23 ms·

Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

399 points by barking 9y ago

mhh__ 9y ago
Why kill it though? If they were going to replace it with something good enough to challenge Adobe (pls do, they need some competition) then sure. Paint can't need that many maintainers?
- matteocontrini 9y ago
  Because they've already replaced it with Paint 3D
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Because keeping everything around for forever equals bloat. When developing an app or operating system, you have to remove stuff from time to time.
examplar 9y ago
would be more common-sense to just kill Windows
cabaalis 9y ago
This is silliness. I Win+R, mspaint at least 10 times a day. I paste in screenshots and quickly cut out just a portion of them. Or leave the screenshot there for later review. Why don't they just remove the file browser? Or how about mouse support?
- mschaef 9y ago
  Agreed. In fact, I also use OSX a lot, and would love to have 'Paint' there too.
  - nextlevelwizard 9y ago
    Hopefully not for same purpose as OP, since you can just do cmd+shift+4 and draw the region you want. Maybe Microsoft should implement something like this, so maybe shift+screen shot or something like that would let the user just draw rectangle over what they want captured.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
      I use Alt-PrtSc to just capture the current window, which is a good start. Specific regions would be even better though (although the Snipping Tool can do this).
    - mschaef 9y ago
      No... cmd+shift+4 mostly covers that base for me. It's also a nice way to take quick measurements of screen dimensions. (Once the drag is started, <esc> will stop it without capturing an image. But for cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis, etc. - Paint is pretty useful. (It also has the benefit of working more or less the same way since pre-Windows 3.0, so the consistency is a nice thing.)
      - sjwright 9y ago
        > cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis Preview.app can do all of that.
  - zavulon 9y ago
    https://paintbrush.sourceforge.io/ https://paintbrush.sourceforge.io/
  - sjwright 9y ago
    It's not paint but Preview.app can crop, edit and annotate screenshots. A handy tip is to include control in the Mac screenshot keyboard command (e.g. ⌘⇧⌃3) to have the output piped to the clipboard instead of a file. Then in Preview.app, File > New opens the contents of the clipboard in a new window. While I'm at it, ⌘⇧4 (and ⌘⇧⌃4) lets you interactively select an arbitrary region. Also ⌘⇧4–Space (and ⌘⇧⌃4–Space) let you grab a single window directly from the compositor. Which means you always get the full window, including its alpha channel. Even if the window is obstructed or partially off-screen, you still get the whole thing including its transparent drop-shadow.
    - mercer 9y ago
      Is there a Preview.app equivalent for Windows these days? It was one of my favorite new tools when I switched to Mac back in the day, because for windows I had to download special 'see all types of files + basic editing' programs.
      - iaskwhy 9y ago
        Not really, no, but Chrome supports some files: pdf, txt, images... View mode only, obviously.
      - krylon 9y ago
        For simply displaying PDF (and a few other formats), I like SumatraPDF. It is pretty lightweight (compared to the crawling horror that is Adobe Reader), and when you re-open a PDF, opens it at the position you were last time(!!!). The latter feature makes it perfect for viewing reference manuals etc. EDIT: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html EDIT²: IrfanView can display many graphic formats and quite a few that are not strictly speaking graphics. Plus, it has some basic image editing capabilities (resize, rotate, ...).
        vram22 9y ago
        Interesting, have you tried Foxit PDF Reader, and if so, how does it compare to SumatraPDF? I haven't used the latter but have used the former.
  - atomicfiredoll 9y ago
    As dumb as it may sound, the lack of a real spiritual successor to MacPaint is something that differentiates Windows from OSX in a small way for me. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Like copying a transparent PNG in Windows only to paste something with a black background and no alpha. OSX's lack of a Paint equivalent makes me think, "Windows does it better."
- MLR 9y ago
  It's being replaced, they're removing the program, not the functionality.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  As much as I 100% agree with your comment, from MSs point of view, you now have the Snipping Tool to do that.
- DocG 9y ago
  I did the same until I discovered that windows has built in snippet tool. Try it out.
  - tunetine 9y ago
    You can't draw circles and arrows, etc in that tool though. I need to point out the obvious sometimes. Well, actually most times.
    - Raphmedia 9y ago
      There is no built in circles or arrows but there is a pen and an highligher tool.
    - Maert 9y ago
      http://imgur.com/a/0oDU7 http://imgur.com/a/0oDU7
      - Retric 9y ago
        The top 'arrow' looks like a sideways J, I assume it's an arrow based on context, but it's not that clear. Which is why it's nice to have a good tool for the job. PS: If you actually do the same thing in paint they have a lot of useful shapes and you get a preview of how they look. Which is nice if you don't want the chicken scratch look.
        Maert 9y ago
        Well, for anything serious, paint is not good enough. You can't rotate your arrows, for example. If i need to do something well, then I use Paint.net (which is best parts of Paint and Photoshop combined in a free and super fast package). If I need something quick, then I can use the snipping tool. I literally have not turned on paint ever since I discovered windows snipping tool and paint.net (which is couple of years now).
        Retric 9y ago
- tormeh 9y ago
  Use the Snipping Tool.
- willyyr 9y ago
  On Windows 10 try: WIN+SHIFT+S to get instant screen clipping and paste it to e.g. Twitter or whatever.
  - jconnop 9y ago
    That is amazing, thank you.
    - dagurp 9y ago
      You could also use Win+W if you want to draw on it
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    And it only took them what? 30 years?
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      They had an issue with abusing monopoly power, once upon a time. It's only recently that people stopped coming at them with torches and pitchforks every time they added a feature found in third-party apps.
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        The cynic would say their Windows 10 behavior is a continuing abuse - including the unwarranted setting of Edge and other Microsoft apps as defaults (overriding the user's settings) after an update, the forced upgrades, and so on. Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it.
        adventured 9y ago
        > Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it. They're not catching much flack for it, because they're no longer feared as they were in the late 1990s, due to the devaluation of the desktop PC. It's no longer regarded as the center of the tech universe, nor is it regarded as the future economic gateway through which everything will flow (as was commonly believed 20 years ago). Back then, Microsoft stood practically alone as the gorilla of the technology industry, today that's not even remotely the case.
- aldanor 9y ago
  Win > "snip" > <Enter>
  - mavhc 9y ago
    Win > snip > wait a bit, now a bit more in case it switches to doing a web search for snip, or finding all files named snip > enter
    - slig 9y ago
      Is it really that bad? I haven't used Windows since XP, and it seems bizarre that they couldn't emulate macOS's Spotlight yet.
    - jongalloway2 9y ago
      I'm running Windows 10 on a 7 year old desktop. Just typed win+snip+enter as fast as I could, it launched the snipping tool.
- princeb 9y ago
  snipping tool. that allows you to screenshot, draw, highlight, email, copy to clipboard, and you can snip a snip to crop.
- nashashmi 9y ago
  alt+printscreen to do window screen shot if you have one note, one note has a snipping tool win+S to either copy to clipboard or copy to onenote.
- goda90 9y ago
  I know it's nice to have built in tools that just work, but if you are looking for a good third-party tool for that functionality, Greenshot is pretty good. It has it's own simple little editor for annotating the image if you want.
- jpswade 9y ago
  They know this. It has been deprecated, not removed. That sounds like it's likely to remain for now.
- devopsproject 9y ago
  check out greenshot
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  You might be interested in switching to Greenshot. The workflows that you described will go much quicker since it pops up a menu of quick actions to take after you press Print Scrn. For screenshots that you want to review later, you just tell Greenshot to save directly to a file that it automatically names with a timestamp. To do quick edits, you can open your screenshot in the built-in editor. Or, you can open them in Paint.NET or any other editor.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    It took me a few minutes to compose the same reply. Try Greenshot: http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/ It's open-source, no-nonsense, free software. It takes your 9 keystrokes plus multiple clicks to crop down to one key: PrtScn. The built-in image editor is optimized for the things that you need to do with screenshots. Here's a quick guide I threw together: https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png Yeah, it was a bit of a mind-bender editing a screenshot of the screenshot editor with the screenshot editor...
    - vram22 9y ago
      >Yeah, it was a bit of a mind-bender editing a screenshot of the screenshot editor with the screenshot editor... Ha ha, I had the same thought just now, after trying out the (plain) PrintScreen command in DanBC's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839229 Before that, I'd always used just Alt-PrintScreen to take a screenshot of only a specific window, not the whole screen. So, to try it, I arranged a few app windows in cascaded style (including Paint itself), then did PrintScreen, then pasted the screenshot of Paint (plus other apps) into Paint ... Who GNU that ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
- binthere 9y ago
  Snipping tool on Windows solve your problem. No need for paint.
- frik 9y ago
  Me too, use Win7 snipping tool and or Paint all the time. Notepad, Paint, Wordpad are all useful. Even though I wished MS would give them some love like add UTF-8 as default save option, or a better search function, etc. The new Win8/10 metro/UWP apps and the Store are crap.
- bargl 9y ago
  Have you looked at greenshot? I love it.
- partiallypro 9y ago
  They aren't removing it, they are deprecating it.
