Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Literally never found an use for WordPad. Neither for Notepad, if we're at it.

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'm indifferent about Wordpad; always surprises me to read people don't regularly use Notepad.

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.

If you have Powertoys installed, it has a utility to directly paste as plain text.

For small amounts of text, another simple way is to paste it into the Run dialog (Winkey-R) and then copy it back out again. Works well for turning URLs into plain text and removing the editor formatting from function names before pasting into a bug report, for example.

That's my go-to for a clipboard clear. Win+R, space, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C/X (I go for X because closer key), ESC, all on the left hand.

Since I spend a lot of time in the web browser, I use the address bar for the same thing. Ctrl+(C then T then V then A then C then W) is my muscle memory "copy without formatting" shortcut.

Puretext is a free UWP app in the Microsoft Store for format stripping. The author is/was a MSFT dev, iirc. With it installed, WIN+V does a format_clear() paste.

If you enable clipboard history (Win+V), then you can click on the three dots over clipboard item to reveal additional options, and there will be a button to insert that item as a plain text.

> always surprises me to read people don't regularly use Notepad.

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

---

> 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.

It surprises me people using NP++ use NP (and a new tab even in VSCode should be just as fast?)

PS You can use autohotkey or other utilities to make it a Windows feature

Reply on news.ycombinator.com