Fun fact: Before WordPad there was Microsoft Write.
Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.
Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.
From 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."
> 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 Pathssee https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...