XP Paint – A Web-Based Version of Window XP's MS Paint | Hacker News Reader

XP Paint – A Web-Based Version of Window XP's MS Paint

chowderman.github.io

250 pointschowderman107 comments

This version of MS Paint is like the peak example of covering 99% of basic use cases while being incredibly simple to use. Whenever I need to make an arbitrary image real quick I miss this version of Paint. Nothing else I can find in 2020 even comes close to its intuitive interface.

I find Paint.NET excellent for both basic scenarios and advanced ones too (it supports layers, effects etc). Strongly recommended. https://getpaint.net

It's free but it's also available in Microsoft Store as a paid product, which gets automatic updates as a small extra and mostly works as a donation towards the developer.

I love Paint .NET, but I wince every time I go to their website (which is not paint.net) to download it: the download button[1] gives me strong "clicking this will give you a shareware virus from 2005" vibe. It is also very sketchy that their website (getpaint.net) redirects to another site (dotpdn.com) for the actual download page.

I power through these feelings and download it anyway, knowing what wonderful software awaits on the other side, but it's really hard to shake those thoughts.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/pfVCnLN

I recommend everyone on HN using Windows to use Chocolatey and Chocolatey GUI to install their software. Chocolatey is a package manager / "app store" for FOSS and other free-to-install software on Windows.

Downloading random installers was always flawed, but it's not getting any better. Chocolatey is the best you can get as a Homebrew/Homebrew Cask equivalent on Windows, and even if it takes some getting used to is so much better than navigating the web for installers.

These days I prefer https://scoop.sh/.

Chocolatey is fine but it would sometimes cause problems which I frankly don't remember. With scoop I've had no issues.

Yeah, whichever package manager you use is a huge improvement over working your way through dodgy ad-ridden websites and installers.

I'm guessing the HN crowd can use either. A big plus for Chocolatey is that it has an official GUI (Scoop seems to have GUIs as well, but they are unofficial), which improves discoverability for everyone and makes it easier to extend the recommendation to users with lower technical skills. Chocolatey and its GUI are a bit clunky compared to my Unix-based package manager tuned taste (and Windows is missing a good sudo equivalent), but it's such a big improvement over the Windows tradition of chasing installers on the internet.

The Windows software ecosystem is incredibly sketchy, no wonder viruses are still a thing: for some reason people hate hosting binaries but love to redirect you to fishy, ad-ridden shareware websites where a click on the wrong place will place a toolbar on your browser. I hate downloading software on Windows so much.

You could try Pinta, which is open-source and based on Paint.NET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_%28software%29

Pinta is not comparable to Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a very polished program and Pinta... isn't. While it's true that it is based on Paint.NET 3, the part they kept was the filter and image manipulation stuff and the part they dumped was the UI, and their (Gtk# I think) UI is not very good compared to even the WPF UI of the old versions of Paint.NET it was based on. Stuff like the selection handles being rendered on canvas so looking very broken when working on e.g. pixel art, or just highly zoomed in as the marching ants scale with the image pixel size.

If you need an open source editor for those use cases, go with KolourPaint or Krita. Krita is not quite as simple as Paint which is why KolourPaint might fit your use case better, but I've switced to Krita for my Linux image editor. Now if they could just bring back an on-canvas text tool...

Isn't mspaint in Windows 10 basically the same thing but with a ribbon instead of a toolbar?

I don't much care for the ribbon but I'm used to it now. Hitting WinKey-R, mspaint, [Enter] is still my goto for simple picture editing, even just recording a screenshot despite the existence of the snipping tool...

Other than the minor annoyance of getting used to the ribbon I felt as if I was still using the same old paint when I did this.

No, it is a very different application. For example when you draw something, like a rectangle, and then you try to draw something else over it, it instead moves the rectangle - failing to do the most basic task: being a paint program.

It does have some nice features, like the premade shapes and brushes, but those could have been added to the previous MS Paint application without breaking its UX.

Two things I dislike about the new Paint are;

1. Can't select secondary colour with right click

2. Needs way more clicks to get a filled Rectangle

1. On latest Windows version I am on now it works as the classic paint. 2. On classic paint you set colors > rectangle > select filling (w/ outline or w/o). On new paint is set colors > rectangle > fill > select filling > outline > select outline. So 1 or 3 more if you want to remove the outline.

Number 2 took me from using paint constantly to just using photoshop instead.

