Windows will no longer have an integrated basic rich-text-based word app.
Wordpad always seemed like an annoying and unnecessary half-step between notepad and word to me.
I liked having the minimal formatting options in WordPad without the bloat of Word.
Wordpad is also able to open large text files without having a stroke. RIP
This is my most common use. It is grrat for opening large log files on servers.
I read that like you’re Tony the Tiger. “It is GRRRRRREAT for opening large log files.”
The holy spirit help you with your servers that run on windows.
I’d also suppose this update won’t affect you, cuz you’re hopefully not running latest win11 on a server.
Lol. Good point!
In the nineties it produced the cleanest .rtf output of all the editors. Word makes toxic .rtf that unnecessarily turns formatting off and on at every line break and elsewhere too.
If it weren’t for wordpad I wouldn’t have learned how to output .rtf from my code.
RIP WordPad.
Word is now so bloated that I fear using it. It’s nice to have Wordpad.
T
Ah. Are you trying to write about Theodore Roosevelt? Bing can help!
The
Here are 10,000 links to Theodore Roosevelt
The fox…
As if Clippy wasn’t doing that 25 years ago.
Yeah but Clippy was attractive. All those curves on display.
Now I had a mischievous long chuckle on the bus and the old ladies near me are a bit worried about me!
its pretty neat if you dont have access to word, which is likely why they want to get rid of it
Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.
Thing about wordpad at least for me is that its just there if you need to make quick document that doesnt have to be as specificially made as you need to use word, but still more nice looking than just using notepad. You also dont need word to read stuff made with it.
Sure, though it’s not something that anyone is likely to switch OSes for.
It was very niche, but it’s great for viewing docs or other light work on a system you don’t want to install a whole office suite onto.
You can still do that but it’s through word webview. Some people won’t like that option.
I don’t want to install “word webview” on a server in order to look at a large log file or peruse some XML.
You don’t, it’s a browser. You shouldn’t be doing anything interacting from a server anyways.
You shouldn’t be doing anything interacting from a server anyways.
Ideally no but in the real world it happens, especially with with Windows Servers.
Can’t say I ever needed it in the 28 years I’ve been using Windows. I’m sure there are plenty who did, though.
I used it all the time to save text temporarily in. Note worked too, but i like the line break that WordPad had. It made reading and formatting easier.
As others have said, fast opening quick notes with basic formatting.
For example, if I get an unexpected call I need to write down more than a call back number, Wordpad was my go to.
Well, at least when back when I used Windows regularly.
Microsoft’s business model has often gotten in the way of anything they do making sense.
Is there anything left to microsoft that makes sense at this point? Maybe the physical doors to the microsoft offices still function… after you watch an ad?
It was created for people to open Word docs at home before everyone had Office.
Rtf is far more lightweight than docx. It’s closer to markdown.
In other words: bloat
Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.
Microsoft: We can’t spy on your usage when you use wordpad, use O365 instead! (guessing since MS recommends using O365 Word in its place).
TBH, I haven’t used wordpad since Windows 98. Not saying others don’t use it, but Notepad++ and a myriad of other options are better anyway.
If they just wanted telemetry they’d just “enhance it” they way they did with the monstrosity that is new Paint or AI assisted notepad.
AI assisted Notepad is a thing?
Yeah, though I don’t know if it graduated beta, because I don’t use windows 11.
And probably as a security update as well.
TBH, I haven’t used wordpad since Windows 98
which is why they’re getting rid of it
it would probably be pretty easy to just patch telemetry into it, except nobody uses it because why would you
Does Notepad++ allow rich text?
On a default install on NP++ you can only save as rtf, but there are addable plugins that give some rtf functionality. So as a direct answer, no, it doesn’t, but it can.
Meh. I’m not sold enough.
vim with global ls_colors and dircolors kinda user huh? Nothing wrong with that.
I don’t understand these words 😭
WordPad 3d
WordPad AI
Thanks for making me throw up in my mouth
chatgpt integration
Windows Copilot+ integration
Windows Recall integration
you no longer need to save your documents we will take screenshots of every page for you
Beautiful
WordpadGPT
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Oh get fucked Microsoft. Now I have to use notepad when I put the tape measure on the spacebar so teams doesn’t change my status to idle.
Just select yourself to chat with in Teams (top option in contacts) and put a battery on the delete key like a professional…
I like the cut of your jib. I’ll put a word in for you with the Bobs.
MouseJiggle.exe
I’m a frequent host and participant of a meeting for one.
Looped video for me
Could they please retire modern Windows UI design?
Those contrasting color squares are not the zen those designers think. UI layout being different in paradigm for every application is not the productivity improvement they think. Using titlebars for something other than titles and control buttons is not optimization. Those buttons being some scratches on the screen barely visible is crap from any PoV I can imagine.
And somebody should explain to them that a good design for a billboard, a good design for a glossy magazine, a good design for a shop front, a good design for an office, a good design for a videogame, a good design for a movie and a good design for a workstation are all mutually incompatible in vast majority of cases.
And again about zen, simplicity, air and all that. I understand they think they are very smart and understanding of aesthetics. But zen would be having clean window borders and clearly visible control elements, for starters. And buttons not being just color squares. And in general solutions being subordinate to functional goals of the UI being usable. Industrial ergonomics are zen.
EDIT: I know it’s offtopic, not interested - keep walking
“We need to recapture the Apple market share!”
“Got it boss, we’ll make it stupid.”
It just pains me to see, remember Chinese websites and software around 2007-2008?
