Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

bleepingcomputer.com

226 pointsturtlegrids354 comments

One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack.

This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)

I have a story which predates WordPad, but concerns OLE support in it's predecessor Write:

At my secondary school, a long time ago now, they used PCs from educational vendor Research Machines (RM). These ran a locked down version of the Windows 3.11 Program Manager which didn't allow you to start any unapproved programs. I discovered you could embed EXEs from a floppy disk as OLE objects in a Write document and then start them from within Write by double clicking. In this manner, I could bring my LibertyBasic programs in from home and run them on the school's machines :-).

We also used PCs from RM at our secondary school in the late 2000s. At that time there was still a very similar exploit that allowed me to embed and run unauthorised programs inside of PowerPoint slide shows. Fun times.

Who can forget the first time they opened Wordpad and then tried to drag a text document into the window to edit it, just like you do with Notepad, only to have the text document turn into an icon inside of the empty text document you had open. Fun times.

I forgot the first time, but it happened enough times I found it frustrating. Apparently it's a mistake I didn't learn from.

WordPad was an official sample application for the MFC and OLE: https://web.archive.org/web/20070429125746/http://msdn2.micr...

Yes, this explains why Wordpad seemed like a wrapper for OS-level text controls and views. This is like any PDF viewer on Mac OS now.

from https://github.com/microsoft/VCSamples/tree/master/VC2010Sam...

"The WordPad sample demonstrates how to implement an application that imitates the functionality of WordPad, including the user interface elements and some of the capabilities."

I should have known it wasn't the real Win95 WordPad source code since this version is written using MFC and C++.

C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 components in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.

Hmm. Murray Sargent's blog post states that Win95's WordPad IS written in MFC.

from https://web.archive.org/web/20070127011040/http://blogs.msdn...: "...RichEdit 1.0 was wrapped in MFC to produce WordPad as an example of how MFC could be used for text processing. This was shipped with Windows 95 as mentioned in the previous post."

More RichEdit history: https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...

> C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 components in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.

Plenty of Windows 95 components were written in C++, including pretty much everything that dealt with OLE. WinNT also used C++ for the graphics layer.

WinNT isn't Win95.

Lots of MS groups were using C++ before Win95, including the Exchange group.

Windows for Workgroups 3.1+ included C++ code.

I recall that in the initial Win95 group meeting, C++ wasn't allowed. I moved to another team, so I don't know if that restriction was relaxed or not and/or when they allowed C++.

The email client included with Win95 wasn't allowed to use C++, including the RichEdit windows control, which had to use C for OLE code - not many other codebases could boast about that - no one signs up for that sort of masochism by choice.

The "real" WordPad is built on top of the sample, with minor changes.

One neat OLE object (btw this works even in Windows 10 - i don't know about 11) is the "package" which allows you to embed any file as an OLE object. So basically you can drop an image file, PDF, video, program or anything else in WordPad and it'll put an icon representing it that if the user double clicks it'd be equivalent to them doubleclicking a file.

Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPad chokes at anything above a handful of MB) since you're making a bad archive file (using the default .rtf format will encode the binary data in hex which will actually increase file size), but i always liked how general the idea was.

(also it isn't limited to WordPad but to anything that uses OLE - e.g. you could do the same with Delphi which has a "OLE object" control that can embed any OLE object and the object becomes part of the executable - so you could, say, throw a PDF file in a package OLE object in a form and when the user doubleclicks it the control opens the default PDF viewer)

I was tinkering last night and it was amusing to have Windows XP Wordpad spawn a Windows 10 Wordpad instance in OLE mode.

https://i.imgur.com/51BySZ0.png

Seems like the implementation was impractical, but it's basically what we do with Obsidian and any modern knowledge management software. Feels to me like it was ahead of its time.

Which is also why you shouldn't trust an RTF file

OLE has always fascinated me. I’ve wanted to play around with it just to see what sort of cursed things I can do, but my eyes glaze over looking at WinAPI docs.

if only the OLE stack wasn't riddled with malware (think those activex toolbar addons you could download for IE), it would've been a great idea!

