Hacker News Reader

Comment by niutech | Hacker News Reader

Which free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.

View on HN

Something I've used time and again when I was still primarily using Windows: Jarte (https://www.jarte.com/). It's small, portable, and works well with RTF files.

Apparently, it can also work with .DOC and .DOCX files (https://www.jarte.com/features.html), but I've never tried it myself.

Focus Writer. Open-source, minimalist interface (but enough useful options in settings) and many more. I've been using it for years, very happy with it

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

Edit: Also available for Linux (deb/flatpak)

Hard to complain about free, but overall it feels a bit .. unpolished. On Ubuntu 22.04 jammy you can't change the font reliably

Notepad++ maybe?

Notepad++ doesn't support RTF nor DOCX.

Html with contenteditable I guess?

You just gave me the idea for an HTML file format that writes changes to contenteditable back to the file.

Has anyone tried this before? I'm likely ignorant. But it would be a pretty exciting document publishing format.

There are already multiple WYSIWYG HTML editors such as BlueGriffon.

Are any of them writing tools instead of publishing tools?

You can use any of them for writing any HTML code.

With a little server-side support it wasn't all that rare an approach back in the early-mid 2000s days of web dev, when none of us had any idea what we were doing and couldn't wait to find out.

"Exciting" is certainly a word I would use to describe the results, especially in the common case where no VCS was in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki is kind of like that, albeit way more involved

Reply on news.ycombinator.com