av3csr 9y ago
There goes my screenshot editing software
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  My thoughts are with all those help-deskers who will have to explain this to a million people who used this to cut and paste pictures. Microsoft sure likes to put up a rodeo-experience for the customers.
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    I'm 28 and I'm sure I'll be long dead before any large organizations move past Windows 7.
- executesorder66 9y ago
  Try Greenshot [0] for taking, and editing screenshots on Windows. [0] http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/
  - saw-lau 9y ago
    The main issue I have with this is that, like you could guarantee vi/vim being present on any Unix/Linux installation, mspaint.exe would always be present on any Windows installation for easily taking screenshots. When working with locked-down systems, such as we do at work, that was a really useful feature.
    - _pmf_ 9y ago
      AltGr+Scroll, Win+R "mspaint", Enter, Ctrl-V is in my muscle memory.
    - drawkbox 9y ago
      Snipping Tool still there for screenshots.
      - 9y ago
frou_dh 9y ago
For me, the program lost its charm when they introduced the antialiased shapes, soft brushes etc (Win7?). The MSPaint aesthetic was all about rough and ready aliased drawing.
eksemplar 9y ago
It's probably the Microsoft product I use the most outside of windows, visual studio and outlook. If it could save pictures without a background I probably wouldn't need any other image editor. I probably use it around 10 times a week professionally, much more than I use Word (I do most of my writing and notetaking in standard text editors and only use Word when it's time to style it or save to PDF). So this is terrible news to me.
- Yuioup 9y ago
  https://www.getpaint.net/ https://www.getpaint.net/
  - eksemplar 9y ago
    Thank you. Unfortunately I'm on an enterprise controlled software stack. I'm not sure my needs warrant adding new software and thus more maintenance work for the IT department when our stack also includes photoshop.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Just be careful where you click, that site is loaded with adverts for dubious software.
    - strangecasts 9y ago
      If you want to avoid that, it has a Chocolatey package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net
      - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
        Actually I think I'll avoid it altogether, if someone is willing to do that on the web site then what might they drop in the installer.
- MLR 9y ago
  Paint 3D shipped already and is the replacement version, it can also save pictures without a background.
skc 9y ago
Just use paint.net
danijelb 9y ago
Interesting to notice, syskey.exe is also going to be removed. Wonder how it will affect fake tech support scammers.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is cited as one of the reasons for its removal. It had no real practical use for the user at this point and was basically just a handy ransoming tool. My tool for cracking syskey locks doesn't work on UEFI systems so I'm glad they're just gonna break he functionality.
Spooky23 9y ago
Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. They purged the other image tool (the MS Office one that let you view TIFFs), and now they're killing paint. I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Creation for Personal Users (not to be confused with a creators update) available on 4 different channels for $6.99/mo. The stable branch will not have the ability to open JPEGs or save to a format other than clip art, but a new revisions will be delivered daily.
- vtlynch 9y ago
  "Microsoft to remove ability to right-click." Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Mouse Power Users for $6.99/mo.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    We jest, but bullshit like that is entirely possible. Windows is a product in decline in many ways, and a public company still needs to grow revenue. Users can (and are) migrating to modern platforms, but many of the organizations using it are doing so because they have to, will continue to have that need for a decade or more. My colleagues at work who run apps on the IBM Mainframe and POWER server platforms plan their operational cadences around peak periods where they lease access to CPU cores and memory on their servers. They only get to access about 25% of the hardware without a meter running. Microsoft can and probably will do the same conceptual thing to extract more dollars.
    - vtlynch 9y ago
      I was trying to point out how incredibly myopic and foolish your idea was.
Jaruzel 9y ago
Paint XP for Windows 10 seems to be a good go-to alternative: http://www.mspaintxp.com/ http://www.mspaintxp.com/ Although, it's a shame that it's an installer, and not just a zip-file.
wodenokoto 9y ago
Not even 30 minutes ago, I saw a MS sponsored add for Paint on Facebook. But then again, unlike this article, I don't consider a rewrite with new functionality as killing off an app, even if the rewrite has "3D" attached to the title.
halcy0n 9y ago
There is a whole subculture of artists who use MS paint as a means to make a specific form of art. Also this actually saddens me that sure there could be other low budget tools but without one baked into the OS think about the kid bored in school who can no longer stumble into mspaint and start doodling in class.
- matteocontrini 9y ago
  Paint 3D is now preinstalled on Windows 10
  - ygra 9y ago
    To add to this, pixel-precise drawing is still available in Paint 3D, so "the specific art style" mentioned by the GP is still possible there. Heck, some things that cater to this style are even easier in Paint 3D than in Paint.
BatFastard 9y ago
Question is why does MS after 32 years still include incredible WEAK tools like Paint and Notepad? They should spent a little and buy up some of the great tools out there and include them in windows.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  This might help explain why they won't go down this route: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    True, but.. this was filed in 1998 when they were trying to gain exclusivity in the browser market and for good reason.
- mrec 9y ago
  Notepad is "weak" for a reason: it aims for absolutely minimal dependencies so that it can still be used for system recovery when everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Hard to make that argument for Paint though, I'll grant you.
  - jle17 9y ago
    At the very least they could add support for Unix line breaks...
    - garaetjjte 9y ago
      ..and stop using BOM in UTF8 files...
  - alanh 9y ago
    Consider the OS X equivalent, TextEdit. In contrast to Notepad, it remains fairly minimal while being upgraded to always use and showcase the latest OS X APIs and design standards.
jcadam 9y ago
If it weren't for MS Paint, I would have absolutely no image manipulation tools available to me at work :)
davidiach 9y ago
I still use Paint for things like shrinking the size of an image or editing screenshots. Sad to see it go.
StreamBright 9y ago
Literally the most used desktop MS application for me.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
Weird, in the comments i almost don't see paint dot net ( https://www.getpaint.net/ https://www.getpaint.net/ ) get mentioned? Awesome free tool, between paint and photoshop. Support for layers, ...
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Wow, I haven't heard mention of paint.net in sooo long! I used that years ago, and it was awesome...then numerous migrations, and different types of jobs (where needed less use for ms paint or paint.net)...lately just use whatever is on the OS - sometimes it is GIMP, sometimes its ms paint. Yeah, if no one else vouches for paint.net, i'll definitely vouch for it!
- cableshaft 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't get everyone pitching a fit over this when Paint.net is so much better and nearly as lightweight.
stordoff 9y ago
What alternatives does Windows have built-in? I use mspaint a fair amount to black out sensitive areas of screenshots or for cropping images to a specific size (scale then shave x pixels off the sides to get a specific aspect ratio), but not often enough that I feel like setting up an alternative on all my machines.
- piaste 9y ago
  Not worth it for Paint alone, but you might want to consider using something like Ninite (if you want the least possible hassle) to install most of your favourite apps on all your machines with one click.
srikz 9y ago
Off topic, but what caught my eye in the article was this: > Now Microsoft has announced that, alongside Outlook Express, Reader app and Reading list, Microsoft Paint For those who don't know Reader was introduced in Windows 8 as a PDF reader with annotation support (worked with Stylus in just black colour). I always hoped it would get more features and could become comparable to Preview on Mac. But sadly it was never updated for Windows 10. I still use it as I don't like using Edge for PDFs and Ebooks. Nothing wrong with it, but I hoard a lot of tabs and every time I open a PDF several tabs will open up. Would really like my browser and ebook / PDF viewer to be separate apps. /rant also RIP Paint. Gave me great joy as a kid and the constraints challenged me in fun ways to create 'interesting' art
- mavhc 9y ago
  Got to get people to use Edge somehow. Also try banning installers from adding pinned icons so users don't use Chrome, banning installers from setting defaults so users don't use Chrome, When you do open Chrome adding adverts for Edge to the screen (it's totally faster guys, come on). Banning browsers from the Windows Store, and thus Windows 10S.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    I'd be more sympathetic to poor google's plight if they didn't plaster banners telling me to switch to chrome all over the place.
  - chadgeidel 9y ago
    "...banning installers from setting defaults..." goes way, way further than "... so users don't use Chrome". Installers silently replacing my default app is user-hostile and I encourage any steps my OS vendor takes to reduce the ability to do that. I had zero problems manually switching my default browser in Windows 10 to Chrome.
    - mavhc 9y ago
      It's more the way they did it, and continue to try to reset Edge to be default. I'm talking about my users who can't work the shift key, they just click whatever is pinned to the task bar. Same with how Mail is now pinned by default, even though everyone uses web mail. Any individual one of these wouldn't be too much of a concern, but together it seems suspicious.
melling 9y ago
