Microsoft Gives Paint the 11th Hour Reprieve It Deserves | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Gives Paint the 11th Hour Reprieve It Deserves

thurrott.com

83 pointsadrian_mrd95 comments

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 it needs a powerful image editor. They are bringing paint back because many folks are very familiar with it, it gets the job done for them, and has a certain nostalgia factor to it to boot.

The point is to bring back paint exactly as it has been for years. Not iterate on the project.

One of my favorite examples of paint is the popular streamer destiny doing a Bob Ross painting. It actually comes out looking pretty okay...

https://youtu.be/8XxsgEw49p0

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.

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.

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.

After recent system change, I went out looking for something better. I've settled on this for now:

https://flameshot.js.org/#/

Simple, mostly[0] bullshit-free, GPL 3 licensed. Grab part of the screen, draw boxes, save to file or clipboard. Between this and delayed capture / whole screen capture available as command line flags, this currently solves all my screenshotting needs. Can even upload to imgur if you care for that.

[0] - I say mostly, because it has some (optional?) tray-icon stuff, which I don't care about as I don't even use a tray/external status bar in my tiling WM.

Flameshot is a recent discovery for me, and it has saved so much time.

Before, screenshots was one of those things that really sucked when using Linux.

Amazing tool.

> 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.

Gimp was never meant to do those kinds of operations, and it still can't - at least not "easily"; it's still as cumbersome as before.

You can still do "pixel level" editing - you just can't do primitives.

Honestly, though, it's not the right tool for that.

If I need to do vector art, then I'll use a vector art program like inkscape. If I need to do CAD, then there's a number of options in that space as well.

If I need to do pixel level editing, or something similar, my go-to editor on Linux is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2

...mainly because I'm familiar with it since it is virtually a clone of various editors I used on my Amiga back in the day.

That makes sense. I remember being frustrated though because Gimp was usually the only imaging app that came installed in a desktop Linux system. And I never found a good Paint-like app that wasn’t super buggy.

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

Create a selection using the rectangular selection tool, then navigate to [Edit->Stroke Selection].

that's far from intuitive

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/

You can bind Snip & Sketch to the Print Screen button in Ease of Access -> Keyboard. This is a new feature in Windows 10 1809.

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.

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).

Does that work seamlessly even with applications that take over the screen?

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.

Does snipping tool allow for drawing lines/boxes over the capture? How about adding notational text?

Not on current Windows 10 (non-insider versions) no.

Only freehand pens and some highlighting with a freehand marker.

No text at all

Not even with insiders builds unless it's in 19H2 or later pre-releases.

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.

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/

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!

You gotta try the shipping tool:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13776/windows-use-s...

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.

Why mess around with Paint3D?

Shift+ctrl+s, [win key] pai[enter], ctrl+v, resize canvas, alt+f+s, done.

> Why mess around with Paint3D?

that's the button available in the snipping app.

IrfanView is even faster than MSPaint and has the same functionality.

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?

> Notepad couldn't open CR/LF line endings correctly

Those got added last year.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/windows_notepad_uni...

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.

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?"

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.

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

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?

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 :-)

Isn't that the new photos app?

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.

I get an app that's lightweight, free with no advertising, and extremely simple to use at basically no computational or memory burden?

I'm surprised MS don't just strike a deal with Paint.NET [1]. It would help fund a worthwhile project (which feels as simple as Paint, but is significantly more advanced) that appears to be run from donations only.

[1] https://www.getpaint.net

It is the best balance between ease of use and sufficiently advanced features for someone who is not a professional designer - at least among all image editors that I tested on Windows and Linux (never had a Mac).

Paint.NET and IrfanView represent the best-of-best for simple image creation and viewing, and I cannot believe that they're free.

At my last job some busybodies started inspecting whether or not we have correct licenses for everything we use and explicitly deleted IrfanView from peoples' computers because they didn't. When word got around, actually went out and bought IrfanView license just for the "not gonna let you do that" moment. It's damn useful, and I've been using it for over a decade now on every Windows machine I had. Before that, I remember using something called "ACDSee", but they must have made the software worse in important ways, because I eventually switched to Irfan.

