Notepad3: Must read letter from Notepad3 user

Created on 20 Dec 2017 · 4Comments · Source: rizonesoft/Notepad3

This is a letter I just received in my inbox. Thank you @RaiKoHoff @craigo- @Lhmouse @war59312 @MelchiorGaspar and many others for making Notepad3 the best Open Source project ever.

Dear Mr Payne,

I just wanted to say (next to donating via PayPal earlier this year) a warm "thank you" for Notepad3! I use it (and it predecessors) since years instead of less lightweight alternatives like Notepad++ and others for almost all text editing tasks in Windows. It's great to see that apparently meanwhile a development team has formed, active development takes place and new features are in the pipeline. I also welcome planned improvements like a consolidated documentation (so one has not to put together different pieces of information spread over various websites of earlier Notepad implementations).

But even more important: I appreciate the communication, the openness for ideas and the supportive spirit of the team behind Notepad3! I remember once contacting the Notepad2-mod author with a bug report, and just getting a short "no code - no fix" reply, dismissing my issue. I told him that, as a non-programmer, I couldn't provide a solution in form of code, but that I'd see all kinds of user feedback (suggestions, bug reports, hints on translation, etc.) also as valuable contributions.

He answered with a rude "you've no clue of the open source idea" and didn't want to receive any further messages from me. Apparently he saw his role as "maintainer" of the Notepad2-mod fork as someone just compiling the code and providing binaries, without the willingness to dive into details, to actually implement bug fixes or even adding new features… I was discouraged and stopped using Notepad2-mod.

Thus I'm glad that Notepad3 picked up the pace, represents a full and most welcome replacement to Notepad2(-mod) with fresh and significant improvements, and especially that user feedback and feature requests are not brushed off (and if they are, an appropriate tone is used to reject them).