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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
- thordenmark 3y agoWordPad was the only thing worse than MS Word. So good riddance. But Windows still desperately needs an ultralight word processor that can do more than Notepad. I dread Word even opening.
- gigel82 3y agoI'm calling it now: Word with ads will ship inbox with future versions of Windows :) Maybe the whole Office suite; if you want a PowerPivot in Excel you'll have to watch a 2 minute unskippable ad for hair loss medication. Totally "private" though, scout's honor.
- system2 3y agoOr something with cloud-login-is-a-must Word Lite. Then make you feel very restricted while showing you "amazing" things with an obnoxious popup about Office 365 every time you open Word Lite (I made up don't look up).
- ndiddy 3y agoIt wouldn’t be the first time: https://www.cnet.com/culture/microsoft-introduces-starter-version-of-office/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/microsoft-introduces-starter-ve...
- bombcar 3y agoWord pad was basically Word for Windows 6 and was quite usable for basic needs. Really only finally out to pasture by the free Google Docs, I’m sure wordpad killed a decent ecosystem of editors that may one day have competed with Word.
- drzaiusapelord 3y agoEverything MS does is for the business case. Wordpad, windows, etc exist only in a capitalist context and need a financial justification to exist. It was there exactly for the reasons you state, to kill the word processor market in Windows. Previously you had all these other players but Win95 came with Wordpad for free which had a lot of functionality. For pros, you could buy Word. I don't think we appreciate how many competitors Win95 killed with all its built-in GUI apps when people upgraded from 3.1. Now I'm starting to see Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors. I also read that RAR support is now native in Windows, so WinRAR and other RAR programs are probably going to finally die. I think this comes with further ZIP support and improvements which means apps like 7-zip are going to be less in demand.
- 38 3y ago> Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors. Won't ever happen. For it to even have a chance, it would need to have syntax highlighting, which Microsoft will never add.
- kapp_in_life 3y ago>Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors That seems unlikely when Microsoft is already investing so much in VSCode.
- GuB-42 3y agoI don't think Notepad is going to be anything more than a basic text editor. It certainly gets new features from time to time, but it is more about making it usable in the modern world than adding advanced features like Notepad++ has. It does compete with Notepad++ in a sense that now, Notepad can actually edit text files, and if you want advanced features, there is VSCode. And I must admit that I don't have any use for a middle ground text editor like Notepad++ or PSPad anymore, so maybe their strategy is working.
- jiofj 3y ago>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf). It can open and edit docx files, no? MS has suggested Office as an alternative, but Office costs money, so yes, this is lost functionality. And no I am not interested in uploading my docx files to google docs or microsoft office online to edit them, as they may contain private information.
- smoldesu 3y agoAre you too good for LibreOffice?
- vouaobrasil 3y agoLibreOffice is good for a lot of tasks but it's bloated, and takes time to start up. Wordpad is great for all sorts of quick tasks when you just need to edit a quick RTF like a poster or some basic letter, and don't want to stare at a ribbon full of functions you'll never use.
- drzaiusapelord 3y agoLO for Windows launches with a launcher that pre-loads it a boot time. I find Writer to be pretty pleasantly light-weight on a modern computer. A lot of its performance shortcomings are a bit exaggerated especially on modern equipment.
- toast0 3y agoPre-loading at boot time is a tradeoff, and it'd be nicer not to have to pay it. Cold load times aren't terrible on modern systems, but wordpad is much faster. (Microsoft Office isn't great at fast loading either).
- jiofj 3y agoLibreOffice doesn't come preinstalled with Windows. It also is very bloated compared to WordPad.
- croes 3y ago>and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed There are texts I don't want to write in a browser
- goalieca 3y agoThere’s a million and one offline open source solutions that are higher quality than wordpad.
- croes 3y agoThere a nearly infinite solutions that also contain malware, the one solution of the OS maker gets at least a little trust from me
- eviks 3y agoIf all you need is "a little trust", there are also plenty of options
- Tao3300 3y agoWhich do you suggest? If it doesn't have rich text support, isn't lighter than anything in the OpenOffice family, and is as unstable as AbiWord, don't bother saying it.
