Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
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)
[0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE
"The WordPad sample demonstrates how to implement an application that imitates the functionality of WordPad, including the user interface elements and some of the capabilities."
I should have known it wasn't the real Win95 WordPad source code since this version is written using MFC and C++.
C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 components in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.
from https://web.archive.org/web/20070127011040/http://blogs.msdn...: "...RichEdit 1.0 was wrapped in MFC to produce WordPad as an example of how MFC could be used for text processing. This was shipped with Windows 95 as mentioned in the previous post."
More RichEdit history: https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...
Plenty of Windows 95 components were written in C++, including pretty much everything that dealt with OLE. WinNT also used C++ for the graphics layer.
Lots of MS groups were using C++ before Win95, including the Exchange group.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1+ included C++ code.
I recall that in the initial Win95 group meeting, C++ wasn't allowed. I moved to another team, so I don't know if that restriction was relaxed or not and/or when they allowed C++.
The email client included with Win95 wasn't allowed to use C++, including the RichEdit windows control, which had to use C for OLE code - not many other codebases could boast about that - no one signs up for that sort of masochism by choice.
Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPad chokes at anything above a handful of MB) since you're making a bad archive file (using the default .rtf format will encode the binary data in hex which will actually increase file size), but i always liked how general the idea was.
(also it isn't limited to WordPad but to anything that uses OLE - e.g. you could do the same with Delphi which has a "OLE object" control that can embed any OLE object and the object becomes part of the executable - so you could, say, throw a PDF file in a package OLE object in a form and when the user doubleclicks it the control opens the default PDF viewer)
At my secondary school, a long time ago now, they used PCs from educational vendor Research Machines (RM). These ran a locked down version of the Windows 3.11 Program Manager which didn't allow you to start any unapproved programs. I discovered you could embed EXEs from a floppy disk as OLE objects in a Write document and then start them from within Write by double clicking. In this manner, I could bring my LibertyBasic programs in from home and run them on the school's machines :-).
Good job WordPad - one of the flag bearers of Microsofts anti-competitive business practices.
For Win95, the new included-in-the-box email client required a text editor which supported multiple fonts, colours, font styles, et al. But Microsoft Write code was not written to be modular and cross-platform (much of the Win95 email client code would also run on the Macintosh, for Mac OS System 7.x).
So the RichEdit windows control was created.
Wordpad.exe is a thin wrapper around the RichEdit control, like Notepad.exe is a thin wrapper around the text edit control.
Microsoft Word for Windows was released in 1989 November, four years after Windows 1.0 included Microsoft Write. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word
And the later WordPerfect for Windows was competition that MS was keen to kill.
It's unusuable now.
"The Windows 11 Notepad uses the RichEditD2DPT window class with a recent Microsoft 365 RichEdit."
1. Ship Word with Windows and not get paid for it, even though they had hundreds of engineers working on it.
2. Ship no word processor with Windows, and make the end user find one on their own.
3. Ship a basic one and let the user upgrade to Word if they needed something more.
At the time with option 2, it's not like you're going to hit google and download some FOSS solution - you would need to go to the computer store and pay $200 for something in a box off the shelf.
I'm thinking option 3 was a good middle ground, and a win-win for MS and the customer.
The irony was that Microsoft included Microsoft Money in the Works suite, likely to give an aspiration of saving and making enough in order to upgrade to the Office suite.
Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.
> 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).
You could create a paint.bat file in C:\Windows\System32 (usually the first dir in %PATH%) that calls Paint.net instead. Something like this should work:
"C:\Program Files\paint.net\paintdotnet.exe" %* Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App PathsFrom Wikipedia: "The Windows 3.1 version of Cardfile was included with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not installed by default. For the later two versions of Windows, the user would have to manually copy the Cardfile application from the Windows install CD in order to use the application."
see https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...
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.
But you can have multiple notes, and as soon as there are lots of notes to look at, I won’t do it every day.