Is Kitra the best alternative? https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ This is an opportunity for open source options to get a lot more users.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle: it does much more with far greater hardware, software, user effort and user experience requirements. Additionally, the specific focus on high-end painting using a tablet means that emulating MS Paint with pixel-perfect drawing, crisp shapes and palettes has halfhearted support or needs clever workarounds.
  - zeptomu 9y ago
    > Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle I think that is too harsh. Although Krita can do more than Paint the user-experience is pretty well done and it also works for basic tasks providing useful defaults.
    - HelloNurse 9y ago
      Yes, Krita is well polished, but it deliberately offers advanced tools: some proudly beyond the competition (e.g. layers and brush engines), some quirky, some plain and dependable, some state of the art, all meant for expert users and optimized for serious work (including basic tasks), not for ease of learning.
vtlynch 9y ago
Paint is one executable file, no? Getting rid of this does literally nothing to combat bloat and seems like a pointless move that will irritate users.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  On the other hand, this basically means just one line to the script to be run on each fresh install of Windows. It's not like we lost the license to use Paint, did we?
  - vtlynch 9y ago
    You mean in order to place it back on the machines? Sure, just one line. But there seems to be a rather big difference between basic software that is guaranteed to be available and software that requires any amount of scripting/preparation to install, even if it is just one line.
- sjwright 9y ago
  Yeah, but that executable file is like 335 kilobytes, or at least it was in Windows XP. * checks Win10 * My goodness it's 6,520 kilobytes now. At that rate of growth... * back of napkin math * KILL IT!!
mwexler 9y ago
All the comments that "you can just use X to do Y" is missing the point that Paint just works, for almost every value of Y. No argument, Paint.net is great, snipping tool solves the grab and crop, but for most anything else you need to do in a hurry, you need a quick paint program. It's like removing Notepad: we all know hundreds of editors we would replace it with, from Notepad++ to vim/emacs... but isn't nice that when you aren't on your box, you know the core set of tools that are always there? (In other news, Fedora announces dropping grep, lc, and ls from the distro, in favor of python: "most users are devs, let them write their own tools" they stated in a press release). Paint3D takes longer to load, and has made the simple... much less simple. While we can all say "Yes, that's the way of tech", it's just not necessary. And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jadbox 9y ago
  Woh, why would a distribution drop something as common as grep? Saying you can build it yourself sounds crazy when it always exists and cross-platform...
  - markrages 9y ago
    Twas satire
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    Maybe they want the core experience to not require ancient command line tools? You don't see many Windows users complaining about the lack of grep.
    - castis 9y ago
      I don't see many Windows users hanging out in the CLI for extended periods of time, either. Even though OP wasn't serious about fedora nixing grep, surely you see the lack of equivalence in that argument.
excalibur 9y ago
Let's get rid of the handful of useful features left in Windows. Next time around we'll take care of that pesky calculator, and then we're coming for notepad.
- anonymfus 9y ago
  Calculator was replaced by UWP version two years ago.
- crispytx 9y ago
  Hahaha! Best @#$%ing comment in this whole thread.
- vram22 9y ago
  >and then we're coming for notepad. If they ever do that, Metapad will still be there to help. Though I'm mainly a vi/vim/gvim user, I use metapad sometimes for quick edits. It's very lightweight, but still supports some more features than notepad. It has some neat features. The developer has stopped working on it, but I think a) he released the source code (C or C++ using the Win32 API) and b) the download is still there on his site. Search for metapad or metapad download.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Note: if using Metapad, might want to tweak the default options a bit before using it for anything important. E.g. I seem to remember that ESC exits the file you are editing, maybe without warning. Other than a minor thing or two like that, it's a neat tiny text editor, though - IMO.
Jeema101 9y ago
Paint has always been a handy tool for me for making annotated screenshots as well as lightweight image manipulation. I use it on a fairly regular basis at work. I forsee the result of this being lots of people Googling 'download ms paint' in the future and ending up with malware on their system. Seems kind of shortsighted if you ask me.
- devopsproject 9y ago
  check out greenshot
- connorcpu 9y ago
  I think more likely will be users type 'paint' into the start menu and just click the first option which should be the new Paint 3D on a fresh system
xyzzy4 9y ago
I wonder if they check the usage statistics before getting rid of it? Because surely there are millions of people using it every day. Don't they care about the users?
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
Pity that they don't open source it. I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint. The layout and functionality is incredibly intuitive. You drop someone into Paint, and even if they've never seen it before, they can start doing stuff within a minute or so. You drop the same person into GIMP, and five minutes later they're still trying to figure out how the hell to select a paintbrush. I understand that every image editor is trying to compete with Photoshop, but sometimes I don't need Photoshop. I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.
- jb55 9y ago
  > I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint Have you tried mypaint?
  - sattoshi 9y ago
    Yeah, ugly as hell.
  - irth 9y ago
    I loved MyPaint on the Nokia N900, with the pressure sensitive screen and the built in stylus
- rockinghigh 9y ago
  These basic image highlighting features are so useful that Apple made them available in the Mail app (https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204093 https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204093).
- mlvljr 9y ago
  Might be in the old leaked Win 2000 source pack, though :)
- ProAm 9y ago
  Pinta has always been my simple go to image editor on linux. Similar to Paint.NET
4ndr3vv 9y ago
MS hasn't said they're going to remove it: [“Deprecated” Apps] ...are not in active development and might be removed in future releases [1] Its clearly not being actively developed, but there's no indication its going anywhere just yet. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-that-are-removed-or-deprecated-in-windows-10-fall-creators-up https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-th...
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  In other words, mature. So let's mark it for removal.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ygra 9y ago
  Perhaps similar to Notepad, which has been more or less feature-complete since Windows 2000 or so. I guess it is also internally "deprecated", but will continue to be shipped for quite a while. Microsoft doesn't tend to break such things. In Paint's case, I'd guess the most that will happen is that it will vanish from the Start menu, but the executable will still be there.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    "Find" in Notepad does not wrap around to the start of the document, and has no option to do so, so in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start. That's bone-headed behavior and should've been fixed a decade ago.
    - pdm55 9y ago
      "in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start" Yep, but we all know to do this. Better to keep it with this quirk, than remove this indispensable software. Notepad and Paint are so simple and work fine, long may they remain.
donretag 9y ago
I remember when I first started using OSX (forgetting OS9 and prior for now) and being shocked that there is no built-in paint program. There still is not one. Paint works amazing well for very quick edits, which is all I really ever need to do.
- toast0 9y ago
  Preview actually lets you do a lot of things you might have wanted to use paint for. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind would expect something called 'preview' to do image editing, so I never noticed until someone told me.
  - alanh 9y ago
    Haha, true. I use Preview all the time for cropping, converting, and annotating images. You can even fill out, draw on, and annotate PDFs in Preview.
crispytx 9y ago
Shit is weak. Paint was the bomb.com.
squidbot 9y ago
"Goodbye Old Paint"
shawnbaden 9y ago
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Hal Lasko (The Pixel Painter). Hal started using Microsoft Paint when he got a computer on his 85th birthday until his death at 99 in 2014. He made some great looking art bit by bit. https://vimeo.com/70748579 https://vimeo.com/70748579 - The Pixel Painter https://hallasko.com/ https://hallasko.com/
- erikrothoff 9y ago
  Ooo I'm so happy that you mentioned this! I own two Hal Lasko's :) That story is amazing. It really shows the value that tech can add to anyone's life.
borski 9y ago
I wonder what Pat is going to do? https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-paint/ https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-pai...
Chronos 9y ago
This is because Homestuck ended, isn't it?
booleandilemma 9y ago
Does this mean I'm going to have to wait 10+ seconds for GIMP to open up if I want to work with a screenshot?
- ygra 9y ago
  No one's stopping you. Paint.net and Paint 3D both take only about a second, though.
epx 9y ago
They could improve it to make it Preview.app-like. I use Preview in Mac a lot, it is great.
krylon 9y ago
I have not used MS Paint in many, many years, but I have some fond memories of playing with it on my first PC. I can understand, though, how this upsets people that have made it part of their workflow. For simple tasks, Paint is nice because it starts really fast compared to e.g. GIMP. And it's on every ____ing Windows machine, you can rely on that. Same as notepad or calc. These programs, after all, are there for a reason. (I am not on Windows 10, my work laptop runs Windows 7, and at home I don't use Windows, so this does not affect me directly.)
peterburkimsher 9y ago
Paint is still my preferred way to save screenshots. Press the Print Screen button, paste into Paint, draw a red line, save.
- grimgrin 9y ago
