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Comment by z_open | Hacker News Reader

Man people are nostalgic about the most bizarre things sometimes. My experience with WordPad was accidently opening something with it and having to change the default app for some extension.

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I see nothing wrong with being sad that Microsoft is removing something from their OS and their suggested (but not included) replacement is a paid app which is at least an order of magnitude larger and more complex. Sure, WordPad isn't the best program of its kind (not the tool you need for every job), but still it was nice having the functionality there when you needed it without needing to install something (which in turn needs an internet connection). It was still an OK tool.

I liked WordPad because it was comfortably simple, did more than Notepad, but didn't have way more than I needed for personal use. It's similar to why I like Apple Notes (even though TextEdit is closer to WordPad). Most of the time, I don't need pages, margins, footers, a bunch of fancy formatting, but the ability to make text bold or italic, add hyperlinks, and maybe change the color or font. In which case I want all the doodads related to those unused features out of the way.

I like WordPad because when I collect screenshots and quick notes about what's of them, it's fast and doesn't get in the way: Alt+PrintScreen, Alt+Tab to WordPad, Control+V, type some text, Alt+Tab again to go back to the application you're screenshootting and you can keep going.

Control+S at the end and you have a RTF that can be read everywhere.

It is not just nostalgia. Windows used to have a built-in word processor. Not anymore. If I wanted to write a letter on a Windows computer I was unfamiliar with, I could use WordPad, I knew it was there, like Notepad and the calculator. WordPad is not the best word processor, by far, but it was there.

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).

> LibreOffice, that I am not very comfortable with

You still can gain that comfort.

All three apps you mentioned are awful, the fact that they were there doesn't confer a non-nostalgic benefit to mourn their disappearance

The only use case I have ever used Wordpad for was to open text files with Linux End-of-Lines on a Windows computer with only Wordpad and Notepad (that do not see LF as proper and of lines and just displays one line of mess).

Same here. Open a text file in Notepad and the contents extend way past the edge of the screen. Open it in WordPad and turn on line wrapping.

Oh! Also, needing to open an RTF when Word wasn't installed.

Why not turn on wrapping in notepad?

Notepad wouldn't recognize Unix line endings and would interpret the whole file as one line. Word wrapping doesn't fix that.

Oh I see. Yes, I remember that.

FYI, notepad can cover this use case now, as it can handle more character encodings and line-endings.

There was also some weirdness where you could not have the status bar and word wrapping enabled at the same time.

FYI, nowadays notepad does support different line endings.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

I remember using WordPad as a poor destitute kid forced to learn how to type in school and couldn't afford to fork over money for Word so my formatting and spacing was all fucked.

And then I learned that sometimes software is freely available online if you know where to look.

This article is definitely hamming it up to fill an article about a single line in a change log.

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.

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