- deafpolygon 3y agoHonestly, I'm just waiting for the Linux community to figure itself out with Wayland/X and get a bit more stable and I'll probably be switching. The only question in the air for me is how I'm going to manage my cloud files (I've gotten used to having filesystem sync between multiple devices) as the existing offerings seem more or less meh.
- hypercube33 3y agoI haven't looked yet but on steam deck I've noted that Windows/wine stuff has improved a ton lately - could you just run your sync tool from win32 on *nix?
- deafpolygon 3y agoImportant critical files, to run on something like this? No thanks.
- heavyset_go 3y agoWayland's a solved problem if you use an up to date or rolling release distribution.
- deafpolygon 3y agoNo, it's not. A lot of things are a works-in-progress, and it's less stable than X. Calling it solved is understating by a large margin the plethora of issues that still need to be addressed. Is it better than where we were a couple years ago? Yes, definitely. Is it stable enough to be a daily driver? Somewhat, yes.
- lmz 3y agoI thought it was just a wrapper over the rich edit control, but the control only supports RTF and WordPad supports docx.
- jaclaz 3y agoCannot say if Notepad does it in recent versions, but on older Windows systems Wordpad was useful to quickly open texts made on Linux (with just LF instead of CR+LF) which in Notepad would show as uninterrupted.
- hypercube33 3y agoI think it's killed by Word Online (free-ish) and VSCode over at the Seattle company.
- niutech 3y agoWord Online requires sending docs to MS cloud and VSCode doesn't provide text formatting, so they are different things.
- alexey-salmin 3y agoExactly, the only reason why I was sticking to WordPad whenever I had to use a windows machine
- dawidpotocki 3y agoThey did indeed add LF support to Notepad, 5 years ago: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-notepad/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoTook them long enough, honestly it was bizarre how long it took them. Even worse was how resizing the notepad window would introduce newlines into the text if you saved it.
- jaclaz 3y agoThank you, though now I cannot anymore honestly state that MS did not introduce any new meaningful feature in Windows 10 ;).
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThis is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get. I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoThis happens in opensource too, its just more rare. Terraform relicencing comes to mind, but there has been many, many other times too.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoIt happens, but there's a way out: forking. With proprietary software, the option of forking does not exist.
- Dalewyn 3y agoffmpeg had a schism just over a decade ago and the splinter group forked off into libav. One of the splinter group members happened to be the now-former ffmpeg maintainer in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories and switched them from ffmpeg to libav. Yes, this was done purely for ideological reasons.[1] So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world. In a way, I would argue it's even worse in the open source world because when it happens the driving factor is oftentimes ideological dogma instead of something simpler like lack of money or interest. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg
- prmoustache 3y agoffmpeg kept being available and developed. It is a good example that shows that whatever reasons are behind, it is never worse in the open source world.
- mostlylurks 3y agoThe crucial difference is that with FOSS, unless a piece of software has some particularly gnarly and/or finicky dependencies, you can easily bypass whatever is in your package manager's repositories and just use the version you want (by compiling it from source, or by using a ready-to-use version provided directly by the maintainers of the software itself, which is often, if not always, a possibility), regardless of what the maintainers of the aforementioned repositories do. With proprietary software, you simply do not have this option.
- kjellsbells 3y agoImplicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types. Plain text or Office formats, PDF, thats it. That might well be true for 99% of people, but it isn't true for me. I'd like to have an editor built into windows that was way lighter than an IDE but could handle things like JSON, XML, and CSV without sweating. Notepad++ serves that purpose today but would be nice to have it bolted into Windows. Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)
- layer8 3y agoI think it’s more a recognition of the fact that Microsoft expects Windows users to purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, as part of their push to replace local-first applications with cloud services. Also look at how they are changing desktop Outlook to a web-tech based UI, which is a prerequisite for eventually moving it to the cloud altogether.
- Condition1952 3y agoMicrosoft knows that windows users will eventually cave in to some of those second option subscription reminders.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago> Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!) An awful lot, maybe most Windows users who need to inspect non txt filetypes still wouldn't be comfortable with Vim, even with a user friendly keybinding.