With my .rtfd file, there is only one file with one todo list, and that’s it. I can never lose it or get lost in it, or spend time finetuning it.
TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.
A notes .txt represents my current unit of work, and moving it into the archive folder is equivalent to deleting it in that I will likely never need or use it again. Documentation goes into the repo or Notion or whatnot, grocery lists are shared with my wife, etc., and I see the value in additional features there.
(And yes, I use Notes for everything :) )
There's something great about dealing with raw text files (and I say this as a happy Photos.app user)
You'd make the Read Me documents on classic Mac OS by changing the type of the file from 'ttxt' to 'ttro'
I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.
With proprietary software, the option of forking does not exist.
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.
This is fine for those of us who know how to compile the source or find a ready-to-use version. Trouble is, I've often been in situations without updated sources being available and or where maintainers haven't been contactable.
Ordinary users are in a worse position as most wouldn't know how to go about compiling code even if available. It's a significant problem.
In all fairness I, as a programmer, couldn't be bothered to do that either.
It's also a straw man. Compiling from source is just one option (that is particularly relevant for the HN demographic), but many (most?) notable apps, the kinds regular users would be using anyway, seem to provide ready-to-use versions that can be downloaded from their site and run without even having to be installed. This is a very convenient workflow that even regular users would be capable of using, and is quite reminiscient of what people often do on proprietary desktop operating systems.
I must agree with that. Whilst I've written code and compiled it—even Assembler—when it comes to using compiled programs without source, MSO for instance, then I am essentially in the same position as the average user.
I've lost count of the times that I've wished I could change a program to alter a feature or provide one that was missing. Like the average user I'm powerless to change it in any practical sense as it'd be so difficult and timeconsuming (even with source, it could still be very challenging and not worth the effort).
The detail is what happens after this happens. In a closed source world, most of the cases, that's it. No more builds for any reason, it's dead. You want to change it? Then first reverse engineer it.
But if it's open source, I can if I must, pull down the source code myself and build it. It can continue to live, if someone wants.
This is probably a good thing for those who want something very particular.
For example, something like Ubuntu for the desktop, but without snaps everywhere - that'd be Linux Mint. Or maybe something like RHEL, but without necessarily having to (or being able to) pay - that'd be Rocky Linux or Alma Linux.
On the other hand, this also means that the community's efforts are spread thin, there's lots of fragmentation and the whole experience is just way more messy.
Instead of writing install instructions for The One True Linux Distro, you now need to write those for many, deal with multiple packaging formats and repositories, or just live with the reality that something available in one distro won't be available in another. I even had that issue with WireGuard, where it worked in Ubuntu but not Debian for a particular use case, shortly after it came out.
For as niche the types of BSD OSes are, they feel more coherent. I wonder what things would be like if we'd have similarly focused efforts for Linux, even stuff like one audio solution that's made to always work everywhere, one display server/compositor, one desktop that scales back to run as fast as XFCE or be as pretty as KDE.
But that's not how humans work and instead we'll just get new packages replacing older ones, sometimes for the better, but not always.
The very same thing applies to many FOSS software packages out there, but in a sense it's still better than some closed source package being abandoned and nobody ever being able to do anything about it.
Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.
Few users, if any, are depending on this app that hasn’t been getting attention for years. There’s plenty of replacement apps as good or better, including FOSS ones.
If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.
It rarely if ever is.
Anyone remember PhantomJS? It took years before a replacement emerged and nobody was willing to take in the project, and this was a critical piece of tech at the time
Maybe PhantomJS wasn't as critical as you thought it was? Or maybe the JS ecosystem doesn't lend itself towards this model because JS developers have the attention span of a goldfish
You can always pay someone to maintain it. Not every thing has to be free.
It happens all the time. But when it happens it's so transparent that nobody even notices.
There are many 30+ year old open source applications still in use. How many of the current maintainers are still the original developers?
Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.
> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.
When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.
(The full OLE capability needs a bit tweaking to get it working right, if one needs it)
But even if that was not the case, it is a change in a user's workflow that they did not request.