  So here's a pretty cool thing using ShareX: http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png Ok so it's another screenshot tool. Capture all, a window, a selection, etc. Bind global hotkeys. But where it really shines is the easily configurable "after capture" and "after upload" toggles. In the screenshot you can see I have: copy to clipboard, save, and perform actions turned on. The first is nice because I can easily paste into Slack. The middle is nice because it goes to a particular directory and I have history. But the latter is something I just turned on to show you how it can easily open the screenshot into mspaint.exe for you. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/ https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/ https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/
- vacri 9y ago
  Move to linux and use Shutter :) Shutter is great for screenshots, both taking and annotating/editing.
verri 9y ago
Does this mean that half of the bitmap OLE objects will break in a few months to come?
notadoc 9y ago
Why? People use Paint surprisingly often, surely they know this.
keithpeter 9y ago
Does anyone else here remember the little booklet that came with Windows 95 where they showed you how to produce little projects with Notepad, Wordpad and Paint? The idea being that even with the bare OS, you had a few tools to work with and some tutorials that exposed features of the OS in a systematic way. Anecdote: I'm still to this day showing colleagues at work the wonder of the Windows button and the power of Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Y and within a document window Ctrl-F.
Yahivin 9y ago
I may as well shamelessly self promote an alternative: https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/ https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/ It's simple, fast to start up, and you can drop images in from your desktop.
racl101 9y ago
What's a few kilobytes. Just keep the program. Worry about the important stuff. Like everything else wrong with Windows 10. This is the least of it.
eco 9y ago
I'm amazed just how few people in the comments here actually read past the clickbait headline. Paint is deprecated. It isn't being removed for the time being. Beyond adding a ribbon menu and some brushes Paint hasn't received meaningful updates since XP so it should really come as no surprise that it would be deprecated. If Microsoft's history is any indication Paint will be around for another decade, and continue to work if you just download it from some MS Paint nostalgia fansite for decades later.
drngdds 9y ago
They say it might be "removed in future releases." But isn't Windows 10 supposed to be the "last" version of Windows, just perpetually updated? It would be really strange if a system update removed Paint.
kin 9y ago
Paint is the one program I miss the most from Windows other than the Windows file explorer and window management. Paint clones don't seem to cut it. Preview doesn't cut it for me either. Everything else seems to offer a subset of Paint in a more complicated manner. I don't quite know how to explain it. Is it possible to DL an executable of Paint and run it in Wine?
pdm55 9y ago
I use Paint as my scanner connection. So simple, it just works.
rosseloh 9y ago
Time to go find the executable and save it somewhere. I use mspaint for one thing, but it does that one thing beautifully. When I'm designing large complicated structures to eventually build in Minecraft, there's nothing quite like zooming all the way in to a blank canvas, turning on the grid, and drawing the floorplan pixel by pixel. mspaint does this so well because of its simplicity. 20 basic colors, single-pixel drawing (with the ability to do lines and boxes if necessary), and not much else. It's fast, it's simple, and since it's just an image file, it's no problem to transfer the design to another computer (where you can open it right up again in mspaint and have all the same tools). I've played around with the "new" paint, Paint 3D, and as far as I've seen, there isn't even the ability to put down a 1x1 grid. Basically, they removed a bunch of the "paint" features in order to add the "3D" features.
joeylemberg 9y ago
http://yinyangpaint.com http://yinyangpaint.com
maxxxxx 9y ago
I always find it fascinating that they can redesign the whole OS with almost every release but thinks like cmd, notepad, Wordpad or paint stay unchanged for decades (?) despite having huge feature gaps. They surely should be able to find one or two devs that can put some ongoing effort into these.
xg15 9y ago
So their big shift of making Windows an OS more focused on creation than consumption starts by... nixing Paint. Why? It's a dickish enough move on it's own, but I can't understand the reason behind it. This will surely generate a huge PR backlash wgen actually implemented, with even more people trying to block the update... for what exactly? The article doesn't even talk about a planned replacement. What is their plan?
subbu 9y ago
The best use of MS Paint I have seen is by Sal Khan for his initial versions of Khan Academy videos. He used pretty much all features of MS Paint effectively.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
First they came for the desktop gadgets, and I did not speak out— Because I did not use desktop gadgets. Then they came for Purble Place, and I did not speak out— Because I did not play Purble Place. Then they came for my MS Paint — and there was no one left to speak for me...
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kelvin0 9y ago
I'm waiting for Geos Paint to make a comeback: https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_issue_1_(June_1994)(GEOS_and_Commodore).html https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_...
agentgt 9y ago
Every time GIMP crashes on my Mac (been meaning to figure out why but for some reason its when I copy and paste) I think of Microsoft Paint and I would love it if Apple had an analog. Its sad because other than MS Excel, MS Paint is one of the few MS apps I know how to use. I am so bad with word and powerpoint. Even my knowledge of Excel is pretty bad. I have been known to even load up simple datasets in Postgres,Pandas, or even R because of my sheer incompetence and inability to navigate menus. Minesweeper is also pretty cool and underrated albeit boring after a few... errr 100s of plays.
- ctrlrsf 9y ago
  Although fairly basic, with the Preview app you can do some minor editing, annotating, drawing, cropping, resizing, etc.
  - agentgt 9y ago
    I'm embarrassed to say it took me a full year of mac use (I came from linux originally) to learn that preview app could edit as well you can insert your own signature!
makecheck 9y ago
As a 3rd-party developer I could almost understand retiring apps (too many dependencies on deprecated stuff, ancient code base is too hard to maintain, etc.). Yet built-in apps are much more special. For one, many people consider built-in apps to be "the OS" as much as the OS itself. And two, if there is any development team that can continue supporting an ancient code base, it's the OS vendor: if they really have to, they can do things other companies can't (like privately continue to ship functions that are now publicly unavailable). It should always be more in their interest to evolve rather than redo.
b0rsuk 9y ago
There's an implicit fallacy that MS Paint did a lot of good and the world would be a sad place without it. No, something else would fill that niche. The same nostalgia argument has been used for MS Windows, Internet Explorer, etc.
deleted 9y ago
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EdSharkey 9y ago
I'm surprised Microsoft CAN kill off Paint, given how much they cater to big corporate interests and keeping things backwards compatible. For example, I've heard stories that Notepad can never be upgraded nor removed from Windows because there are big corporate users that have binary monkey-patched Notepad in order to achieve some business goals. They literally have to keep Notepad unchanged from Windows 3.x days or else some big corporate entity won't upgrade Windows when the upgrade comes out. I think that's one reason that Windows desktop and its apps are such a hodge-podge representation of Windows UX over the years. I can't believe Paint isn't absolutely mission critical to some big company somewhere, maybe its design wasn't conducive to monkey-patching.
LyalinDotCom 9y ago
Nick Craver had the most funny tweet on this subject today: "They’re killing MS Paint in the Windows 10 Fall Update. We’re trying to migrate our design team to alternatives now." ROFL... had to read that one twice. https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336 https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336
symlinkk 9y ago
I wanted to hate on this decision but honestly Paint 3D is a much better version of MS Paint. For instance in MS Paint if you write some text in a textbox and then de-select the textbox it's extremely hard to select it again so that you can edit the text. And if you make a square selection and then use the edges of the square to expand your selection, you'll actually stretch the image under it, which I found unintuitive and odd. I think the biggest mistake here was creating a new application called Paint 3D and discontinuing the original one. That's bound to create bad PR. Instead they should have "updated" the original Paint to become Paint 3D, just like they "updated" calc.exe.
bonoboTP 9y ago
I never used the new MS Paint after the ribbon-redesign for Windows 7. The XP version was so intuitive, precise and clean. Actually it's possible to use the XP version in newer Windows editions, but it involves some tinkering.
- mattss 9y ago
  You're supposed to put commands you use frequently on the quick command bar with the ribbon
- tdeck 9y ago
  I recently had to use Paint again and noticed the newer versions got rid of the "right click on this color to set the background color" mechanic. Sure it's not very discoverable, but that was a great power feature that I didn't even appreciate until it was gone.
  - marvy 9y ago
    The feature is still there, but the mechanic is different. More clicks needed, but more discoverable.
faragon 9y ago
Please, Microsoft, don't remove the Paint program.
jasonrhaas 9y ago
nooooooooooooooooo
bane 9y ago
OS X/MacOS doesn't have a "paint" analogue. So users have to run around and install a bunch of things or buy things to replace it. It's a PIA on new systems, and I still am not quite sure what a good new user replacement is. Years ago when I first learned GUI programming, a simple paint application was the 2nd or 3rd example given. I hope they replace it with something, I consider such a tool an essential part of any modern GUI OS.
RyanRies 9y ago
Deprecation is not the same thing as removal. They're not removing Paint. They are just not developing it any more. They may still leave it in the OS for years to come; maybe even indefinitely. There are a lot of deprecated programs that still ship with Windows.
richardboegli 9y ago
MS Paint is here to stay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa...
ctolkien 9y ago
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa... Paint isn't going anywhere.