- hulitu 3y ago> Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types Regular windows users are mostly corporate and there are (management excepted, of course) a lot of file types to be manipulated. (CAD, MS Office, etc)
- layer8 3y agoI wonder what program XML files will open in by default instead of WordPad… [0] Maybe XML Notepad? [1] [0] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/changing-default-xml-editor-from-wordpad-to/0fc042d5-ef9a-47e7-ba36-e120de1619f0 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/chang... [1] https://github.com/microsoft/XmlNotepad https://github.com/microsoft/XmlNotepad
- richard_todd 3y agoToo bad they can’t open-source it and see if there is any community interest in keeping it going.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Aachen 3y agoThen they couldn't recommend people to buy an expensive licence to have a wysiwyg editor on their Windows
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoWordPad was always useful to read RTF files, which used to be pretty common. I guess they have been replaced by PDFs at this stage. Would still be nice if Windows had some sort of basic word processor, as WordPad had functionality that many users would still find useful, basically just fonts and headings.
- pasc1878 3y agopdf and rtf are totally different things. rtf is nearer html - in fact Apple Mail changed from rtf to html in very early OSX possibly 10.3
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoSure but PDF seems to have replaced RTF in some ways. When you used to download software it would often come with an RTF file as documentation, now it would be a PDF.
- pasc1878 3y agoYes but not if you need editing which is what WordPad can do. In this case we have an improved fuction as instructions should not be editable.
- hyperpl 3y agoI use Linux and BSD primarily but at my job where we use Windows I actually quite like wordpad.exe/write.exe (same thing?) for dissecting prod logs complete with highlights, formatting, etc.. Once you turn off line spacing and margins, it's quite good and generally pretty fast at wrangling a bunch of text that you may end up emailing via Outlook.
- unforeseen9991 3y agoNotepad++ is much much better for log and config parsing. Also has lots of plugins, like the diff plugin which I rely on a lot when comparing dev/prod config files and such.
- throwaway_75369 3y agoOne interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)
- chii 3y agoif only the OLE stack wasn't riddled with malware (think those activex toolbar addons you could download for IE), it would've been a great idea!
- badsectoracula 3y agoOLE isn't any more "malware riddled" than anything else you install on your PC, at its core it is just a fancy plugin system for embedding stuff in a document without the document editor knowing about it. OLE is as susceptible to malware as any other plugin system - in other words unless you somehow[0] install malware, you wont get malware. [0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE
- cyberax 3y agoWordPad was an official sample application for the MFC and OLE: https://web.archive.org/web/20070429125746/http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/51y8h3tk(vs.71).aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20070429125746/http://msdn2.micr...
- xattt 3y agoYes, this explains why Wordpad seemed like a wrapper for OS-level text controls and views. This is like any PDF viewer on Mac OS now.
- 3y ago
- FredPret 3y agoOff topic, but I'm loving the Mac equivalent, TextEdit. After trying every kind of fancy task management and note taking system from org-mode to Obsidian to Logseq, I now use a .rtfd (.rtf + images) on iCloud to act as a note-taking system / todo-list. I would have used pen and paper but I need to paste screenshots and URLs. There's an iOS app called RTF Write for 99c. Now I always have my notes, tasks, and shopping, and above all, it's so simple and quick.
- Tsiklon 3y agoAs a tangential aside Textedit I believe used to be provided as sample source code with Xcode. So even if it was removed it may never die.
- HelloImSteven 3y agoIt still basically is — the document-based app template is pretty much TextEdit minus some settings.
- xmonkee 3y agowhy not use the notes app? you get in built folders and shari g options too
- 404mm 3y agoNotes would be a total killer app if it supported Markdown.
- troupo 3y agoThey forced people to upgrade the full operating system when they ever so slightly changed Notes' format recently. I shudder to think what it will take them to support Markdown. (And yes, I use Notes for everything :) )
- xtracto 3y agoI found notes-up when I moved to Linux mint. It supports markdown! Ans it doesn't change quotes like notes does .
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- niutech 3y agoWhich free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.
- pacifika 3y agoHtml with contenteditable I guess?