1. Use shift+click.

I still find myself trying to do #1 frequently

It's similar but in my opinion with every release Microsoft makes their products slightly more unintuitive. This version of Paint is far simpler to view and instantly know what to click to get what you want.

Similar to you, "discoverability" is what irks me about MS trend recently. As you say, the version you can "view and instantly know" = easy to discover what/how you can do.

A lot of MS stuff recently seems to have forgotten that people need visual cues to "know" what to do.

I immediately searched for the XP version the first time I encountered this extremely frustrating behaviour:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

I honestly would prefer if the post was left unanswered than having to read shit like

> Hi,

> Thanks for the update on the issue.

> We have tested the same with the latest Windows updates installed on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

> As suggested, I would recommend sharing this as a feedback on the Feedback app of Windows 10.

> Do let us know if you face any Windows related issues in future. We will be glad to assist you.

> Good Day!

That whole forum is a dumpster fire. When a search takes me there, I brace myself to read a poorly-written, incorrect, dismissive answer. Nine times out of ten, the questioner is clearly more knowledgeable about the problem than the person answering it.

Win Vista and later paint replaces the palette of a 256 color bitmap with a completely different one upon saving, to name a major and breaking difference. I grabbed the paint.exe from an old XP and it works absolutely fine, even on 7 and probably 10.

Kolourpain is better. It does transparency, fill with a configurable distance, and supports more file formats. Other than these, it's quite similar :)

https://kde.org/applications/graphics/org.kde.kolourpaint

http://www.kolourpaint.org/screenshots.html (that website could use an update...)

Photoshop is better, or should I say https://www.photopea.com/

Is Kolourpaint available as a website I can visit right now? Lots of editors are "better" from a feature standpoint. That's not the feature that is relevant to the discussion.

I'm sorry if I should have been more nuanced. Lack of transparency support was my number 1 pet peeve back with mspaint.

Kolourpaint's scope and interface are similar. It can be found in most distributions'packages, and on flathub. Looks like nobody bothered to package it for windows, though, which is a shame.

> That's not the feature that is relevant to the discussion.

Not to the thread overall, but it is relevant to this thread in particular. GP didn't mention any specifics regarding whether or not the editor is available online; they merely spoke about Paint's simplicity relative to everything else.

Wow, Photopea runs extremely smoothly. On my old laptop it runs better than native image editors.

> I miss this version of Paint

Well you are in luck: https://archive.org/details/MSPaintWinXP

I use this all the time on my Windows 10 box.

Just download, rename to "mspaintxp.exe" and put it in C:\Windows\System32. Optionally update Paint shortcut to point to that one so when you type "Paint" in start menu that's the new default.

In fact, you don't need to go to all this trouble if you don't want to. Someone has made a web-based version of paint you can use right from your browser, even if you don't have Windows installed. Link: https://chowderman.github.io/xp-paint.html

That's awesome! Someone should post this on HN.

Indeed! So we could discuss about it!

And maybe someone could talk about native alternatives!

That link is … well, the link for this thread.

Just a bit of wry humor :)

Me too, along with calc.exe --- starting with Win7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791667 among other issues appeared, and then in Win10, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17670644

It's really sad that one of the world's biggest software companies can't make a fully-working calculator.

If you're looking to run it with Wine, you'll also want a copy of the IA32 version of mfc42u.dll.

added: totally necessary proof https://qui.suis.je/drop/peakfun.png

It also works in the browser under JSLinux in Wine (requires mfc42u.dll). https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=alpine-x86-xwin.cfg&...

It is possible to use the Debugger registry value to replace `mspaint.exe` with `mspaintxp.exe` seamlessly. (Or any software you want.)

Unfortunately I transitioned to Mac a few years ago so it isn't just drop in and done.

Paintbrush was the closest thing I could find here, but it glitches out on me occasionally and the UI isn't as simple. I may just take the 20 minutes to do what you recommended under Wine. Thanks!

I’m always perplexed by this. Maybe I lack the artistic talent? Paint could never cover any of my use cases. For that it was always too much about … well … painting … which is something I just don’t need on a day to day basis. The painting focus seems completely misguided to most of the typical use cases I can imagine.

My quintessential perfect tool is always the Preview App on macOS:

You can add simple shapes, arrows and text to any images. You can rotate, crop and resize images. You can reorder, rotate, split and merge PDF documents.

That’s all very well tailored to most common use cases. In terms of image editing I guess you can do all that with Paint but it seems clumsy to me. Not really fit for that purpose.