If you want to support it, and dislike PayPal, you can pay for it on the Windows Store.

i visited the webpage once, and one of the shady advertisements was one of those pseudo-native-ad fake download-button things. just seeing it really pissed me off.

between the shitty ads spread everywhere and the whole drama over source and licensing, i don't want anything to do with it. i'm content to use krita, gimp (both free) or affinity photo (inexpensive).

It's a very good piece of software. Unfortunately its early Linux fork (Pinta) is much more unstable.

+1 Pinta. I use it all the time. Would be overjoyed tho if Pinta got a little more love. It's pretty stagnated but still a great tool.

It is great, but lacks a few key features. For example there is no way to select a part of the image and rescale that part (meaning that the image content of the selection would be resized by dragging the corner of the selection box).

My brain just doesn't grok the way of working in GIMP so I highly appreciate the general simplicity of Pinta. Somehow simple tasks are really complicated in GIMP. I usually just want to draw primitive shapes, move or resize image content, add text. Exactly the MS Paint-style basics, but it's a pain in GIMP.

I used Pinta to make a technical cutout illustration the other day, for fun. I should have saved more often though, because it crashed and took everything with it.

I also wondered why it defaulted to saving in JPG. When I opened my .ora save file, the colors had changed in a way that affected the antialiasing. It looked pretty bad.

Anyway, while I wouldn't recommend it for illustration work unless you save often and save to PNG, for simple image work and even charting it is pretty nice.

In my opinion Paint is one of the best ever examples of good software UI & UX.

It's so simple and obvious how to use it - all the most important controls are right there to hand and the few slightly more advanced features are easily discoverable in a well organised, fairly flat menu system. You can literally figure out every function either by intuition or very quick trial and error.

It uses skeuomorphism and icons wonderfully to make everything absolutely clear in form and function, even for a very novice user.

And - I think this is an important - it deals with images as a 2D grid of pixels without any abstractions on top. No semi-3D overlapping 'layers', etc. In keeping it simple, they give the user maximum control over the image with no abstractions to get in the way.

In all sincerity, I think it should be a case study in simple, right-tool-for-the-job UX and UI design.

I would LOVE something as simple as the Windows XP version of Paint on Linux. Something that opens instantly, doesn't have a bazillion options, nested and floating tool menus, etc.

I've tried Gimp and a few others and I end up wasting way too much time just trying to figure out how to do basic stuff like draw a red box around something.

I've always used Kolourpaint for this, which scratches exactly that itch for me.

The following additional packages will be installed: kinit kio kwayland-data kwayland-integration libdbusmenu-qt5-2 libfam0 libhfstospell9 libkf5archive5 libkf5attica5 libkf5auth-data libkf5auth5 libkf5bookmarks-data libkf5bookmarks5 libkf5codecs-data libkf5codecs5 libkf5completion-data libkf5completion5 libkf5config-bin libkf5config-data libkf5configcore5 libkf5configgui5 libkf5configwidgets-data libkf5configwidgets5 libkf5coreaddons-data libkf5coreaddons5 libkf5crash5 libkf5dbusaddons-bin libkf5dbusaddons-data libkf5dbusaddons5 libkf5doctools5 libkf5globalaccel-bin libkf5globalaccel-data libkf5globalaccel5 libkf5globalaccelprivate5 libkf5guiaddons5 libkf5i18n-data libkf5i18n5 libkf5iconthemes-bin libkf5iconthemes-data libkf5iconthemes5 libkf5idletime5 libkf5itemviews-data libkf5itemviews5 libkf5jobwidgets-data libkf5jobwidgets5 libkf5kdelibs4support-data libkf5kdelibs4support5 libkf5kdelibs4support5-bin libkf5kiocore5 libkf5kiofilewidgets5 libkf5kiontlm5 libkf5kiowidgets5 libkf5notifications-data libkf5notifications5 libkf5parts-data libkf5parts-plugins libkf5parts5 libkf5sane-data libkf5sane5 libkf5service-bin libkf5service-data libkf5service5 libkf5solid5 libkf5solid5-data libkf5sonnet5-data libkf5sonnetcore5 libkf5sonnetui5 libkf5textwidgets-data libkf5textwidgets5 libkf5wallet-bin libkf5wallet-data libkf5wallet5 libkf5waylandclient5 libkf5widgetsaddons-data libkf5widgetsaddons5 libkf5windowsystem-data libkf5windowsystem5 libkf5xmlgui-bin libkf5xmlgui-data libkf5xmlgui5 libkwalletbackend5-5 libphonon4qt5-4 libpolkit-qt5-1-1 libqt5qml5 libqt5quick5 libqt5script5 libqt5test5 libqt5texttospeech5 libqt5waylandclient5 libqt5waylandcompositor5 libqt5xml5 libvoikko1 phonon4qt5 phonon4qt5-backend-vlc qtwayland5 sonnet-plugins