- Andrex 3y agoYou just gave me the idea for an HTML file format that writes changes to contenteditable back to the file. Has anyone tried this before? I'm likely ignorant. But it would be a pretty exciting document publishing format.
- niutech 3y agoThere are already multiple WYSIWYG HTML editors such as BlueGriffon.
- throwanem 3y agoWith a little server-side support it wasn't all that rare an approach back in the early-mid 2000s days of web dev, when none of us had any idea what we were doing and couldn't wait to find out. "Exciting" is certainly a word I would use to describe the results, especially in the common case where no VCS was in use.
- theanonymousone 3y agoThat's the sad fate of fifth wheels. Or when you are neither Word nor Notepad.
- qbrass 3y agoYeah, I remember Microsoft Works.
- forgotmypw17 3y ago>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision Actually, I have a reason to be outraged by this decision. I like using WordPad, and it will take me time and effort to find an adequate replacement for a simple note-taking application.
- niutech 3y agoTry Obsidian.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThank you for the suggestion, but Obsidian does not meet my needs. It is a completely different class of application. I just want a basic rich-text editor that opens quickly and lets me quickly jot something down and save it as a file. wordpad.exe is less than 3MB, while just the installer for Obsidian weighs in at 72MB.
- system2 3y agoWell, the new notepad in win11 is very nice. Obsidian has many amazing plugins make it super easy to use and you don't need to worry about unsaved files crashing and disappearing. Notepad++ is standard for code editing and extremely fast. I use all these 3 alternatives for different reasons but my #1 is still notepad.
- notatoad 3y agoso keep using it? ending development doesn't mean the executable stops working. the good news for you is this is essentially a promise that wordpad will never change.
- Aachen 3y agoI took > will be removed in a future release of Windows to mean it's not just unmaintained (indeed that's fine) but actively removed from your computer
- Apocryphon 3y agoA sad loss, but it did seem like Notepad gained a lot of features in recent versions of Windows- surprised it doesn’t support rich text.
- jug 3y agoI agree. Now would be a perfect opportunity to give it Markdown support. Rich text for a more modern era. It wouldn’t need to be a big feature. Just have a button that toggles text editor and md preview and let it print formatted. Notepad is now a WinUI app so let it render the md with MarkdownRenderer.
- taubek 3y agoThis is a shame. I still use is to open RTF and DOCX files.
- Aachen 3y agoWait, it opens files made with Microsoft Office? I thought it refused that and only did rtf and text files like html, txt, etc. Is this perhaps new or do I just misremember?
- hulitu 3y agoAFAIK Wordpad can only open Word 6 files.
- taubek 3y agoI open DOCX files, and it is listed here http://hs.windows.microsoft.com/hhweb/content/m-en-us/p-6.2/id-7479c387-8dc4-40b6-9506-cc7a58c61f0a/ http://hs.windows.microsoft.com/hhweb/content/m-en-us/p-6.2/... Not sure if it is some update or what.
- justsomehnguy 3y agohttps://imgur.com/a/48sl0X0 https://imgur.com/a/48sl0X0
- torstenvl 3y agoThis is deeply unfortunate. WordPad is by far the best implementation of RTF anywhere.
- avidiax 3y agoBut who uses RTF? I can't recall ever receiving an RTF file. Scanning my drives, I've only found a single Readme RTF file in some old Windows utilities.
- Kye 3y agoScrivener saves everything in RTF files.
- whobre 3y agoIt’s used a lot in the localization industry.
- physicles 3y agoI’m curious, why is that? When you’re dealing with semi-structured data like localization files, adding formatting seems counter-productive.
- asddubs 3y agohow so? if a word is bold in a sentence, you want it to be bold in the translation without having to split the sentence up (which will fail as soon as there is more than one formatted word)
- physicles 3y agoI see. I’ve seen embedded styling/html in localized text, but doing that with rtf also makes sense.
- o_m 3y agoTextEdit on macos use rtf by default
- ZeroClickOk 3y agoThe natural upgrade for WordPad did never come: basic html or markdown editing.
- afandian 3y agoAren’t you describing Frontpage Express? I think it was bundled with Windows 98?
