RIP Microsoft WordPad
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1) Quit TextEdit 2) In the Terminal, type the following command: defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false 3) Open TextEdit and presto!
System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive ( Options ) > uncheck TextEdit.
Starting with macOS Ventura, it is System Settings > Internet Accounts > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options > uncheck TextEdit.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/61406/how-to-make-...
I do like WordPad since it will do fonts, embedded pictures, etc. I really hate that MS is moving things to the cloud. I'm often in places that don't have wifi/cell coverage so getting to the cloud is impossible.
It feels as friction free as writing on a physical notepad with a paper and pencil.
I don't know if they fixed them since, I haven't used it in three or four years.
There were different bugs, some deleted session.xml and some the files themselves.
I had actually found the reasons and prepared bug reports, but then had some life messes and lost the reports themselves.
Maybe I'll try to see if I can find the code again (it was plain calls to "deletefile" or something like that ended up being called by an error handler, if I'm not mistaken - it was so reckless code that I moved away from Notepad++)
If a file is saved and then gets corrupted for whatever reason, I can also use dropbox to grab the previous known good version. I've tested it, but I've never had to actually use it.
A gripe I have with TextEdit (an app that I love for its simplicity) is that UI elements (like font selection windows) are too small.
Rip C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories and back it up somewhere. WordPad.exe is standalone. If you're running Win7+ you'll need the en-us/muis/etc, if you pull from an XP install wordpad.exe is all you'll ever need to do.
Bonus points if you just grab a Windows XP iso and deflate wordpad.exe from the install image - copy WORDPAD.EX_ from the i386 folder and just run "expand wordpad.ex_ wordpad.exe".
I don’t know if anyone is emotional about this. At worst maybe someone is vaguely annoyed that they will have to change their workflow that invariably involves .rtf files for some reason.
Oh! Also, needing to open an RTF when Word wasn't installed.
FYI, notepad can cover this use case now, as it can handle more character encodings and line-endings.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
Control+S at the end and you have a RTF that can be read everywhere.
And then I learned that sometimes software is freely available online if you know where to look.
Now, there is no word processor I know is there. There is that useless trial version of Office 365, or maybe the real one. Or LibreOffice, that I am not very comfortable with. Or one of the webapps like Google Docs, but then I need an account, and internet access (not guaranteed).
You still can gain that comfort.
One thing we noticed was that RTF documents made in WordPad instead of Word were much, much smaller and since every byte added to our CDN bill we made a point of re-saving all our files in WordPad before publishing them. Sometimes simple is good.
Now imagine a machine is malfunctioning and you need to look up the last known "good" settings to see if anything changed. First open a browser, then go to the office site, then fish out your cell phone because you're going to need the authentication code to log in, then dance around for a bit because you're in a warehouse and the reception is terrible, then open the Word app, then wait ages for it to "work on it".
All I'm trying to do is quickly read some text. I don't see how this is better than clicking a text file icon on the desktop.
Occasionally, you have to document something with…screenshots. Now, some versions of Windows Server come with snipping tool, which lets you save a screen shot. Others you still have to use the print screen key. Then what… well, you open wordpad and paste.
Luckily most of the systems we interact with now we get to install Office when the system is being qualified. Could be a huge PIA though otherwise.
edit: level 2/2.5 means no internet connection and therefore no browser based editors.
Often time screenshots correlate to steps. You open wordpad and start a numbered list. Write what action you perform and the screenshot. Repeat until you’re all the way done. Take it off the system, print it, sign and date it and attach to an MOC and your done.
I supposed you could copy and save in paint. Then do the same thing in Word off the system by dropping in all the images. Idk, doesn’t sound like that much more work, but it’s annoying enough.
To me it's emblematic of a time when software tried to be self-contained and to serve the user, when operating systems (Windows in particular) had consistent interface conventions between programs, and when there was some consensus about what people could be expected to have.
Now, you'd probably point Grandma to Google docs. Which would be a little heavier, a little laggier, yes more capable, but also somewhere out there, a service, a thing available only thanks to the largesse of Google, a thing that can be taken away at any time, a thing that fosters dependence.
Its removal is consistent with the ongoing enshittification of Windows.