399 points by barking 9y ago

Why kill it though? If they were going to replace it with something good enough to challenge Adobe (pls do, they need some competition) then sure. Paint can't need that many maintainers?

matteocontrini 9y ago
Because they've already replaced it with Paint 3D
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Because keeping everything around for forever equals bloat. When developing an app or operating system, you have to remove stuff from time to time.

examplar 9y ago

would be more common-sense to just kill Windows

cabaalis 9y ago

This is silliness. I Win+R, mspaint at least 10 times a day. I paste in screenshots and quickly cut out just a portion of them. Or leave the screenshot there for later review. Why don't they just remove the file browser? Or how about mouse support?

mschaef 9y ago
Agreed. In fact, I also use OSX a lot, and would love to have 'Paint' there too.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  Hopefully not for same purpose as OP, since you can just do cmd+shift+4 and draw the region you want. Maybe Microsoft should implement something like this, so maybe shift+screen shot or something like that would let the user just draw rectangle over what they want captured.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
    I use Alt-PrtSc to just capture the current window, which is a good start. Specific regions would be even better though (although the Snipping Tool can do this).
  - mschaef 9y ago
    No... cmd+shift+4 mostly covers that base for me. It's also a nice way to take quick measurements of screen dimensions. (Once the drag is started, <esc> will stop it without capturing an image. But for cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis, etc. - Paint is pretty useful. (It also has the benefit of working more or less the same way since pre-Windows 3.0, so the consistency is a nice thing.)
    - sjwright 9y ago
      > cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis Preview.app can do all of that.
- zavulon 9y ago
  https://paintbrush.sourceforge.io/ https://paintbrush.sourceforge.io/
- sjwright 9y ago
  It's not paint but Preview.app can crop, edit and annotate screenshots. A handy tip is to include control in the Mac screenshot keyboard command (e.g. ⌘⇧⌃3) to have the output piped to the clipboard instead of a file. Then in Preview.app, File > New opens the contents of the clipboard in a new window. While I'm at it, ⌘⇧4 (and ⌘⇧⌃4) lets you interactively select an arbitrary region. Also ⌘⇧4–Space (and ⌘⇧⌃4–Space) let you grab a single window directly from the compositor. Which means you always get the full window, including its alpha channel. Even if the window is obstructed or partially off-screen, you still get the whole thing including its transparent drop-shadow.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Is there a Preview.app equivalent for Windows these days? It was one of my favorite new tools when I switched to Mac back in the day, because for windows I had to download special 'see all types of files + basic editing' programs.
    - iaskwhy 9y ago
      Not really, no, but Chrome supports some files: pdf, txt, images... View mode only, obviously.
    - krylon 9y ago
      For simply displaying PDF (and a few other formats), I like SumatraPDF. It is pretty lightweight (compared to the crawling horror that is Adobe Reader), and when you re-open a PDF, opens it at the position you were last time(!!!). The latter feature makes it perfect for viewing reference manuals etc. EDIT: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html EDIT²: IrfanView can display many graphic formats and quite a few that are not strictly speaking graphics. Plus, it has some basic image editing capabilities (resize, rotate, ...).
      - vram22 9y ago
        Interesting, have you tried Foxit PDF Reader, and if so, how does it compare to SumatraPDF? I haven't used the latter but have used the former.
- atomicfiredoll 9y ago
  As dumb as it may sound, the lack of a real spiritual successor to MacPaint is something that differentiates Windows from OSX in a small way for me. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Like copying a transparent PNG in Windows only to paste something with a black background and no alpha. OSX's lack of a Paint equivalent makes me think, "Windows does it better."
MLR 9y ago
It's being replaced, they're removing the program, not the functionality.
Jaruzel 9y ago
As much as I 100% agree with your comment, from MSs point of view, you now have the Snipping Tool to do that.
DocG 9y ago
I did the same until I discovered that windows has built in snippet tool. Try it out.
- tunetine 9y ago
  You can't draw circles and arrows, etc in that tool though. I need to point out the obvious sometimes. Well, actually most times.
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
    There is no built in circles or arrows but there is a pen and an highligher tool.
  - Maert 9y ago
    http://imgur.com/a/0oDU7 http://imgur.com/a/0oDU7
    - Retric 9y ago
      The top 'arrow' looks like a sideways J, I assume it's an arrow based on context, but it's not that clear. Which is why it's nice to have a good tool for the job. PS: If you actually do the same thing in paint they have a lot of useful shapes and you get a preview of how they look. Which is nice if you don't want the chicken scratch look.
      - Maert 9y ago
        Well, for anything serious, paint is not good enough. You can't rotate your arrows, for example. If i need to do something well, then I use Paint.net (which is best parts of Paint and Photoshop combined in a free and super fast package). If I need something quick, then I can use the snipping tool. I literally have not turned on paint ever since I discovered windows snipping tool and paint.net (which is couple of years now).
        Retric 9y ago
tormeh 9y ago
Use the Snipping Tool.
willyyr 9y ago
On Windows 10 try: WIN+SHIFT+S to get instant screen clipping and paste it to e.g. Twitter or whatever.
- jconnop 9y ago
  That is amazing, thank you.
  - dagurp 9y ago
    You could also use Win+W if you want to draw on it
- rbanffy 9y ago
  And it only took them what? 30 years?
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    They had an issue with abusing monopoly power, once upon a time. It's only recently that people stopped coming at them with torches and pitchforks every time they added a feature found in third-party apps.
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      The cynic would say their Windows 10 behavior is a continuing abuse - including the unwarranted setting of Edge and other Microsoft apps as defaults (overriding the user's settings) after an update, the forced upgrades, and so on. Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it.
      - adventured 9y ago
        > Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it. They're not catching much flack for it, because they're no longer feared as they were in the late 1990s, due to the devaluation of the desktop PC. It's no longer regarded as the center of the tech universe, nor is it regarded as the future economic gateway through which everything will flow (as was commonly believed 20 years ago). Back then, Microsoft stood practically alone as the gorilla of the technology industry, today that's not even remotely the case.
aldanor 9y ago
Win > "snip" > <Enter>
- mavhc 9y ago
  Win > snip > wait a bit, now a bit more in case it switches to doing a web search for snip, or finding all files named snip > enter
  - slig 9y ago
    Is it really that bad? I haven't used Windows since XP, and it seems bizarre that they couldn't emulate macOS's Spotlight yet.
  - jongalloway2 9y ago
    I'm running Windows 10 on a 7 year old desktop. Just typed win+snip+enter as fast as I could, it launched the snipping tool.
princeb 9y ago
snipping tool. that allows you to screenshot, draw, highlight, email, copy to clipboard, and you can snip a snip to crop.
nashashmi 9y ago
alt+printscreen to do window screen shot if you have one note, one note has a snipping tool win+S to either copy to clipboard or copy to onenote.
goda90 9y ago
I know it's nice to have built in tools that just work, but if you are looking for a good third-party tool for that functionality, Greenshot is pretty good. It has it's own simple little editor for annotating the image if you want.
jpswade 9y ago
They know this. It has been deprecated, not removed. That sounds like it's likely to remain for now.
devopsproject 9y ago
check out greenshot
hungerstrike 9y ago
You might be interested in switching to Greenshot. The workflows that you described will go much quicker since it pops up a menu of quick actions to take after you press Print Scrn. For screenshots that you want to review later, you just tell Greenshot to save directly to a file that it automatically names with a timestamp. To do quick edits, you can open your screenshot in the built-in editor. Or, you can open them in Paint.NET or any other editor.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  It took me a few minutes to compose the same reply. Try Greenshot: http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/ It's open-source, no-nonsense, free software. It takes your 9 keystrokes plus multiple clicks to crop down to one key: PrtScn. The built-in image editor is optimized for the things that you need to do with screenshots. Here's a quick guide I threw together: https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png Yeah, it was a bit of a mind-bender editing a screenshot of the screenshot editor with the screenshot editor...
  - vram22 9y ago
    >Yeah, it was a bit of a mind-bender editing a screenshot of the screenshot editor with the screenshot editor... Ha ha, I had the same thought just now, after trying out the (plain) PrintScreen command in DanBC's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839229 Before that, I'd always used just Alt-PrintScreen to take a screenshot of only a specific window, not the whole screen. So, to try it, I arranged a few app windows in cascaded style (including Paint itself), then did PrintScreen, then pasted the screenshot of Paint (plus other apps) into Paint ... Who GNU that ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
binthere 9y ago
Snipping tool on Windows solve your problem. No need for paint.
frik 9y ago
Me too, use Win7 snipping tool and or Paint all the time. Notepad, Paint, Wordpad are all useful. Even though I wished MS would give them some love like add UTF-8 as default save option, or a better search function, etc. The new Win8/10 metro/UWP apps and the Store are crap.
bargl 9y ago
Have you looked at greenshot? I love it.
partiallypro 9y ago
They aren't removing it, they are deprecating it.