- ZeroClickOk 3y agono so complex.. just everything that a online wyswyg editor like tinymce can do, saving as a single HTML file instead
- altintx 3y agoFrontpage Express was an IE activeX control with contentEditable set to true. There was plenty of functionality around building <table> or whatever but comparing it to TinyMCE is absolutely right. Just 6 years before FckEditor was a thing.
- badsectoracula 3y agoFrontpage Express was basically WordPad that saved HTML instead of RTF/DOC.
- reassembled 3y agoOh man, FrontPage. I haven’t heard that name in 20 years. I got started learning how to make web pages in FrontPage and then branched out to editing HTML in notepad, aided with my trusty copy of HTML for Dummies.
- pixelpoet 3y agoI remember thinking I was hot shit after switching from FrontPage to Macromedia Dreamweaver for my geocities site... those truly were the days :D
- schube 3y ago> We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf Doesn’t Office require a paid license on top of the Windows license, unlike WordPad?
- LegitShady 3y agoBundling a word processor is anti competitive based on all the objections to Microsoft bundling anything else. So what if you have to pay for it? Wasn't that the whole point of making this fair? You can buy any word processor, or find a free one.
- kadoban 3y agoLike they give a fuck. They've gone back to forcing use of their own browser and others.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoDamned if you do, damned if you don’t then.
- codetrotter 3y agoInstall LibreOffice. If you were using WordPad before, LibreOffice will be a fine replacement for your purposes. https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/
- massysett 3y agoWhat’s the load time on LibreOffice these days? Years ago on Linux it took awhile. I use Notepad and Wordpad because they load fast.
- conception 3y agoAbiword still is great.
- 3y ago
- dominojab 3y ago[dead]
- not_your_vase 3y agoI'm always sad to see applications go (especially if the recommended alternative is a paid software), but did that thing ever work properly? In the past decade I used Windows only when someone held a gun to my head, but before that I remember that WordPad always messed up all documents I have ever opened: weird page and line breaks, picture and textbox formatting all over the place, and saving a document was a good way to prevent future reading.
- davnn 3y agoNobody uses WordPad, nobody wants to improve WordPad, WordPad will be sunset.
- smackeyacky 3y agoI always figured this was by design. Microsoft needed a GUI word processor that was free to stifle competition in the new "windows software" market, but not good enough to upset their Word business. Good job WordPad - one of the flag bearers of Microsofts anti-competitive business practices.
- lockhouse 3y ago[flagged]
- tredre3 3y ago> I literally could write a WordPad clone in an afternoon You might be able to make a Notepad clone in an afternoon, but not wordpad. Creating parsers for all the formats it supports (rtf/doc/html) as well as the renderer/wysiwyg editor would take anyone several days of either coding, or stitching libs together.
- lockhouse 3y agoThe parser and renderer is a pre-existing RichTextEdit widget. Add menus and save, open, and print functionality and you are over 90% of the way to a WordPad clone.
- profile53 3y agoIt’s a pre built widget because Microsoft wrote it for WordPad though.
- lockhouse 3y agoIt’s actually likely to be the opposite. WordPad could be a test application for the RichTextEdit widget.
- canucker2016 3y agoNo. The RichText control was written for the Win95/Exchange email client. Since there was now a RichText control that supported RTF in Windows, the Windows group could write a thin wrapper around the RichText control and replace Microsoft Write with Microsoft WordPad. Support for Microsoft Word file formats came later once the Word group took over responsibility for the RichText control code.
- 3y ago
- moritzwarhier 3y agoIs this somehow symptonatic considering (a presumed lack of) adoption of RTF today, compared to formats such as markdown? I just was hit by the nostalgia of hearing the app name at all
- llimos 3y agoFun fact: Before WordPad there was Microsoft Write. Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.
- sjkna 3y agopbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. (It used to be called Paintbrush.)