Is this a high bar I have set for the developer? Yes, perhaps it is.
And yet I believe in it and stand by it in my projects.
I consider it my responsibility to accommodate the user, and not the other way around.
The opposing reactions (discontent MS did open source something, discontent that they didn't) are odd. I don't fully remember the details there though so can't make a meaningful comment.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-told-were-not-happy-...
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
Even worse was how resizing the notepad window would introduce newlines into the text if you saved it.
There is always plenty wrong with each new release but the comments and jokes about ${"LATEST_RELEASE"} of ${"SOFTWARE"} being unilaterally worse just make me think the person can't deal with something changing instead of the software actually being bad.
Comments and jokes about how they could have an entire new release worth of features just bringing back what they've removed or reverse-improved over the years however... that I agree with ;).
Which is a PITA to use, so useless.
> , (full) DX12, made significant improvements to the console
Cmd.exe is still the same
> , added real ARM support for the desktop OS,
Not relevant
> replaced IE,
Not fully. They still have it as a menu item in Edge
> implemented proper DPI support (all the way to per-monitor true fractional),
YMMV. This one is hit or miss.
> added openssh, actual HDR support, and many more things that can be surprisingly hard to go without if you revert to a previous release.
You cannot revert to a previous release in Windows.
> There is always plenty wrong with each new release but the comments and jokes about ${"LATEST_RELEASE"} of ${"SOFTWARE"} being unilaterally worse just make me think the person can't deal with something changing instead of the software actually being bad.
When SW changes just for the sake of change (see calc.exe), something is wrong.
> Comments and jokes about how they could have an entire new release worth of features just bringing back what they've removed or reverse-improved over the years however... that I agree with ;).
Also agree.
cmd.exe is a shell so it shouldn't be any different just because the console updated. This article simultaneously explains the difference between a shell and a console as well as explicitly list the feature changes added to the console in Windows 10 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/10/07/consol...
> Not fully. They still have it as a menu item in Edge
Well sure, completely removing IE just because they added Edge would have made the replacement more painful for no real gain. They already committed to ongoing support of IE based applications for many years to come years ago.
> YMMV. This one is hit or miss.
YMMV on what apps support the new DPI features but the APIs and support itself is 100% there all the time in every copy of Windows 10. In previous versions of Windows apps were unable to reach that level of DPI support regardless if they wanted to update and do so.
> You cannot revert to a previous release in Windows.
Where'd you get that idea? I've done it myself, it's quite possible. You're also quite welcome to just install fresh if you're update data has been cleared but you can revert otherwise.
> When SW changes just for the sake of change (see calc.exe), something is wrong.
Calling adding resizability, OS theme following, (fractional) DPI awareness, additions to the unit and time conversions, and graphing "changes just for the sack of changes" is spot on the nose of what I was talking about - the only way they could have made you happy was to not change, it has nothing to do with how much better or worse the new calculator actually is. Maybe you personally aren't a fan of a single one of the changes, that's still not reasoning for why it's changes for the sake of changes.
The rest is more individual so I won't say anything one way or another. E.g. ARM support can be critical to one person and irrelevant to the next, hard to make 1 list containing only what every person on Earth agrees is relevant so I included things many will even if some won't. That doesn't mean I'm saying you specifically must find ARM support one of the meaningful changes.
There are texts I don't want to write in a browser
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.
The last stable point release was over 3 years ago.
[0] https://invent.kde.org/office/calligra/-/commits/master/
But then at some point I think that might have been replaced in practice with HTML as a clipboard format instead.
I'm not sure if you copy text from browsers or word processors today, if it's usually available as both RTF and HTML, or only one?
In fact rtf usage is all over the place on Apple platforms. Cocoa/AppKit apps can take an rtf file to present in the app’s standard About window for credits/acknowledgments and if you want to present rich text with low hassle and resource consumption, by far the easiest way is to embed an NSTextView/UITextView with editing disabled which can then have a bundled rtf loaded into it trivially (just a couple lines of code).
