Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

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.

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.

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-th...

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 - The Pixel Painter

https://hallasko.com/

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Is Kitra the best alternative?

https://krita.org/en/

This is an opportunity for open source options to get a lot more users.

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?

Paint XP for Windows 10 seems to be a good go-to alternative:

http://www.mspaintxp.com/

Although, it's a shame that it's an installer, and not just a zip-file.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

There goes my screenshot editing software

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

MS Paint is here to stay

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa...

Literally the most used desktop MS application for me.

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

I'm waiting for Geos Paint to make a comeback:

https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_...

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

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.

I may as well shamelessly self promote an alternative: https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/

It's simple, fast to start up, and you can drop images in from your desktop.

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...

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

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.

Just use paint.net

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.

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.

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?

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

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

"Goodbye Old Paint"

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

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

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.

Why?

People use Paint surprisingly often, surely they know this.

This is because Homestuck ended, isn't it?

nooooooooooooooooo

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.

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.