- cesarb 3y ago> > Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today > pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. And in both cases, the reason was most probably backwards compatibility, so that programs which directly called WRITE.EXE or PBRUSH.EXE to open a file would keep working. Most of these are going to be 16-bit Windows programs (which AFAIK no longer work, unless you're still running a 32-bit build of Windows), or 32-bit Windows programs directly ported from 16-bit Windows programs (Microsoft designed the 32-bit Windows API to make it easy to have a single source code building both 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the same program, and to make it easy to adapt the source code from a 16-bit Windows program into a 32-bit Windows program; it was not unusual back then to offer both 16-bit and 32-bit builds of the same program, built from the same source code).
- 3y ago
- NavinF 3y agoNice to see that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are also on the list: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...
- sph 3y agoIs Notepad now able to read files with UNIX-style line endings? Because Wordpad was the only one able to read .txt files created on Linux.
- syntheticcorp 3y agoYes it can do that now, at least on Windows 10
- emrah 3y agoI wish they would open source it so it would continue to exist
- BookhouseGames 3y agoShame. Notepad++ should now be the go to, right?
- system2 3y agoI personally don't know anyone who doesn't have OpenOffice, Libre, or Office (local non cloud most of the time). I do not know anyone using WordPad for any reason while they have notepad for opening simple no-formatting documents (php etc.), obsidian, or notepad++. Seriously, nobody uses WordPad.
- spread_love 3y ago> we recommend Microsoft Word Which now costs $159.99?!
- CSSer 3y agoOf course. Breaking every tracking script that marketers try to share is hard work! And you laugh now, but wait until they roll out Clippy GPT-4 edition.
- jodrellblank 3y agoWhich is $0 if you're the kind of person to use Google Docs and GMail and other free web services: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-on...
- hackerbrother 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- atum47 3y agoI know your deeds, that you are neither notepad nor word. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm - neither notepad nor word - I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
- breadwinner 3y agoMicrosoft is slowly removing features, but is it adding any notable features? Here are some examples of features I would like to see: - Native Markdown viewer and editor, to replace Wordpad - Disk space manager - graphically show where my diskspace went; allow me to find and delete large files - Restartable and reliable file copy (similar to rsync on Linux) - Notepad with same features as textarea element in browser, including spellcheck, multilevel undo/redo, completion, etc. - Printing that can stay connected to printers on my local network - Dictionary app (MacOS has it) - Air drop compatible with iPhone - A screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows) - No system processes that randomly consume high CPU - Command-line zip - Instant search (Mac has had it for how many years now?) - Stock app (MacOS has it) - Beautiful widgets (like the old Konfabulator) https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/konfabulator/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/konfabulator/
- accoil 3y ago> - Command-line zip Does https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.archive/compress-archive https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof... do the trick?
- discreditable 3y agoOnly if you don't need to create ZIPs over 2GB.
- DHowett 3y agoWindows includes BSD tar, which can produce ZIP files. tar -c --format=zip -f foo.zip path/
- causality0 3y agoFor me the "canary in the coal mine" for when Microsoft actually starts caring about the user experience is when the taskbar dynamically expands and contracts with the number of open windows.
- Throw10987 3y ago
- andersa 3y agoI must be the only one who didn't know what a WordPad was before reading about it being removed on here. What do you use it for? I can't remember the last time I had to edit a text document that wasn't either pure text (like markdown), a pdf, or an office file. Some people mentioned ".rtf" files in this thread, but I don't believe I've ever heard of one of those being used for anything.
- xen2xen1 3y agoWordPad had one real use in my world: if you edited a Linux document in WordPad it was smart enough to not mess up the line endings CR/LF versus LF IIRC. It was nice to not have to worry.
- andersa 3y agoBut doesn't a basic text editor like notepad++, or sublime text, I guess nowadays people use vscode too, take care of that? Why would you want to use some kind of rich text editing program for those?
- Aachen 3y agoSo you have to go out and install third party software rather than just right click and open with WordPad, particularly when using someone else's computer, or a corporate system where you can't just install random software But the point is moot now that they added support for this to Notepad. Dunno if there are still supported versions of Windows out there that don't have it, but at least the newer systems should
- xen2xen1 3y agoHave they? I'll have to try now, or really.. I haven't worried in a long while, so it's probably had it a long time now.