av3csr 9y ago

There goes my screenshot editing software

Pica_soO 9y ago
My thoughts are with all those help-deskers who will have to explain this to a million people who used this to cut and paste pictures. Microsoft sure likes to put up a rodeo-experience for the customers.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  I'm 28 and I'm sure I'll be long dead before any large organizations move past Windows 7.
executesorder66 9y ago
Try Greenshot [0] for taking, and editing screenshots on Windows. [0] http://getgreenshot.org/ http://getgreenshot.org/
- saw-lau 9y ago
  The main issue I have with this is that, like you could guarantee vi/vim being present on any Unix/Linux installation, mspaint.exe would always be present on any Windows installation for easily taking screenshots. When working with locked-down systems, such as we do at work, that was a really useful feature.
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    AltGr+Scroll, Win+R "mspaint", Enter, Ctrl-V is in my muscle memory.
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    Snipping Tool still there for screenshots.
    - 9y ago

frou_dh 9y ago

For me, the program lost its charm when they introduced the antialiased shapes, soft brushes etc (Win7?). The MSPaint aesthetic was all about rough and ready aliased drawing.

eksemplar 9y ago

It's probably the Microsoft product I use the most outside of windows, visual studio and outlook. If it could save pictures without a background I probably wouldn't need any other image editor. I probably use it around 10 times a week professionally, much more than I use Word (I do most of my writing and notetaking in standard text editors and only use Word when it's time to style it or save to PDF). So this is terrible news to me.

Yuioup 9y ago
https://www.getpaint.net/ https://www.getpaint.net/
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Thank you. Unfortunately I'm on an enterprise controlled software stack. I'm not sure my needs warrant adding new software and thus more maintenance work for the IT department when our stack also includes photoshop.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Just be careful where you click, that site is loaded with adverts for dubious software.
  - strangecasts 9y ago
    If you want to avoid that, it has a Chocolatey package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      Actually I think I'll avoid it altogether, if someone is willing to do that on the web site then what might they drop in the installer.
MLR 9y ago
Paint 3D shipped already and is the replacement version, it can also save pictures without a background.

skc 9y ago

Just use paint.net

danijelb 9y ago

Interesting to notice, syskey.exe is also going to be removed. Wonder how it will affect fake tech support scammers.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This is cited as one of the reasons for its removal. It had no real practical use for the user at this point and was basically just a handy ransoming tool. My tool for cracking syskey locks doesn't work on UEFI systems so I'm glad they're just gonna break he functionality.

Spooky23 9y ago

Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. They purged the other image tool (the MS Office one that let you view TIFFs), and now they're killing paint. I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Creation for Personal Users (not to be confused with a creators update) available on 4 different channels for $6.99/mo. The stable branch will not have the ability to open JPEGs or save to a format other than clip art, but a new revisions will be delivered daily.

vtlynch 9y ago
"Microsoft to remove ability to right-click." Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Mouse Power Users for $6.99/mo.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  We jest, but bullshit like that is entirely possible. Windows is a product in decline in many ways, and a public company still needs to grow revenue. Users can (and are) migrating to modern platforms, but many of the organizations using it are doing so because they have to, will continue to have that need for a decade or more. My colleagues at work who run apps on the IBM Mainframe and POWER server platforms plan their operational cadences around peak periods where they lease access to CPU cores and memory on their servers. They only get to access about 25% of the hardware without a meter running. Microsoft can and probably will do the same conceptual thing to extract more dollars.
  - vtlynch 9y ago
    I was trying to point out how incredibly myopic and foolish your idea was.

Jaruzel 9y ago

Paint XP for Windows 10 seems to be a good go-to alternative: http://www.mspaintxp.com/ http://www.mspaintxp.com/ Although, it's a shame that it's an installer, and not just a zip-file.

wodenokoto 9y ago

Not even 30 minutes ago, I saw a MS sponsored add for Paint on Facebook. But then again, unlike this article, I don't consider a rewrite with new functionality as killing off an app, even if the rewrite has "3D" attached to the title.

halcy0n 9y ago

There is a whole subculture of artists who use MS paint as a means to make a specific form of art. Also this actually saddens me that sure there could be other low budget tools but without one baked into the OS think about the kid bored in school who can no longer stumble into mspaint and start doodling in class.

matteocontrini 9y ago
Paint 3D is now preinstalled on Windows 10
- ygra 9y ago
  To add to this, pixel-precise drawing is still available in Paint 3D, so "the specific art style" mentioned by the GP is still possible there. Heck, some things that cater to this style are even easier in Paint 3D than in Paint.

BatFastard 9y ago

Question is why does MS after 32 years still include incredible WEAK tools like Paint and Notepad? They should spent a little and buy up some of the great tools out there and include them in windows.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
This might help explain why they won't go down this route: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- BatFastard 9y ago
  True, but.. this was filed in 1998 when they were trying to gain exclusivity in the browser market and for good reason.
mrec 9y ago
Notepad is "weak" for a reason: it aims for absolutely minimal dependencies so that it can still be used for system recovery when everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Hard to make that argument for Paint though, I'll grant you.
- jle17 9y ago
  At the very least they could add support for Unix line breaks...
  - garaetjjte 9y ago
    ..and stop using BOM in UTF8 files...
- alanh 9y ago
  Consider the OS X equivalent, TextEdit. In contrast to Notepad, it remains fairly minimal while being upgraded to always use and showcase the latest OS X APIs and design standards.

jcadam 9y ago

If it weren't for MS Paint, I would have absolutely no image manipulation tools available to me at work :)

davidiach 9y ago

I still use Paint for things like shrinking the size of an image or editing screenshots. Sad to see it go.

StreamBright 9y ago

Literally the most used desktop MS application for me.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

Weird, in the comments i almost don't see paint dot net ( https://www.getpaint.net/ https://www.getpaint.net/ ) get mentioned? Awesome free tool, between paint and photoshop. Support for layers, ...

mxuribe 9y ago
Wow, I haven't heard mention of paint.net in sooo long! I used that years ago, and it was awesome...then numerous migrations, and different types of jobs (where needed less use for ms paint or paint.net)...lately just use whatever is on the OS - sometimes it is GIMP, sometimes its ms paint. Yeah, if no one else vouches for paint.net, i'll definitely vouch for it!
cableshaft 9y ago
Yeah, I don't get everyone pitching a fit over this when Paint.net is so much better and nearly as lightweight.

stordoff 9y ago

What alternatives does Windows have built-in? I use mspaint a fair amount to black out sensitive areas of screenshots or for cropping images to a specific size (scale then shave x pixels off the sides to get a specific aspect ratio), but not often enough that I feel like setting up an alternative on all my machines.

piaste 9y ago
Not worth it for Paint alone, but you might want to consider using something like Ninite (if you want the least possible hassle) to install most of your favourite apps on all your machines with one click.

srikz 9y ago

Off topic, but what caught my eye in the article was this: > Now Microsoft has announced that, alongside Outlook Express, Reader app and Reading list, Microsoft Paint For those who don't know Reader was introduced in Windows 8 as a PDF reader with annotation support (worked with Stylus in just black colour). I always hoped it would get more features and could become comparable to Preview on Mac. But sadly it was never updated for Windows 10. I still use it as I don't like using Edge for PDFs and Ebooks. Nothing wrong with it, but I hoard a lot of tabs and every time I open a PDF several tabs will open up. Would really like my browser and ebook / PDF viewer to be separate apps. /rant also RIP Paint. Gave me great joy as a kid and the constraints challenged me in fun ways to create 'interesting' art

mavhc 9y ago
Got to get people to use Edge somehow. Also try banning installers from adding pinned icons so users don't use Chrome, banning installers from setting defaults so users don't use Chrome, When you do open Chrome adding adverts for Edge to the screen (it's totally faster guys, come on). Banning browsers from the Windows Store, and thus Windows 10S.
- tedunangst 9y ago
  I'd be more sympathetic to poor google's plight if they didn't plaster banners telling me to switch to chrome all over the place.
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  "...banning installers from setting defaults..." goes way, way further than "... so users don't use Chrome". Installers silently replacing my default app is user-hostile and I encourage any steps my OS vendor takes to reduce the ability to do that. I had zero problems manually switching my default browser in Windows 10 to Chrome.
  - mavhc 9y ago
    It's more the way they did it, and continue to try to reset Edge to be default. I'm talking about my users who can't work the shift key, they just click whatever is pinned to the task bar. Same with how Mail is now pinned by default, even though everyone uses web mail. Any individual one of these wouldn't be too much of a concern, but together it seems suspicious.

melling 9y ago

Is Kitra the best alternative? https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ This is an opportunity for open source options to get a lot more users.