And if I don’t want to mark something up but create something new (which will typically heavily rely on text even if it’s more visual, like a birthday invitation) the text editing is too weak to get anywhere really useful, so for that I would rather use some kind of either text editor or layouting program.

Contemporary paint is much better. XP paint was missing some of the most basic and essential features of a pixel editor. Without a proper and simple cropping interface it’s little more than an aesthetic setpiece.

If you need just a bit more functionality, I find Paint.NET to be quite good while not too complex.

Paint.net is still one of the very first things I install on a fresh Windows install. It's simple to use but provides enough depth if you want it without feeling overwhelming on opening. Gimps interface has come a long way but it's still not as user friendly as paint.net I feel.

Yep. It's not at the level of Photoshop but it does a pretty good chunk of the intermediate-level features that you might need for more complex projects (e.g. layers)

> This version of MS Paint is like the peak example of covering 99% of basic use cases while being incredibly simple to use.

At some point Microsoft just forgot how to make software like this - sometime between 2005 and 2010 I think. OSes no longer come with simple, lightweight tools that are unsophisticated and just do what you want

Yup, during college I even created electrical schematics in MS Paint during one course, nobody believed it was done using it :) Although I must admit creating schematics in CAD software is more sane ;)

Check out mtPaint. It's very similar to old school paint, and works on Linux too.

http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

kolourpaint is the exact same thing as windows xp paint. part of kde, but you can also find windows builds online

Well it could crop as well. Then I'd give you 90%.

photopea.com

Here is the repo as well: https://github.com/chowderman/xp-paint.

Note: this is in no way affiliated with Microsoft, its merely a fan project based on my love of Windows XP

Added a PR to make it installable on desktop. The build script rewrites the link to a local directory for some reason though

How easy do you think it would be to create share links with the canvas state? Would be cool to share links to these things.

This is awesome! I Still use Paint.Net in my VMWare emulator. There's some things in Paint.Net I really like including Crop to selection and things involving layers. If you ever plan to expand to include that, I'd be all ears!

Selecting using the box tool and delete should delete the selection :)

Good work.

This is great, thanks!

Is you like MS Paint art then you should check out Jim'll Paint It (https://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/ - also on facebook).

He takes requests.

That's... an unfortunate name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile

Nonsense. Jim is a very common name, too widespread to be impacted by one bad guy.

GP wasn't comparing just the name "Jim", it was comparing "Jim'll Paint It" to "Jim'll Fix It".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim%27ll_Fix_It

Okay, now I understand their point. Strange not to link it though.

That's the joke.

Looks like this is a fork of https://jspaint.app/

They disclose this in the (beautifully done) about page.

What is the difference between those two?

The main differences are:

* it works totally offline (it performs no XHR requests and none of the libraries are linked to CDNs or other sites)

* is contained within a single ~1 MB in size .html file (I baked all images, scripts, style sheets, etc. within a single file)

* is lighter, as I removed some features to keep it closer to the original (but kept a few like the history and rendering as a GIF)

* is Win XP themed instead of Win 95

Is it possible to save it locally and work on that?

Cool!

This looks like Win98 paint :)

This is a very good recreation. Pleased to see it even replicates the hidden zoom (below 8x). I also spot a good inaccuracy: the undo doesn't appear limited to 3 :-)

How where you able to implement such a fast floodfill? I tried to make something similar a few years ago, but was not able to get the floodfilling to work in reasonably time

Here's the source code for draw_fill: https://github.com/chowderman/xp-paint/blob/b6dfcce7f449d3bb...

The square brush tool is broken https://imgur.com/a/2CqIdhx

Same for me as well.

In 1993 I was 12 years old and spent many, many hours drawing a pixel-perfect replica of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo in MS Paintbrush (the name of MS Paint at the time). I believe it was a 640x480 BMP. I so wish I had saved a copy of this and all of the other stuff I downloaded off bulletin boards! Stuff like this got me started in web graphics, HTML, and eventually sysadmin.

To this day I still take screenshots (PrtScn) and save them using pbrush (WinKey+R pbrush).

So is this just a fork of https://jspaint.app/ with styling changes?

yep says so in the Help > About modal

"XP Paint is a fork of the web-based remake of MS Paint called JS Paint."