- midasuni 3y agoI’m guessing you’re a lot younger than me. Notepad++ didn’t come out until 2003, sublime 2008. Wordpad was on every windows machine from 1995 onwards - no need to install anything on a machine you might not even be able to, and unlike notepad it could open text files from unix machines properly Now I believe at some point in the last decade or so notepad was upgraded to be able to open those files so it’s no longer a feature. I dropped windows well before those other editors came out so not sure exactly when notepad was fixed, but I do remember using wordpad to read files
- heavyset_go 3y agoLong live the WordPad clone that ships with WINE
- chaostheory 3y agoI haven’t used Word Pad in over a decade. I suspect a lot of people fall into this camp I don’t see the point of word pad anymore. Its purpose was a lite free alternative to MS Word. With online word processors like Google Docs and even Word online, both of which have free versions that can work offline, it just makes Word Pad entirely pointless especially when there are open source word processors. I feel that this would be a bigger deal if notepad was killed, but then there’s notepad plus.
- Jarobq18 3y agoWhat about all the MSIs which are using .rtf for EULAs?
- tgma 3y agoI would normally feel neutral/good about this except Microsoft now removes half useful programs and preinstalls or at least shows the icon of total crap like Instagram in a clean install. I mean, what the fuck.
- xvilka 3y agoMaybe one day they will even switch to UTF-8[1]? [1] http://utf8everywhere.org/ http://utf8everywhere.org/
- deafpolygon 3y agoOnly on HN: Microsoft including WordPad = anti-competitive, but Apple including their Office Suite for free isn't.
- zephyr9 3y agoOld software is depreciated. To deprecate software would be to call it names.
- emodendroket 3y agoBefore the 19th Century "ignore" meant "to not know," in accordance with its Latin origins, if you're looking for other words to try and turn back the clock on against the overwhelming tide of modern usage.
- jodrellblank 3y ago"Deprecated features for Windows client" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...
- emodendroket 3y agoIt feels like the era when people needed or wanted WordPad has come and gone. If you're satisfied with something simple and don't care about specific Word features or formatting you're probably using Google Docs or OpenOffice or something.
- Aachen 3y agoBoth are quite incomparable in terms of how heavy they are and startup time. WordPad is about as fast as notepad but has most of the features you need except opening Word ecosystem documents of course
- emodendroket 3y agoWhich are things that people can barely rouse themselves to care about, especially weighed against the benefits of online storage.
- ChoHag 3y ago[dead]
- hyperman1 3y agoI used it on text files with non-windows EOL chars, where notepad would get confused. One of the great things of the windows builtins is trustworthyness: they're always there. Even if notedpad++ is miles better, it can't always be installed, e.g. on a server.
- Avlin67 3y agoI did not even remember I had this application on my system
- dgb23 3y agoI remember Microsoft Works better! I had it on the first computer that I owned and could do all kinds of stuff with it. Aside from Works I also got some version of Visual Basic. I still remember playing around with those programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
- mark-r 3y agoThis is a real shame. There's value in simple apps that come bundled with the OS and don't change for years. Wordpad is the simplest way I know to get a sample of a font. My workplace doesn't use Microsoft apps so there's absolutely no chance I'll be able to use their recommended replacement of Word.
- tiernano 3y agoin one way, this is a good thing, right? But in another, how do i manage old servers which still use TLS1.0 or TLS1.1... The only browser i can use, most of the time, is Firefox for getting into older IPMI endpoints (old servers that dont get security updates... Thanks HP/Dell...). Guess i will be using a Linux VM for managing that kind of gear now...
- BillyTheMage 3y agoI'm confused, what does WordPad have to do with TLS and IPMI?
- tiernano 3y agoFeck... i commented on the wrong one... There was one on TLS 1.0 and 1.1 being deprecated... (facepalm)
- CaesarA 3y agoNext to things like Notepad, the Calculator, and Command Prompt, Wordpad is and has been one of the most useful programs ever bundled with Windows in terms of functionality and user-friendliness, so the idea of getting rid of it (even if it gets replaced) just seems kind of asinine.
- kkoste 3y agoLess bloat is always good. Can't imagine many using WordPad anyway.