad.exe, copied the first 2 lines and pasted them a few times at the start of the file. Pasting the two lines one time took as long as opening the file in all cases.

I have both, Win7 and WinXP, installed on my laptop and here are the results:
Windows XP:
- automatic line breaks disabled: 1 second
- automatic line breaks enabled: 2-3 seconds

Windows 7:
- automatic line breaks disabled: 9 seconds
- automatic line breaks enabled: 16 seconds

I used the Win7 notepad.exe on Windows 7, but a quick test showed that the XP notepad has the same lag and loading times as the Win7 one.

 

How big are the files you are trying to open? Or does this happen with any file?

 

it is one of the reasons my primary text editor is now EDIT.COM, or Metapad.exe

 

With or without word wrap? I seem to remember that making a huge difference in Notepad... When you have word wrap on, the program has to constantly calculate where the lines break, which can be pretty slow if the file is 1MB+. I use Notepad++ now, which is better in every way, but can be as simple as the regular Notepad if you don't want to use any of the extra features.

 

If you want to examine how notepad is made, you can get the source code for Notepad and WordPad from the Windows Platform SDK on Microsoft's website. Believe me when I say that Notepad is so simple, it's self-destructive at times.

 

Notepad likes to lag on MB-sized files... At least that's my experience with it.

 

I'm a big fan of Notepad++ myself. Support for AutoIt and NSIS (among MANY other languages), as well as the ability to output straight to a compiler, go a long way.

 

I think the idea with Notepad (as with many default Windows programs) is that it's not supposed to handle megabytes worth of data. The expectation is to use a more capable program if you find yourself using these features a lot (and I'll second the use of Notepad++ while I'm here)

Notepad is just capable enough for Windows developers to do quick tests of software, but doesn't bog down systems with tons of features they might not need. It used to be the same with Paint and Sound Recorder and whatever. Chances are some of the code behind it still dates from 1985 (or at least the Windows 95 build) so it likely never expected to receive 8MB worth of data (and thus wasn't tested to see if it would cope).

 

^^ This. Notepad++ (and my editor of choice, Programmer's Notepad) are built around the scintilla component which is specifically designed for this use case.

 

My editing tool of choice is UltraEdit, I had some of the same lag problems you are experiencing with Notepad, Markey (with saving/loading the file also taking up a ridiculous amount of time.)

 

Notepad actually had a limit of 32k or 64k files back before Windows 2k or XP removed it, it just threw an error dialog if you tried opening bigger things. If memory recalls right, you could still open a file that was smaller, edit it long enough so it grows past the border, and save. You just couldn't reopen it again.

Thirding Notepad++.

 

The limit was 65535 characters, pretty much - which is curious because edit.com could actually open larger files (65280 lines of up to 1021 characters each, if I recall correctly, making up for a maximum of around 63.5 MB, although of course the real limit depended on how many characters did you have per line =P).

 

Win9x notepad kindly asks if you want to use Wordpad instead for opening files larger than 64KB