Windows will no longer have an integrated basic rich-text-based word app.
I guess it’s to direct more people to Microsoft 365 and Word. I hope that in reality more people will start to use LibreOffice and others.
My office had a period where we used LibreOffice and others because of some licensing dispute with Microsoft. However that period of peace ended when we migrated to 365.
I’ve used windows since dos and have never once used wordpad in my entire life.
For basic text, notepad is just fine. For anything fancy, wordpad isn’t good enough.
I feel that it doesn’t have a place anywhere. It’s like the bizarre paint 3D they’ve recently discontinued.iirc wordpad had spellcheck which was sort of convenient
Pfew … I moved to Linux just in time!
Gnome has already been ruined by a similar failed desire for a clean and simple interface.
That was decades ago, though.
Yes, but on Linux I get to choose not to use Gnome
Gnome has only gotten better imo
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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
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!
And then they tank the name X-Box
“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.
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).
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.
Another thing. But there’s a lot of markdown and other lightweight markup editors.
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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.
No longer available and no longer integrated are not equivocal.
idc what people say mswrite was always > wordpad > word
Wordpad, as I recall, only existed because back in the Windows 95 days nobody had Office and couldn’t open Word documents.
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.
They should preinstall libre office as a replacement.
WordPad in Windows 95 was a demonstration of how to use the Windows rich-text editing component. Its C++ source code came bundled with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) as a sample.
Wordpad always seemed like an annoying and unnecessary half-step between notepad and word to me.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Sometimes simple is good.
RIP WordPad.
This is my most common use. It is grrat for opening large log files on servers.
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.
I read that like you’re Tony the Tiger. “It is GRRRRRREAT for opening large log files.”
In other words: bloat
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 on.
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.
Rtf is far more lightweight than docx. It’s closer to markdown.
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.
It was created for people to open Word docs at home before everyone had Office.
Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.
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!
Word pad the goat of somehow interpreting files as not UTF8
Sad but expected. Most people are using either office or one of the free alternatives by now.
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.
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”.
More brilliant decisions from Satya Nadella. 🙄
It is an obvious maneuver, to be fair to Nadella. Not only will this push more over to subscription based word processing, but it also closes one of the easier avenues useds have to avoid aggregated data farming. Their next move should be to turn Notepad into a complementary tiered program:
Tier 1) Use at no charge, but your data pays for it instead.
Tier 2) Notepad becomes an extra pay to unlock feature of 365.
I wonder if anyone thought about looking up WordPal in the Microsoft Store and think about maybe that could be what it evolved into.
Problem is, it’s not installed by default