Holy crap that was fun. Big fan of the history view and the spray effect. Is the cursor lagging behind the mouse intentionally or is it just lag because javascript? I didn't notice anything else lagging, but I don't remember MS Paint having a mass/drag effect like that. FWIW, I found it even easier to write my name with the pencil on a trackpad.

These always miss my favorite hidden feature of mspaint: Control + Scrolling should be able to increase/decrease the size of the brush to sizes much larger than you can normally select. Instead, this just zooms the browser but maybe it could be changed to alt + scroll or something.

For some reason, I can't zoom via main menu (View/Zoom). Level 3 menu just diappears. (My browser is Firefox if this matters.) Keyboard accelerators don't work either (e.g. Alt+V,Z,L). Only level 1 menu works via keyboard accelerator (Alt+V).

Small bug: on Brave browser, the "fill" tool is not covering 100% of the pixels https://i.imgur.com/Ej6owmI.png

Someone I know once got brief access to source code for a version of Windows that included paint. He had just a few mins with it and opened up the source to paint because he liked the software. One of the variable names was something like “fluffy_bunny_rabbit” and he read a comment that said “this fixes bug X, I don’t understand why, but just leave this code here.” Unsure if former softies can confirm this was code quality back then...

Nice work! It would be great if you could include a feature to crop an image, similar to how you can in MS Paint. Crop is the feature I probably use most often in MS Paint.

Started using MS Paint or whatever it was called then after years of drawing on Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. I wasn't very impressed, but now after seeing later alternatives it's actually not too bad. Didn't Hockney do lots of recent paintings on the most basic iPad drawing program?

There is also https://jspaint.app/

If you don't like the display scaling, you can try running this in the browser console:

  document.body.style.zoom = 1 / window.devicePixelRatio

This is the best replica of mspaint I have seen everything looks and behaves exactly the same , well done!

I wish it would save as bmp only, that png feature makes it orders of magnitudes less horrific than the orignal paint.

And I think it should only save to localStorage, so that saving a few images would fill up all the space like I quickly did on my few GBs hardrive.

The best version of paint. ;)

you know it! It had a sleek and modern look for the time, while still having the simplicity and user-friendliness of MS Paint from Win 95/98. really wish this version of paint was still supported in Win 10

A sleek and modern look for the time? The basic UI was already over a decade old! (paintbrush)

It's cool that you like it, but that's a surprising way to describe it. As I recall (as a user of windows 3.1, 95, ME and XP), the consensus was that Paint was a retro holdover, like Minesweeper and Solitaire. People appreciated it in a kitschy retro way.

We still have Notepad.

And Ubuntu still ships with ed. Some people like their "retro" tools that have shipped with the OS since early versions.

Surely it can be packed as an Electron app?

I wouldn’t be surprised if a stripped-to-the-bone installation of WinXP in a VM, running only Paint, is lighter on system resources than Electron running this.

A very basic XP install with a GUI can fit in 20-30 MB[1][2][3], using minlogon, but even with a "standard" Winlogon it should be below 50 MB, so it surely would take less disk space than the hypothetical 100 MB electron based version.

[1] http://reboot.pro/topic/3717-xpsp1-with-full-commandline-and...

[2]http://reboot.pro/topic/16765-minixp/

[3]http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/MiniXP/

Why would you do that? If it runs in a web page, it could be condensed to a single .html file.

It can be packed very easily actually! It is a single HTML file, so you can easily embed it into an electron app or a webview if you wanted. Only problem is it would bring the total size to ~100 MB instead of ~1 MB, and would be tough to make it a single .exe file.

Nice job! (Would like to see Ctrl + e focus into the first value box)

Oh my! This even has the secret x10 zoom! That's awesome. :)

Is anyone else having trouble going View > Zoom > Normal

As much as I enjoy this, I feel for it to really shine would be a desktop version, not locked into the browser. I think a Chromium/Electron app would be fine.

I couldn't disagree more. An entire electron app just for mspaint? That's ridiculous.

I disagree with you. The way I work is based in realms of OS apps, not browser tabs. Electron is bloated, but for a 'cute' app like this I don't think it's any worse than Slack, or a Qt app. Overall, I'm less likely to use an app on a regular basis if I need to go to a website to use it.

How will it differ? In both cases you'll be running a web browser. At least right now you don't have to install another one.

I don't want to have to go to a web address to use it.

Then just make a shortcut. Depending on your browser `firefox --ssb $URL` or `chromium --app=$URL`.

Nice work! Please add a LICENSE file

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