A bit like the Markdown of it's time.
At least it's easily replaced. I assume...
In recent years Notepad has overcome its traditional limitation when opening Unix files directly, I just discovered this not too long ago:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...
Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359310 - Sept 2023 (354 comments)
This may have been after win95 shipped, but before Exchange 4.0 shipped
So this is how the mouse wheel came about.
Basically without word-wrap each paragraph will be one long line of sentences.
With "paragraphs" separated by blank lines.
Then copying the non-word-wrapped text from Notepad, and pasting into an email window or message box allows the target window to display using its own word-wrap without the extraneous line breaks.
Then the receiver's email window can usually handle it when it is scaled differently than the sender, and it will be OK in both places.
They've upgraded the multi-tabbed notepad to use the Rich text edit control these days (win11)
But I think it's the loss of the Wordpad that matters to people, but that Wordpad will be yanked from all current and future Windows machines. For people who use a lot of different systems as guest, this can matter.
Actually as others said, since it's simply a Rich Edit wrapper they could just leave it; at least they could leave a view-only version, although the editing features are in all likelihood equally simple.
Any vulnerability it might have is probably present in the controls themselves rather than its code.
Edit: confirmed notepad behavior. Wordpad crashes in the emulator, then causes windows to lock up.
I always liked WordPad better than Word back then. It was faster and did all of the things I needed it to do. AbiWord occupied a similar sweet spot for me for some time after I went to Linux in the early 2000s.
For text files, Notepad is pretty much useless. For short files I'm using Notepad++, I tried using plain Notepad and I can't describe exactly why but it's almost unusable in comparison. And for large files (MBs to GBs) I'm using less. From git bash.
And if I need any sort of rich text formatting, there's the free Libre Office which is usually good enough for the job. In case I need the actual MS version suite, I've got a Microsoft Office Home and Student retail license on my wife's laptop. The one that I actually own, not the SAS crap they're pushing nowadays.
Otherwise I find Libre Office fairly crappy and barely usable but for opening and looking in the occasional MS file, it's good enough. The "Excel" (Calc) is by some reason horrendously slow in drawing charts. Like if I got an 1000 rows CSV, it becomes almost unusable. On a machine that could have been used in the 90s to do galaxy collision simulations at NASA. Excel, obviously doesn't have this problem.
In summary both Notepad and Wordpad are useless to me.
I use it as a clipboard scratchpad. It strips RTF when copying between programs since Windows itself has no built-in way of doing so and you can also use it to clean up whatever you're copying. It loads fast and is minimalist.
Some programs on Windows vomit all over themselves when receiving RTF information, like Teams for example. I also read people use the Address Bar/OMNIBar in browsers, but that may transmit to the search provider.
I also use Notepad++ and VSCode. Notepad remains my favorite clipboard toy because it is so fast and light-weight. I use Notepad++ when I need to use its advanced search/replace and visualization tooling (e.g. View -> Show Symbol -> Show All) and VSCode when I need actual language colorization/structural auto formatting.
PS - Ctrl+Shift+V isn't a Windows feature and never was. It is a Microsoft Office shortcut that only 50% of Microsoft Office even supports (e.g. try it in Outlook). A couple of third party programs support it, but it is incredibly YMMV.
There have always been so many free/shareware editors better in every way you wanted, even in launching speed.
It always surprised me to hear people regularly using it
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> I use it as a clipboard scratchpad. It strips RTF when copying between programs since Windows itself has no built-in way of doing so and you can also use it to clean up whatever you're copying.
I'm pretty sure it's not Notepad that strips RTF, it only exploits the windows clipboard feature: the clipboard can store data in multiple formats, and it's actually the applications that support storing it in RTF that also store it in normal text (this is actually usually handled by a control that the application is using, such as win32's Rich Edit).
In short, you can do the same by pasting the text in anything that doesn't support rtf (the only caveat is that the application might reencode and mangle the text when it reads it - old versions of Notepad could do it, for example).
There are also utilities that let you paste the clipboard's plain text directly.
To see what's really inside the clipboard you can use e.g. https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/inside_clipboard.html , if it still works.
PS You can use autohotkey or other utilities to make it a Windows feature