A WebKit webview and HTML could be used instead in these instances, but that’s significantly more heavy and doesn’t have an OS-included WYSIWYG editor which makes it less friendly to e.g. non-technical team members whose job it might be to prepare the content being displayed.
Has anyone tried this before? I'm likely ignorant. But it would be a pretty exciting document publishing format.
"Exciting" is certainly a word I would use to describe the results, especially in the common case where no VCS was in use.
https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/
Edit: Also available for Linux (deb/flatpak)
Apparently, it can also work with .DOC and .DOCX files (https://www.jarte.com/features.html), but I've never tried it myself.
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?(!)
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.
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.
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)
Doesn’t Office require a paid license on top of the Windows license, unlike WordPad?
If you were using WordPad before, LibreOffice will be a fine replacement for your purposes.
Its never been long enough that I thought it was slow
Nothing irks me more than having to do this, I wish The Document Foundation would address this instead of adding new features. Damn it, MS Word has bugs and quirks but it's much faster and than LibO when dealing with large tables and inserted images.
If LibO were fixed properly it would then be a true competitor to MSO.
We're mostly volunteers, so people implement whatever they feel like doing :-) The essence of open-source.
Come help out if you can, or sponsor some fixes with one of the LibreOffice consulting companies.
I am extremely appreciative of what open-source developers do. One only has to look at the Linux ecosystem to see how much work they've contributed—and of course there's much more than just that.
What you say is obvious, volunteers are unlikely do work they do not like and I'd certainly not expect them to do so. However, unfortunately, that, in my opinion, is often (but not always) the Achilles's heel of much open-source software.
For example, open-source software often lacks drivers or that good drivers only arrive much later than they do for commercial software. The two mitigating reasons for this are that hardware interfaces etc. are often proprietary and the info is more likely to be released through commercial agreements leaving open-source developers to reverse engineer them which is messy and timeconsuming. But a second factor is even more important, which is that very few developers like writing drivers (I hate doing so and it's years since I've done so—so I'd not expect others to do so for free). A good illusion of this is Linux's old NTFS driver, it was a 'dog' and often corrupted files. Luckily it was fixed recently when the commercial operation Paragon donated a revamp/rewrite of their commercial NTFS code (no doubt out of vested interest, compatibility etc.). That new driver probably doesn't do much for Linux Diehards who interface with ext4, etc. (and it's likely why the old code was never properly developed), but the replacement is a godsend for mixed environments where one is trying to introduce Linux to Windows users.
The problem then is how do we fill the gap between what open-source developers want to do and what users actually need? It's really a vexed problem that remains to be solved if open-source software is to become widely competitive with its commercial counterparts.
For a long time my view has been that we need a middle-ground solution here. For example, large projects such as LibO should be developed under a nonprofit structure that would pay developers for their efforts. The amount developers would receive as compensation would be less than that paid by commercial interests but it'd certainly be more than a token amount. This way, only those who had a true commitment to the project would work on it and payment would also provide the incentive to get the less popular development done, thus projects wouldn't be held up.
Revenue to pay developers would come from the sale of the software, which, say, for LibO could be around $20 - $30 which is only a fraction of what MS charges for MSO. Such a scheme would be criticized on grounds that the source would then have to be closed. That problem is also easily solved if the license agreement required that the source could be only be compiled on condition that the binary was only for one's own personal use—resale of the complied code would be strictly forbidden. Given its nominally low price then by far the vast majority of users would opt to buy the program already compiled.
No doubt, there are many variations on such a scheme and much tweaking would take place before an optimal solution was found. Overall, with such a scheme users would be better off as development would be faster and proceed more smoothly.
I can only stress again that I am in favor of open-source development and I do donate to open-source projects, also if I have to buy software then I only do so from small independent commercial developers. In fact, in recent years, I've bought no code from the Big developers except for Windows which was already installed on a machine, even then that's been strictly limited as most of my machines run Linux.
