Textpad is still not able to Autosave / Recover after restart (Windows Update) and more...

[zhenya]

Oh man, please allow me a second to rant. I just lost hours of work because my laptop decided to apply an update and restart. It's really really amazeballz that in 2024 (in a few weeks) an app as popular and as useful as TextPad still doesn't have the functionality to play nice with the Windows API, and auto-save/restore documents during restart/logoff. Amazeballz! I come back after getting a cup of coffee and discover all my work gone.

There are posts about this for the better part of a decade:

• Automatically save for recovery purposes unsaved documents
• OK to Create by Restart Manager
• Autosave broken in 8.0.2
• Block reboots

I can't turn off updates on my work computer because I don't have permissions to change the group policy.

Ok rant over. I decided to put my anger into something useful and do some QA and A/B testing compared to Windows Notepad:

Setup:

• Win 10 (latest update),
• TextPad 9.3.1 (latest update) default settings,
• Sign-in options -> Automatically save my restartable apps... Turned ON

Scenarios:
1) Sign out occurs while editing a new unsaved file. When the user signs back in:
============================================================================
Expected behavior: The application should restart upon login and all the previous content should remain
TextPad: Application restarts with a blank new file, all content is lost
Notepad: Application restarts, all content remains
Comment: There was nothing in the user's AppData/Local/Helios/Textpad directory

2) Sign out occurs while editing an existing file. When the user signs back in:
=========================================================================
Expected behavior: The application should restart upon login and all previous content should remain, but the existing file should not have been saved.
TextPad: Application restarts with a blank new file. The previous edits were saved to the existing file.
Notepad: Application restarts, all content remains, the existing file is unmodified.
Comments: Although saving the edits to the existing file is better than nothing, that behavior is still incorrect. The whole point is to restore the previous state (e.g. the edits should be saved to a temp file and reopened upon sign in), maybe the user never planned to save the changes. [/list]

Other weird bugs I managed to replicate:

The dreaded OK to Create by Restart Manager:
==================================================

1. Open a file in TextPad using the right click context menu
2. Sign out then sign back in.

Result: OK to create C:\RestartByRestartManager:E6E5E06F-08A9-4435-9823-A22166B7A4AB
Comment: In order to replicate this you have to open a file using the right click context menu

"Save All" does nothing for newly created files
========================================
Save all only seems to save existing files. That's fine, if you rename it to "Save All Existing". Otherwise, it is extremely confusing. For example consider if you are writing a few new files. You haven't saved them yet. You click "Save All" and nothing happens, it's a no-op. You are confused, did you do something wrong? Should it be grayed out? It gets even more confusing if you have some new files and some existing files edited.

Expected behavior: Save All should save all existing files AND prompt you save all new files. Or it should otherwise give you a prompt that you still have new files.

"Reload last workspace at startup"
=============================
This only seems to work if you have explicitly saved the last workspace? Was that the design goal? If you did not save the last workspace, TextPad will not open it. What is the expected functionality of this feature? Is it like "restore the previous session on startup" (that's what I thought originally)?

Hope this is helpful. If any of the Admins or Developers want to ping me, we can do a screen share and I can demonstrate.

[AmigoJack]

I come back after getting a cup of coffee and discover all my work gone.

There must be other programs where you'd loose unsaved content - even the company's own programs should suffer from a system deciding on its own when to restart. That group policy just does harm in my eyes. 3D designers and doctors overlooking complex documents should be in the same danger as opposed to expect every program to "recover" any previous state.

Did you know you can save an entire workspace? That would also save all non-files in one go.

Notepad

Windows' Notepad? Or actually Notepad++?

[zhenya]

There must be other programs where you'd loose unsaved content

You are absolutely right. As has been discussed here, and everywhere else on the internet, Microsoft's decision to make Windows restart itself after an update is just abhorrent and bewildering. I personally think it is contributing to people switching to Apple. But, that having been said, the fact is it has now become ubiquitous.

It's been years since this behavior has been introduced. Almost any modern application of note is a restartable application. Down to Windows Notepad. We can debate how much Microsoft sucks ad nauseam. And I am sure, there are other applications that would lose their work, of course.

But, for example, on my work laptop I have: Eclipse, Microsoft Word, VMware Workstation (Virtual Machines), HeidiSQL (SQL Administration Tool), amongst other random apps. The fact is all of them have either explicit or implicit support for Windows Restart Manager. Even VMware suspends the virtual machines in a safe manner before restarting. This is now the default behavior of almost any application. It's the only reason Microsoft is able to get away with this shit.

Windows' Notepad? Or actually Notepad++?

Windows Notepad, not Notepad++

Also, I guess I should say that it's clear the TextPad developers intend to make TextPad a restartable app. It just doesn't work. They obviously have a broken feature.

[zhenya]

Why don't we just get this fixed?

Totally willing to work with the devs to demonstrate how the use cases fail.

[bbadmin]

This is fixed for the next release.