That's a lot, but it does work well.

Yeah, if you do not have the KDE libraries already, installing any program that uses them will give you this package vomit. One way to manage this is to do apt-get install kolourpaint and then close your eyes, press enter, y, enter enter enter (repeat enter around 30 times or so, depending on your terminal size), open your eyes, type exit and go watch a couple "top 10" videos on youtube or something.

After that you can use Kolourpaint.

Careful where you suggest something like that. Next week we might see a front page HN shell script that blacks out your screen, starts an install, and queues up some top 10 videos.

And people will use it.

Part of this is packager fetish for breaking things into the smallest possible components. I used to see the appeal. But I don't see the point in separating libqt5test5 - Qt's unit testing framework - from the rest of Qt, if installing a paint program just yanks it in anyways.

Yeah, the packages themselves are rather small, so disk usage is not nearly what you might expect.

Agreed about libqt5test5.

Just from a quick look, you're probably not using KDE and haven't got any other QT5 apps installed. I wonder what a static build of that app would look like.

This is probably a good use case for Snaps or whatever the current desktop-container-du-jour is.

I just tried it out, and it's exactly what I want. I can't believe I never found this one when I was searching earlier. Thanks!

Kolourpaint is excellent for this kind of work.

xpaint is pretty much this, though the UI is rather old style and you may have to experiment with it a little bit to become proficient.

One of the most nostalgic things about Windows was messing about with MS Paint to kill time in the days when the internet didn't exist yet. I wish OS X had some kind of native paint program. Seems like such a basic thing, why not include it with the OS?

The irony is that MacOS used to come with a really good paint app up until system 7 or so:

https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw...

The closest 3rd party app I've found to ms paint is Paintbrush, but that's a bit too primitive compared to paint and it doesn't work that well with retina screens.

What horrifies me is that the iPad still doesn't have a basic Calculator built-in, while the iPhone does.

PS - I'm familiar with the Spotlight Search trick (and asking Siri) but that is pretty limited.

I wouldn’t consider using Spotlight as a calculator a ‘trick’. It’s a very powerful way to write out complex expressions.

But yet still not a calculator.

I know this isn't what you're looking for, but if your desperate you can use Siri as a calculator.

Siri needs an Internet connection to do anything.

I remember drawing ovals, circles and then using the fill feature to put colors in there. That were some fancy colorful circles back then :)

osx has a perfectly useable markup tool, the one that pops-up when you print-screen. Weirdly enough, I don't know how to launch that with a blank canvas.

Seashore (a severely gimped GIMP) is a decent simple editor for OSX.

https://github.com/robaho/seashore

Interesting. I may figure out a way easily to get a full screen of white (full-screen in a browser on a blank HTML page?) to hackily print screen to use that as MacOS "paint", heh.

Those are the same markup tools found in Preview.

If you open an image or PDF in preview, just go to View -> Show Markup Toolbar

Or you can choose tools right from the Annotate menu.

