7 ms·

I think commenters here are missing the point. Yes there are alternatives. Yes there are open source versions. But Microsoft isn't bringing paint back because i

• dewiz 8y ago
  After bringing it back though, it would be nice to see some few features being added, without too much complexity. IMO Paint should be the default image viewer, allowing basic editing, my 2 cents :-)
  • awiesenhofer 8y ago
    Isn't that the new photos app?
• lawl 8y ago
  I find paint extremely useful for screenshots. PrintScreen, Win+R, mspaint, crop it, add some red boxes, done. Using the snipping tool is infinitely slower for me. Win, snipp, click new, select region, click the edit in paint 3d button, wait for Paint3D to open, add boxes. mspaint opens instantly and is sufficient for basic tasks, that's why I like it when using windows.
  • manderley 8y ago
    You can bind Snip & Sketch to the Print Screen button in Ease of Access -> Keyboard. This is a new feature in Windows 10 1809.
    • Someone1234 8y ago
      I'm a really big fan of that keyboard shortcut (first time I've used the Print Screen key on purpose in years). On a related note I hope they aren't done developing "Snip & Sketch" it still lacks features from the Snipping tool in 1809 (Delay Granularity, Window Snip, Highlighter, and the new Ruler is buggy as heck).
    • munk-a 8y ago
      This sounds like heresy, you can pry paint and notepad out of my cold dead hands. Also, while you're at it, no one will need more than 640K of memory.
    • krageon 8y ago
      Does that work seamlessly even with applications that take over the screen?
  • shawnz 8y ago
    Now you can use Win+Shift+S to capture a screen region, which will put it on your clipboard and also put a notification in the notification area which opens the capture in snipping tool when clicked, where it can be saved to a file.
    • joezydeco 8y ago
      Does snipping tool allow for drawing lines/boxes over the capture? How about adding notational text?
      • LandR 8y ago
        Not on current Windows 10 (non-insider versions) no. Only freehand pens and some highlighting with a freehand marker. No text at all
        • coldacid 8y ago
          Not even with insiders builds unless it's in 19H2 or later pre-releases.
      • jccalhoun 8y ago
        a couple versions ago they added "snip & sketch" which does. When they released it they said they were getting rid of the snipping tool but they don't seem to have done that yet.
  • WalterBright 8y ago
    Yes. It's like Notepad. It's small, lightweight, loads instantly, needs no manual, is available on every machine, and perfect for simple editing tasks.
  • staticassertion 8y ago
    Yes, this is 99.99% of the image work that I do. Take a screenshot, add a box. On Ubuntu there is no default tool for this, to my knowledge. I installed `pinta`, and it's way overkill and far more complex than paint. A sane, default, "draw box on image" app is a good thing.
    • jolmg 8y ago
      The Linux program most similar to Paint that I know of is KolourPaint[1]. If my memory of Paint serves me right (I haven't seen that program in many years), KolourPaint seems pretty much like a clone of Paint. [1] https://kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/ https://kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/
    • cblum 8y ago
      > A sane, default, "draw box on image" app is a good thing. Speaking of that, is that still insanely hard to accomplish in Gimp? I haven’t used it in years but I remember being extremely frustrated with it.
      • jetrink 8y ago
        Create a selection using the rectangular selection tool, then navigate to [Edit->Stroke Selection].
        • recrof 8y ago
          that's far from intuitive
      • jzymbaluk 8y ago
        Once you've invested the time into getting familiar with Gimp it's not terribly hard, but it's more effort to learn than paint which is dead simple out of the box. Plus Gimp still takes 20+ seconds to start before it's fully useable (even on SSD!), vs paint being ready to go on less than a second
      • cr0sh 8y ago
  • pjob 8y ago
    This is generally my workflow as well. One useful tip is that Alt+PrintScreen will scope the screenshot to only the active/focused window, reducing the need for additional cropping.
  • buttcoinslol 8y ago
    Why mess around with Paint3D? Shift+ctrl+s, [win key] pai[enter], ctrl+v, resize canvas, alt+f+s, done.
    • hnbroseph 8y ago
      > Why mess around with Paint3D? that's the button available in the snipping app.
