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Comment by hjek | Hacker News Reader

MS Paint is my favourite Microsoft program ever. Even on GNU/Linux I can't do without it (just using Wine). The SHIFT + [drag] feature of MS Paint (kind of like on-the-fly brushes with transparency) is the killer feature I haven't seen in any other program.

http://pradiiphira.hubpages.com/hub/Microsoft-Paint-Features...

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That feature was in MacPaint, released in 1984. It used command-option instead of shift, though.

Page 19 of this manual:

http://classiccomputers.info/down/Apple/MacPaint_Manual_-_19...

Exactly that feature on p19! And what a nice manual. Those B/W pixel patterns are so pretty.

I wish there was a way to run those old programs. I once managed to get KidPix in B/W to run on an emulator but somehow it stopped working. I always felt that MSPaint was to pixels what Vi is to text. (Photoshop/Paint.NET/Gimp are more like Word)

Why has noone made clones of those old paint programs? (Maybe I ought to stop whining, and just do it myself. That manual is a great reference, though.)

Mini vMac is an excellent emulator for the Mac Plus. I have quite a collection of old mac software that I backed up from my original floppies, and I'm glad I did. Who knows how much longer those would have survived before they all had errors.

Check out mac garden if you are interested in old mac stuff, it's great.

If you ever make a clone of an old paint program (maybe in a web browser? should be possible nowadays) let me know :-)

I might go as far as saying that MS Paint for Windows Vista is the my favorite program period. It had every feature I could want (excluding transparency) and nothing else. The interface was quick and intuitive. I think it was pretty much perfect

MSPaint does actually have transparency (at least the XP version has)! The "secondary color" desides which color is to be transparent, if you move stuff and have transparency enabled (in the "selection" options). So it's even sort of possible to emulate layers by having multiple MSPaints open.

I don't know about that particular feature, but after looking around I found that Kolourpaint (4?) has essentially the functionality of MS Paint, with better usability and without its annoying bugs.

kolourpaint from KDE. It's basically a clone with more features.

https://vidd.me/kAU

I did a quick check: It also does resizing with several choosable smoothing algorithms and the "perfect shape" thingy too..

It's kind of a Debian/Ubuntu issue, but it is kind of heavy having to install 150 MBs of desktop environment (with database server, wtf?!) to use a paint program. Kind of difficult to compile from scratch too ( the ./configure file seems to be missing in their SVN repo). But looks really cool on the video :-)

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