You can do it from Preview. You can even CMD c a video frame in QuickTime and in Preview select File>new from clipboard.

Preview.app has all this. Just go View->Show Markup Toolbar.

But the Internet has existed for over 20 years. Wouldn’t it be better to encourage the use of open source where a community can develop and the app will get much better?

Krita, for example, seems popular: https://krita.org/en/

Krita is a simulated canvas and doesn't cover the tiny scope that Paint does. It has the same problem as Paint 3D: too complex.

My point is that including "barely good enough" by default hinders the development of other open source apps for the platform.

I know nothing about Krita other than its existence. I imagine there are other options.

Paint.NET is probably the best option, but Microsoft would probably have to fork it as the UI has novelties (floating panels and so forth, which non-technical users might struggle with). The hard thing about Paint is that it fills a similar niche to Notepad or Nano.

> hinders the development of other open source apps for the platform.

Filling the same niche as Paint is hardly improving the world. As soon as your Paint clone does anything innovative it fails to fall inside the constraints of Paint.

As a simpler example, any Notepad clone that added, say, tabs would instantly fail to be a Notepad replacement. I'd seriously question how much value OSS competition (consisting of a native textbox and menu bar) is adding to the world. Edit: Just because OSS can compete doesn't mean it should.

I don't know why they don't just give it a facelift, but keep all the core functionality and interface...instead of the Paint3D route of making it overly confusing and keeping a very dated looking paint .net app.

I know the common sentiment is that software is never "done" and there's always something that could be better about it, but I think Paint is fine as it is without any facelifting.

Most of the software I rely on feels done to me. If anything, I'm afraid that some of the companies have built monstrosities that just aren't sustainable.

Evernote, for example, feels like it should be made way, way smaller so that it can be maintained by a small group of people.

Thank goodness. What would Jim'll Paint It do otherwise?

https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/

[I started the Twitter thread this article links to, and work with Paul and Brad.]

Some context via a timeline:

* Dec 12, 2017: The Microsoft Paint utility in Windows was officially deprecated [1].

* Dec 20, 2017: A Product Alert button [2] was added to the app that, when clicked, indicated Microsoft Paint was going to move to the Microsoft Store [3]. That is, it was going to be available on-demand rather than ship in-box with the operating system [4].

* ~1H 2019: Microsoft has now fully reversed this decision [5] and removed the Product Alert button from the application altogether [6]. There is no official communication as to why this change was made.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-th...

[2] https://i0.wp.com/www.onmsft.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/...

[3] https://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2017/12/windows-10-paint-3d-...

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

[5] https://twitter.com/brandonleblanc/status/112055486957057229...

[6] https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1119940129450184704

I don't really care that much since I rarely use paint or paint 3d. I just find it odd that MS devoted any time to paint3d. I remember when they announced it they went on and on about all these great 3d things you could do. And no one cared. Did enough people in charge really believe that people would be into the 3d stuff or was it just trying to convince people that they wouldn't really need Pain any more?

Does anyone know why they don't update the built-in apps more frequently? Paint, Notepad, Wordpad and others are pretty much remnants from the Win95 days. On some controlled machines it would be a godsend if Windows had a better built-in editor.

Updating these apps can't be that hard compared to all the other stuff they are doing.

Even if the new apps for Windows 10 are better I still go out of my way to uninstall 3D Paint and the rest. If they didn't cram candy crush and all of the other garbage down our throats I probably wouldn't be so sensitive to additions like 3D paint.

I think it's lame that macOS doesn't ship with anything like Paint.

MacOS Preview has (very) basic image editing built in, but it’s not widely advertised. Open it up and look through the menus.

As an avid user of paint, I noticed that it was replaced only weeks after it was first removed (accessed by right-clicking on an image and using "open with").

It made me smile that Paul Thurott's SuperSite lives on.

What on earth is Iker doing in that article?

He's saving Paint

The connotation of using a goalkeeper is more like "avoiding Paint to pass", which is not what the article talks about.

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