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Comment by cheeze | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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