HelloNurse 9y ago
Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle: it does much more with far greater hardware, software, user effort and user experience requirements. Additionally, the specific focus on high-end painting using a tablet means that emulating MS Paint with pixel-perfect drawing, crisp shapes and palettes has halfhearted support or needs clever workarounds.
- zeptomu 9y ago
  > Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle I think that is too harsh. Although Krita can do more than Paint the user-experience is pretty well done and it also works for basic tasks providing useful defaults.
  - HelloNurse 9y ago
    Yes, Krita is well polished, but it deliberately offers advanced tools: some proudly beyond the competition (e.g. layers and brush engines), some quirky, some plain and dependable, some state of the art, all meant for expert users and optimized for serious work (including basic tasks), not for ease of learning.

vtlynch 9y ago

Paint is one executable file, no? Getting rid of this does literally nothing to combat bloat and seems like a pointless move that will irritate users.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
On the other hand, this basically means just one line to the script to be run on each fresh install of Windows. It's not like we lost the license to use Paint, did we?
- vtlynch 9y ago
  You mean in order to place it back on the machines? Sure, just one line. But there seems to be a rather big difference between basic software that is guaranteed to be available and software that requires any amount of scripting/preparation to install, even if it is just one line.
sjwright 9y ago
Yeah, but that executable file is like 335 kilobytes, or at least it was in Windows XP. * checks Win10 * My goodness it's 6,520 kilobytes now. At that rate of growth... * back of napkin math * KILL IT!!

mwexler 9y ago

All the comments that "you can just use X to do Y" is missing the point that Paint just works, for almost every value of Y. No argument, Paint.net is great, snipping tool solves the grab and crop, but for most anything else you need to do in a hurry, you need a quick paint program. It's like removing Notepad: we all know hundreds of editors we would replace it with, from Notepad++ to vim/emacs... but isn't nice that when you aren't on your box, you know the core set of tools that are always there? (In other news, Fedora announces dropping grep, lc, and ls from the distro, in favor of python: "most users are devs, let them write their own tools" they stated in a press release). Paint3D takes longer to load, and has made the simple... much less simple. While we can all say "Yes, that's the way of tech", it's just not necessary. And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jadbox 9y ago
Woh, why would a distribution drop something as common as grep? Saying you can build it yourself sounds crazy when it always exists and cross-platform...
- markrages 9y ago
  Twas satire
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Maybe they want the core experience to not require ancient command line tools? You don't see many Windows users complaining about the lack of grep.
  - castis 9y ago
    I don't see many Windows users hanging out in the CLI for extended periods of time, either. Even though OP wasn't serious about fedora nixing grep, surely you see the lack of equivalence in that argument.

excalibur 9y ago

Let's get rid of the handful of useful features left in Windows. Next time around we'll take care of that pesky calculator, and then we're coming for notepad.

anonymfus 9y ago
Calculator was replaced by UWP version two years ago.
crispytx 9y ago
Hahaha! Best @#$%ing comment in this whole thread.
vram22 9y ago
>and then we're coming for notepad. If they ever do that, Metapad will still be there to help. Though I'm mainly a vi/vim/gvim user, I use metapad sometimes for quick edits. It's very lightweight, but still supports some more features than notepad. It has some neat features. The developer has stopped working on it, but I think a) he released the source code (C or C++ using the Win32 API) and b) the download is still there on his site. Search for metapad or metapad download.
- vram22 9y ago
  Note: if using Metapad, might want to tweak the default options a bit before using it for anything important. E.g. I seem to remember that ESC exits the file you are editing, maybe without warning. Other than a minor thing or two like that, it's a neat tiny text editor, though - IMO.

Jeema101 9y ago

Paint has always been a handy tool for me for making annotated screenshots as well as lightweight image manipulation. I use it on a fairly regular basis at work. I forsee the result of this being lots of people Googling 'download ms paint' in the future and ending up with malware on their system. Seems kind of shortsighted if you ask me.

devopsproject 9y ago
check out greenshot
connorcpu 9y ago
I think more likely will be users type 'paint' into the start menu and just click the first option which should be the new Paint 3D on a fresh system

xyzzy4 9y ago

I wonder if they check the usage statistics before getting rid of it? Because surely there are millions of people using it every day. Don't they care about the users?

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

Pity that they don't open source it. I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint. The layout and functionality is incredibly intuitive. You drop someone into Paint, and even if they've never seen it before, they can start doing stuff within a minute or so. You drop the same person into GIMP, and five minutes later they're still trying to figure out how the hell to select a paintbrush. I understand that every image editor is trying to compete with Photoshop, but sometimes I don't need Photoshop. I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.

jb55 9y ago
> I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint Have you tried mypaint?
- sattoshi 9y ago
  Yeah, ugly as hell.
- irth 9y ago
  I loved MyPaint on the Nokia N900, with the pressure sensitive screen and the built in stylus
rockinghigh 9y ago
These basic image highlighting features are so useful that Apple made them available in the Mail app (https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204093 https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204093).
mlvljr 9y ago
Might be in the old leaked Win 2000 source pack, though :)
ProAm 9y ago
Pinta has always been my simple go to image editor on linux. Similar to Paint.NET

4ndr3vv 9y ago

MS hasn't said they're going to remove it: [“Deprecated” Apps] ...are not in active development and might be removed in future releases [1] Its clearly not being actively developed, but there's no indication its going anywhere just yet. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-that-are-removed-or-deprecated-in-windows-10-fall-creators-up https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-th...

unethical_ban 9y ago
In other words, mature. So let's mark it for removal.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ygra 9y ago
Perhaps similar to Notepad, which has been more or less feature-complete since Windows 2000 or so. I guess it is also internally "deprecated", but will continue to be shipped for quite a while. Microsoft doesn't tend to break such things. In Paint's case, I'd guess the most that will happen is that it will vanish from the Start menu, but the executable will still be there.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  "Find" in Notepad does not wrap around to the start of the document, and has no option to do so, so in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start. That's bone-headed behavior and should've been fixed a decade ago.
  - pdm55 9y ago
    "in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start" Yep, but we all know to do this. Better to keep it with this quirk, than remove this indispensable software. Notepad and Paint are so simple and work fine, long may they remain.

donretag 9y ago

I remember when I first started using OSX (forgetting OS9 and prior for now) and being shocked that there is no built-in paint program. There still is not one. Paint works amazing well for very quick edits, which is all I really ever need to do.

toast0 9y ago
Preview actually lets you do a lot of things you might have wanted to use paint for. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind would expect something called 'preview' to do image editing, so I never noticed until someone told me.
- alanh 9y ago
  Haha, true. I use Preview all the time for cropping, converting, and annotating images. You can even fill out, draw on, and annotate PDFs in Preview.

crispytx 9y ago

Shit is weak. Paint was the bomb.com.

squidbot 9y ago

"Goodbye Old Paint"

shawnbaden 9y ago

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Hal Lasko (The Pixel Painter). Hal started using Microsoft Paint when he got a computer on his 85th birthday until his death at 99 in 2014. He made some great looking art bit by bit. https://vimeo.com/70748579 https://vimeo.com/70748579 - The Pixel Painter https://hallasko.com/ https://hallasko.com/

erikrothoff 9y ago
Ooo I'm so happy that you mentioned this! I own two Hal Lasko's :) That story is amazing. It really shows the value that tech can add to anyone's life.

borski 9y ago

I wonder what Pat is going to do? https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-paint/ https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-pai...

Chronos 9y ago

This is because Homestuck ended, isn't it?

booleandilemma 9y ago

Does this mean I'm going to have to wait 10+ seconds for GIMP to open up if I want to work with a screenshot?

ygra 9y ago
No one's stopping you. Paint.net and Paint 3D both take only about a second, though.

epx 9y ago

They could improve it to make it Preview.app-like. I use Preview in Mac a lot, it is great.

krylon 9y ago

I have not used MS Paint in many, many years, but I have some fond memories of playing with it on my first PC. I can understand, though, how this upsets people that have made it part of their workflow. For simple tasks, Paint is nice because it starts really fast compared to e.g. GIMP. And it's on every ____ing Windows machine, you can rely on that. Same as notepad or calc. These programs, after all, are there for a reason. (I am not on Windows 10, my work laptop runs Windows 7, and at home I don't use Windows, so this does not affect me directly.)

peterburkimsher 9y ago

Paint is still my preferred way to save screenshots. Press the Print Screen button, paste into Paint, draw a red line, save.

grimgrin 9y ago
So here's a pretty cool thing using ShareX: http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png Ok so it's another screenshot tool. Capture all, a window, a selection, etc. Bind global hotkeys. But where it really shines is the easily configurable "after capture" and "after upload" toggles. In the screenshot you can see I have: copy to clipboard, save, and perform actions turned on. The first is nice because I can easily paste into Slack. The middle is nice because it goes to a particular directory and I have history. But the latter is something I just turned on to show you how it can easily open the screenshot into mspaint.exe for you. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/ https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/ https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/
vacri 9y ago
Move to linux and use Shutter :) Shutter is great for screenshots, both taking and annotating/editing.

verri 9y ago

Does this mean that half of the bitmap OLE objects will break in a few months to come?

notadoc 9y ago

Why? People use Paint surprisingly often, surely they know this.

keithpeter 9y ago

Does anyone else here remember the little booklet that came with Windows 95 where they showed you how to produce little projects with Notepad, Wordpad and Paint? The idea being that even with the bare OS, you had a few tools to work with and some tutorials that exposed features of the OS in a systematic way. Anecdote: I'm still to this day showing colleagues at work the wonder of the Windows button and the power of Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Y and within a document window Ctrl-F.