What prompted my original comment about LibO was my recent bad experience, in fact it was quite horrific. It needs a separate post to provide even a reasonable outline as so many things went wrong. However, in brief, it goes thus: I'd not written long and detailed documents in either MSO or LibO for some time and by that I mean complex documents over 100 pages. LibO has been the default WP for ages but I occasionally use MSO on .doc files created by others to ensure no page format anomolies.
Anyway, recently I had to produce a legal document in which some drafts were in excess of 150 pages and about 100 were in the form of a complex landscape table where some cells were split horizontally and vertically. Not only were there memory leaks, the table would take ages appear, certain operations such as deleting cells that split across pages would lock the program and it could only be killed by the task manager (this, unfortunately, was in Windows), moreover there were multiple instances of Write that had to be killed or it wouldn't reopen. Also, the LanguageTool extension (which I needed) caused Writer to cease up when certain actions were invoked, these were separate to the earlier mentioned problems which were present even if LanguageTool was disabled or not installed.
Somewhere between revision 200 and 550 the file became corrupted but it was not obvious until around rev 550 when I found I couldn't delete some parts of the table. Backups didn't help as they contained the corruption from early on. I then had to cut-and-paste into a new file using plaintext to get rid of the corruption which still wasn't obvious, I thus lost almost all of my complex formatting. These problems cost me several weeks lost work, and to make matters worse I was on a court-imposed deadline that I could not alter.
That's only part of the story. Moreover, I wish to hell LibO had some utility that would find corrupt parts within an .odt file and either correct them and or bring them to my attention. Finding some way to edit—or even examine—a raw indigestible and unintelligible .odt file would be extremely useful.
Also, it would have been good if I could have sent the hundreds of crashes to The Document Foundation but with the sensitivity of the doc and the fact that I couldn't carefully review exactly what was to be sent back I found most annoying. That process for advising crashes isn't fit for purpose.
I really do need an extended blog to fully explain what happened. I note from the changelog of ver 7.6 that one of the table code bugs has been fixed but I've yet to fully verify that, however, it still locks up when I try to correct a spelling error before the speller autocorrects it (it's so damn slow, I can beat it manually).
Similarly, I also note LT has notched a single point release since my original trouble but Writer 7.6 still often fails to engage or interact with the extension, that is LT is active but no grammar or spelling correction takes place. To fix this LibO must be closed down and restarted. I don't know if this is a bug in Writer or LT, either way it's really a damn nuisance.
Hopefully you will be happy to hear that a company has funded some improvements to that part of the code, and those improvements should roll out over the current and the next release.
ODT files are theoretically human-editable, because once you expand the file (using e.g. unzip) you have a small set of XML files, which can be edited as text and then wrapped up into an ODT again.
Finding "corruption" is not really a thing (at least for writer documents), the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself, and compromise solutions must be found in the code.
The writer code to lay the document out is sufficiently complex that it has multiple chunks of guard code specifically designed to make it give up when it cannot make reasonable progress.
Very good to hear about the table improvements, I look forward to seeing them.
Re ODT, I unzipped it and looked at the XML and the stuff in the table section was formatted so badly (tightly together as one huge blob of text sans proper spaces and structured formatting). Given the ODT is over 900k long and having examined the XML for an hour or so I simply gave up. I hate to think how long it would have taken me to examine it in detail let alone resolve it without me first going crazy.
As I was in a desperate hurry I cut my losses and used my time fixing it in a way where I could at least estimate the time required.
"the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself,"
This sounds like what was happening, in parts of the table when paging up or down between pages sections of text (both within a cell with multiple lines of text and across cells in lines before and after). Text in a cell would mix and fold over itself or fold over the text in the cell in the line above or below it. Given that some cells could have text of several hundred lines in length sections of the table (but not all of it) became an almighty jumbled mess.
Right, at times it just gave up and if it didn't resolve (respond to commands within a minute or so) I killed it with the task manager.