Everybody (aware) looked at that with terror.
Now it’s the same everywhere.
“Get rid of those ugly strain reliefs on the plugs!”
“Uh, we don’t make hardware.”
“I don’t care, get rid of them!”
I remember a while back Microsoft did an market research thing and found that of their brands, “Xbox” had positive consumer feedback while many of their other product names weren’t nearly as favorable.
So what did they do? Did they try to understand what Xbox did differently to leverage that strategy elsewhere? Did they promote the Xbox marketing team to give them a wider purview?
No. They just renamed Zune Music to Xbox Music and Games for Windows to Xbox for Windows. THAT’LL FIX IT!
The drop-down text menu with dense options was good design. Adding the quick toolbar for more common tasks was also good design.
Moving everything from the text menu to the quick toolbar was bad design.
Just like the evolution of their search functionality. Started as an explorer feature (good), added to the start menu with a focus on program names (good), then they mixed web results from Bing and it’s unclear if a program I’m searching for is installed and it found that or if it exists and the result is a link to some website (bad, if I wanted to search the fucking internet, I’d launch a fucking browser), also insisting on using their browser (wtf, they should have been broken up 20 fucking years ago, instead the courts decided to just fucking ignore them doing the same shit they lost the lawsuit for only much worse now).
Wordpad, as I recall, only existed because back in the Windows 95 days nobody had Office and couldn’t open Word documents.
WordPad in Windows 95 was a demonstration of how to use the rich-text editing component built into Windows. Its C++ source code came bundled with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes - programming library for making Windows apps using C++) as a sample.
The fact that it was a useful tool for end users was essentially just a side effect.
They should preinstall libre office as a replacement.
people still don’t, right? I cant imagine it’s very common outside of company computers
Anyone who works for or studies at any organization has it.
As long as you have notepad, you’re good.
Notepad++
Is this 2010?
Notepad++ is still good :p
I would have suggested Sublime. But you still can’t print with it properly (only with an extension which prints in background with another program). Sure normally you don’t need to print code and with missing markup possibilities it’s pointless anyway. But sometimes a raw easy list of ideas needs to be printed.
Now I selfhost a markdown editor just for that usecase.
What if I want rich text?
Too bad, only the poorest text for you.
*economically challenged text
Have your butler do it for you
Markdown?
You should probably reconsider.
LaTeX is always free and works on many systems.
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I didn’t mind having something light and built in for when I just wanted quickly to create a little rich text doc and not boot up full fat Word and the corresponding jump in resource usage and file size.
They should open-source it, as they did with Calculator.
Libre office writer is a thing
Yeah, sure, a really nice thing.
As is Abiword, which is a bit more of a direct comparison.
here’s a little known fact about WordPad: It was Microsoft’s first word processing program. Originally introduced as an add-on to MS-DOS in 1981, WordPad later became a part of Windows in the 1990s after the release of Windows 95. It was designed to be simpler and more user-friendly than its more advanced counterpart, Microsoft Word.
WordPad didn’t exist until Windows 95. You might be thinking of Microsoft Write, which predated it.
In Windows 95, wordpad was still write.exe, is it possible they just renamed it?
Definitely possible, but I think WordPad in Windows 95 was written from scratch.
I’ve used windows since the 90s. Not once have I intentionally used WordPad.
It did open by default for some file types for a long time (.doc), usually mangling the content cause it couldn’t actually handle them properly. I think it was also the default for .txt files at some point, causing many curse words when editing plain text files, that invisibly weren’t so plain any more after… Programs expecting a configuration fine really don’t like that sort of thing.
So: I’m very ok with this. Just install LibreOffice or something if you needa Word-like experience. Install notepad++ for anything “plain”.
Still on the last windows os am ever gonna use windows 10
If you don’t plan to upgrade even after security updates end, what’s keeping you there now?
Am prob gonna use linux fully and secondary os macos (not 100% sure erm) I also meant like windows oses
Fair enough. If you do run MacOS, I highly recommend UTM for running guest OS’s. It uses qemu and I have really found it to be even nicer than parallels.
heard of utm yeah (on ios/ipad atleast)
And so the bloodline of windows write is extinguished
This is kinda sad that if you want to do even basic word processing with Microsoft software, your only option now is an ongoing subscription to do so.
…your only option now is an ongoing subscription to do so.
You can also still buy the Office package without subscription. The latest release is from 2024 and 2021 before that. But of course its expensive for basic stuff.
Oh I didn’t actually realise that, I thought they’d just gone full Adobe with office 365
I’m fairly sure they want to, they keep trying to kill off the standalone version but always seem to keep giving it a reprieve.
And they’re making notepad pretty unusable also
I’ve had no real issuses with the new notepad.
I just hope that they don’t continue adding too much stuff to it and it becomes the new wordpad and we don’t have a basic box to put text anymore.
One of my biggest problems with the new notepad is you’ve lost using it as a forgettable scratch space. Anything you put in the new Notepad now gets written to your drive, even if you don’t save the file.
You can’t type or copy/paste anything sensitive into notepad anymore as a temporary space even if you don’t save the file.
win + R
copy it into run box
Sure, and I do that too, but that a problem: you’re limited to only a single line of text about 200 characters long
There is a setting to start with a fresh window. But rereading the text kinda concerns me. Starting a new session is when the previous one is discarded?
Here’s a great video going down to the hex level for how to extract the cleartext out of unsaved Notepad files using the temp cache files: video
Word pad the goat of somehow interpreting files as not UTF8