Yahivin 9y ago

I may as well shamelessly self promote an alternative: https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/ https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/ It's simple, fast to start up, and you can drop images in from your desktop.

racl101 9y ago

What's a few kilobytes. Just keep the program. Worry about the important stuff. Like everything else wrong with Windows 10. This is the least of it.

eco 9y ago

I'm amazed just how few people in the comments here actually read past the clickbait headline. Paint is deprecated. It isn't being removed for the time being. Beyond adding a ribbon menu and some brushes Paint hasn't received meaningful updates since XP so it should really come as no surprise that it would be deprecated. If Microsoft's history is any indication Paint will be around for another decade, and continue to work if you just download it from some MS Paint nostalgia fansite for decades later.

drngdds 9y ago

They say it might be "removed in future releases." But isn't Windows 10 supposed to be the "last" version of Windows, just perpetually updated? It would be really strange if a system update removed Paint.

kin 9y ago

Paint is the one program I miss the most from Windows other than the Windows file explorer and window management. Paint clones don't seem to cut it. Preview doesn't cut it for me either. Everything else seems to offer a subset of Paint in a more complicated manner. I don't quite know how to explain it. Is it possible to DL an executable of Paint and run it in Wine?

pdm55 9y ago

I use Paint as my scanner connection. So simple, it just works.

rosseloh 9y ago

Time to go find the executable and save it somewhere. I use mspaint for one thing, but it does that one thing beautifully. When I'm designing large complicated structures to eventually build in Minecraft, there's nothing quite like zooming all the way in to a blank canvas, turning on the grid, and drawing the floorplan pixel by pixel. mspaint does this so well because of its simplicity. 20 basic colors, single-pixel drawing (with the ability to do lines and boxes if necessary), and not much else. It's fast, it's simple, and since it's just an image file, it's no problem to transfer the design to another computer (where you can open it right up again in mspaint and have all the same tools). I've played around with the "new" paint, Paint 3D, and as far as I've seen, there isn't even the ability to put down a 1x1 grid. Basically, they removed a bunch of the "paint" features in order to add the "3D" features.

joeylemberg 9y ago

http://yinyangpaint.com http://yinyangpaint.com

maxxxxx 9y ago

I always find it fascinating that they can redesign the whole OS with almost every release but thinks like cmd, notepad, Wordpad or paint stay unchanged for decades (?) despite having huge feature gaps. They surely should be able to find one or two devs that can put some ongoing effort into these.

xg15 9y ago

So their big shift of making Windows an OS more focused on creation than consumption starts by... nixing Paint. Why? It's a dickish enough move on it's own, but I can't understand the reason behind it. This will surely generate a huge PR backlash wgen actually implemented, with even more people trying to block the update... for what exactly? The article doesn't even talk about a planned replacement. What is their plan?

subbu 9y ago

The best use of MS Paint I have seen is by Sal Khan for his initial versions of Khan Academy videos. He used pretty much all features of MS Paint effectively.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

First they came for the desktop gadgets, and I did not speak out— Because I did not use desktop gadgets. Then they came for Purble Place, and I did not speak out— Because I did not play Purble Place. Then they came for my MS Paint — and there was no one left to speak for me...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kelvin0 9y ago

I'm waiting for Geos Paint to make a comeback: https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_issue_1_(June_1994)(GEOS_and_Commodore).html https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_...

agentgt 9y ago

Every time GIMP crashes on my Mac (been meaning to figure out why but for some reason its when I copy and paste) I think of Microsoft Paint and I would love it if Apple had an analog. Its sad because other than MS Excel, MS Paint is one of the few MS apps I know how to use. I am so bad with word and powerpoint. Even my knowledge of Excel is pretty bad. I have been known to even load up simple datasets in Postgres,Pandas, or even R because of my sheer incompetence and inability to navigate menus. Minesweeper is also pretty cool and underrated albeit boring after a few... errr 100s of plays.

ctrlrsf 9y ago
Although fairly basic, with the Preview app you can do some minor editing, annotating, drawing, cropping, resizing, etc.
- agentgt 9y ago
  I'm embarrassed to say it took me a full year of mac use (I came from linux originally) to learn that preview app could edit as well you can insert your own signature!

makecheck 9y ago

As a 3rd-party developer I could almost understand retiring apps (too many dependencies on deprecated stuff, ancient code base is too hard to maintain, etc.). Yet built-in apps are much more special. For one, many people consider built-in apps to be "the OS" as much as the OS itself. And two, if there is any development team that can continue supporting an ancient code base, it's the OS vendor: if they really have to, they can do things other companies can't (like privately continue to ship functions that are now publicly unavailable). It should always be more in their interest to evolve rather than redo.

b0rsuk 9y ago

There's an implicit fallacy that MS Paint did a lot of good and the world would be a sad place without it. No, something else would fill that niche. The same nostalgia argument has been used for MS Windows, Internet Explorer, etc.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

EdSharkey 9y ago

I'm surprised Microsoft CAN kill off Paint, given how much they cater to big corporate interests and keeping things backwards compatible. For example, I've heard stories that Notepad can never be upgraded nor removed from Windows because there are big corporate users that have binary monkey-patched Notepad in order to achieve some business goals. They literally have to keep Notepad unchanged from Windows 3.x days or else some big corporate entity won't upgrade Windows when the upgrade comes out. I think that's one reason that Windows desktop and its apps are such a hodge-podge representation of Windows UX over the years. I can't believe Paint isn't absolutely mission critical to some big company somewhere, maybe its design wasn't conducive to monkey-patching.

LyalinDotCom 9y ago

Nick Craver had the most funny tweet on this subject today: "They’re killing MS Paint in the Windows 10 Fall Update. We’re trying to migrate our design team to alternatives now." ROFL... had to read that one twice. https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336 https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336

symlinkk 9y ago

I wanted to hate on this decision but honestly Paint 3D is a much better version of MS Paint. For instance in MS Paint if you write some text in a textbox and then de-select the textbox it's extremely hard to select it again so that you can edit the text. And if you make a square selection and then use the edges of the square to expand your selection, you'll actually stretch the image under it, which I found unintuitive and odd. I think the biggest mistake here was creating a new application called Paint 3D and discontinuing the original one. That's bound to create bad PR. Instead they should have "updated" the original Paint to become Paint 3D, just like they "updated" calc.exe.

bonoboTP 9y ago

I never used the new MS Paint after the ribbon-redesign for Windows 7. The XP version was so intuitive, precise and clean. Actually it's possible to use the XP version in newer Windows editions, but it involves some tinkering.

mattss 9y ago
You're supposed to put commands you use frequently on the quick command bar with the ribbon
tdeck 9y ago
I recently had to use Paint again and noticed the newer versions got rid of the "right click on this color to set the background color" mechanic. Sure it's not very discoverable, but that was a great power feature that I didn't even appreciate until it was gone.
- marvy 9y ago
  The feature is still there, but the mechanic is different. More clicks needed, but more discoverable.

faragon 9y ago

Please, Microsoft, don't remove the Paint program.

jasonrhaas 9y ago

nooooooooooooooooo

bane 9y ago

OS X/MacOS doesn't have a "paint" analogue. So users have to run around and install a bunch of things or buy things to replace it. It's a PIA on new systems, and I still am not quite sure what a good new user replacement is. Years ago when I first learned GUI programming, a simple paint application was the 2nd or 3rd example given. I hope they replace it with something, I consider such a tool an essential part of any modern GUI OS.

RyanRies 9y ago

Deprecation is not the same thing as removal. They're not removing Paint. They are just not developing it any more. They may still leave it in the OS for years to come; maybe even indefinitely. There are a lot of deprecated programs that still ship with Windows.

richardboegli 9y ago

MS Paint is here to stay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa...

ctolkien 9y ago

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa... Paint isn't going anywhere.