Yeah of course they wouldn't recommend a competitor, but to me that makes it seem like this announcement is an attempt to get a handful more people to buy Word by removing a finished and functional product that was fast and available to anyone with a Windows computer
LibreOffice is under very active development and can be downloaded from https://www.libreoffice.org/
Apache OpenOffice is effectively abandonware at this point, see https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Product_Release It's mostly been maintenance releases since 2013.
If you want LibreOffice with support (or just want to support development), you probably want Collabora.
There used to be Word and PowerPoint viewers available for free but I think Microsoft discontinued them.
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.
That seems unlikely when Microsoft is already investing so much in VSCode.
Won't ever happen. For it to even have a chance, it would need to have syntax highlighting, which Microsoft will never add.
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.
I don't think there's any strategy here, with Notepad.
The floor has fallen out since then and there are so many free or cheap office productivity options. Works stopped being a thing eons ago and I would guess WordPad is rarely chosen. Disuse is a good reason to say goodbye.
Well, some people would say that Microsoft Works is a contradiction in terms. /s
At a time when there was no internet! The PC sales guy could demo the customer fancy text-editing with fonts and colours, draw pictures and even print to dot matrix! right in the store.
Today people like these minimal OS apps because they are simple, avoid bloat and feature creep, especially notepad and paint. Its probably an error on MS part to get rid of WordPad..
We are not discussing 1985 here. By the mid to late 90s, internet access was greatly normalized.
Even so, as a consumer if you had better than 14.4k dialup you were quite lucky. Almost nobody selling computers in those days was tying up a phone line to keep the internet connected for sales demos.
Wordpad is very basic in comparison.
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.
In this case we have an improved fuction as instructions should not be editable.
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.
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.
Notepad++ is standard for code editing and extremely fast. I use all these 3 alternatives for different reasons but my #1 is still notepad.
the good news for you is this is essentially a promise that wordpad will never change.
> 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
Similar to a local ice cream store, it may not be the best in existence, but the advantage is in it being right there right now
This change constituties a NON-CONSENSUAL CHANGE to my computing environment.
My workflow is broken, and I have to fix it.
This is one of the million paper cuts by which my relationship with Windows was broken.
This is why CONSENT is important in computing.
It is absolutely fucked up, and I won't tolerate it.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/UseTerms/Retail/Windows/11/U...
"6. Updates. The software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you. You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources, and Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with those updates. By accepting this agreement or using the software, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice."
If you don't want this kind of thing to happen, don't use proprietary software that requires you to to agree to it.
But I agree with you that this abuse is a symptom of proprietary software.
Not sure if it is some update or what.
Maybe XML Notepad? [1]
[0] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/chang...
I just was hit by the nostalgia of hearing the app name at all
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.
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/
Does https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof... do the trick?
tar -c --format=zip -f foo.zip path/Try WinDirStat.
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.
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.
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
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
Which now costs $159.99?!
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.
Is it better than where we were a couple years ago? Yes, definitely. Is it stable enough to be a daily driver? Somewhat, yes.
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.
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.
Cold load times aren't terrible on modern systems, but wordpad is much faster. (Microsoft Office isn't great at fast loading either).
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/
edit: Huh, it's even less lightweight for Windows. The Linux downloads come in around 200-220MiB, but the Windows downloads are around 320-350MiB. Weird.
In this case they're also shipping rpm/deb packages, it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it.
They have their own toolkit - VCL - which has GTK and Qt backends for Linux, and a native Windows backend for Windows.
I think I can guess at least part of the reason: MSVC redistributables. On Windows, each program is supposed to distribute a copy of the installer for the standard C and C++ library runtime corresponding to the MSVC version used to compile the software; unlike on Linux, these don't come by default with the operating system, and unlike on Linux, each new MSVC version came with a new and incompatible version of these libraries (the exception is very old or very new MSVC versions, which used/use a common version for more than one MSVC version; but even then, you're still supposed to distribute the installer with your software, since it's not guaranteed to be already installed).