  • mutagen 8y ago
    Greenshot [1] is a great open source Windows screenshot utility for the workflow you describe. Prt Scr, select region, editor opens with screenshot where you can add boxes, arrows, etc. and save, copy to clipboard, etc. Like MS Paint, it is lightweight and focused in a way few Windows programs are these days. [1] https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/ https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/
  • yardshop 8y ago
    I like to use the OneNote Screen Clipping tool for this: Win+S, select region, paste into page (or where-ever), add arrows and boxes etc. This works by changing the default Screen Clipping action from adding to a page to just copying to the clipboard, so I can as easily paste into an email or IrfanView or other things. Even good old Paint!
  • duxup 8y ago
    You gotta try the shipping tool: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13776/windows-use-snipping-tool-to-capture-screenshots https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13776/windows-use-s...
  • Grue3 8y ago
    IrfanView is even faster than MSPaint and has the same functionality.
• melling 8y ago
  No, we aren't missing the point. We understand exactly what Microsoft is doing. Now, do you understand what happens when you bundle a basic app with the OS? Personally, I don't care either way since I don't use Windows. Enjoy MS Paint.
  • trophycase 8y ago
    I get an app that's lightweight, free with no advertising, and extremely simple to use at basically no computational or memory burden?
• Theodores 8y ago
  On my computer I have a simple calculator program. I can go to the view menu and change it to 'scientific'. It then has loads more buttons. I can also choose another mode to make it more useful for finance things. This interface was pretty much the same with the desktop calculators used by schoolkids, if you wanted radians you could change the mode. If you wanted statistics you could change the mode. Normally the basic mode was what you wanted. With MS Paint and the decades it has been part of Windows they could have evolved it. They could have kept the 'simple' view for the simple mode it is and had a photo editor mode that was a full-featured Photoshop clone for those that wanted it. There are ways to iterate a product and keep it simple. What is shocking is how Microsoft have kept the tools deliberately backwards, e.g. Notepad and Paint. Notepad couldn't open CR/LF line endings correctly, why not listen to user needs and put the functionality in?
  • baud147258 8y ago
    > Notepad couldn't open CR/LF line endings correctly Those got added last year. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/windows_notepad_unix_linux_macos/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/windows_notepad_uni...
  • smhenderson 8y ago
    Yeah but they turned calc.exe into a metro app and now I hate it. The transition from old school calc, unchanged for years, to the new one is exactly what I don’t want to see happen to mspaint.
• marquis-chacha 8y ago
  My favorite application of Paint will probably always be The Big Lez Show [1], a 4 season long animated series drawn entirely in Paint, culminating in two hour-long films. Its not for everyone (Australian druggo humor), but if you are in a niche which would appreciate that, its definitely worth a look. It makes brilliant use of the medium: the creator, Jarrad Wright, started making the show in high school on his school-provided laptop, and as the seasons progress the viewer witnesses Jarrad's progression as both an animator and a story teller. Eventually Jarrad embraces the medium to the fullest extent possible, bringing Paint into the storyline in an absolutely mind-blowing meta-animation sequence. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarfingerz2112 https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarfingerz2112
• paleogizmo 8y ago
  Paint ticks a lot of nostalia boxes, but it really isn't very good even for the "draw box/arrow/text" on a screenshot purpose that most people use it for. It's annoying that it doesn't have a "paste as new image" option so I have to crop whatever I pasted in. Plus, whatever I draw goes on the background layer so I can't fiddle with it. And just so people don't get the wrong idea, yes I hate new things too. Paint 3D is stupid. And why did Snipping Tool, which was almost decent, get replaced by Snip & Sketch which does absolutely nothing better?
• hakfoo 8y ago
  People have fixed workflows they've built over years or even decades. A big part of the reason you stuck with Windows and Office was that those workflows just worked. Preserving customer workflows seemed sacred to Microsoft back in the day-- think of the famous hacks just to ensure various badly behaved DOS games survived in Win95, or when they offered the XP Mode virtual machine. Somnething seems to have changed recently. Every time they say "Oh, you can just learn to use the store and download Paint for free" or "we're replacing Snipping Tool with a Ziploc bag of lampreys" or "let's replace the Start Menu to make it tablet-friendly and hide where you go to shut the PC off.", they lose the plot. Pile up enough of these, and consumers start to say "if I have to learn all this stuff over, why shouldn't I just buy a Mac or run Fedora?"
  • MrMember 8y ago
    My guess is the abundance of metrics. A manager sees a stat like "less than 5% of Windows users open Paint at least once a month" (I just made that up), and they see something that can be cut.