OLE isn't any more "malware riddled" than anything else you install on your PC, at its core it is just a fancy plugin system for embedding stuff in a document without the document editor knowing about it. OLE is as susceptible to malware as any other plugin system - in other words unless you somehow[0] install malware, you wont get malware.

[0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE

I'm always sad to see applications go (especially if the recommended alternative is a paid software), but did that thing ever work properly? In the past decade I used Windows only when someone held a gun to my head, but before that I remember that WordPad always messed up all documents I have ever opened: weird page and line breaks, picture and textbox formatting all over the place, and saving a document was a good way to prevent future reading.

I always figured this was by design. Microsoft needed a GUI word processor that was free to stifle competition in the new "windows software" market, but not good enough to upset their Word business.

Good job WordPad - one of the flag bearers of Microsofts anti-competitive business practices.

Microsoft Write (which supported RTF) was included in Windows 1.0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write

For Win95, the new included-in-the-box email client required a text editor which supported multiple fonts, colours, font styles, et al. But Microsoft Write code was not written to be modular and cross-platform (much of the Win95 email client code would also run on the Macintosh, for Mac OS System 7.x).

So the RichEdit windows control was created.

Wordpad.exe is a thin wrapper around the RichEdit control, like Notepad.exe is a thin wrapper around the text edit control.

Notepad.exe have lots of improvement in past 10 years. A major revamp in 2022 It is no longer a "thin wrapper".

I noticed that it needs more than 3 seconds to start on my work laptop. Truly an improvement. /s

Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 November.

Microsoft Word for Windows was released in 1989 November, four years after Windows 1.0 included Microsoft Write. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word

Remember, the DOS MS Word competitor; WordPerfect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect

And the later WordPerfect for Windows was competition that MS was keen to kill.

Funiest thing is, in win11, the notepad use RichEdit again (but use winui's richedit control, not win32

from https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/richeditd2d-wi...

"The Windows 11 Notepad uses the RichEditD2DPT window class with a recent Microsoft 365 RichEdit."

Seems like there were three options:

1. Ship Word with Windows and not get paid for it, even though they had hundreds of engineers working on it.

2. Ship no word processor with Windows, and make the end user find one on their own.

3. Ship a basic one and let the user upgrade to Word if they needed something more.

At the time with option 2, it's not like you're going to hit google and download some FOSS solution - you would need to go to the computer store and pay $200 for something in a box off the shelf.

I'm thinking option 3 was a good middle ground, and a win-win for MS and the customer.

Microsoft had a cheaper office suite that they sold as a middle ground. I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home and had to do some things on school computers instead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

> I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home

The irony was that Microsoft included Microsoft Money in the Works suite, likely to give an aspiration of saving and making enough in order to upgrade to the Office suite.

MS Works was supposed to fill that role...[0]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works [0]

Wordpad was basically just a tech demo for the Rich text control in Windows.

correct. wordpad is one of peak microsoft's assholery and its death should be celebrated. too bad, it won't help libreoffice's adoption.

Can you elaborate ? It was a very good RTF editor.

Wordpad was able to open RTF files much better than Word. Word will mess up formating.

Nobody uses WordPad, nobody wants to improve WordPad, WordPad will be sunset.

I always use wordpad to take notes. It's fast, no-nonsense, always pre-installed but has just the right amount of rich text formatting.

Try to open an RTF file in Word.

That was Notepad, which will continue to live on. WordPad was the one that DIDN'T screw everything up.

Fun fact: Before WordPad there was Microsoft Write.

Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.

MS are the kings of legacy support, no joke here. It is astonishing really.

CARDFILE.EXE has been long gone though.

Ah man I totally forgot about this!

From Wikipedia: "The Windows 3.1 version of Cardfile was included with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not installed by default. For the later two versions of Windows, the user would have to manually copy the Cardfile application from the Windows install CD in order to use the application."

This is their strongest point. I still remember being able to install Microsoft Money 99 on a brand new Windows 10 for my uncle, without much difficulties.

pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. (It used to be called Paintbrush.)

> > Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today

> pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint.

And in both cases, the reason was most probably backwards compatibility, so that programs which directly called WRITE.EXE or PBRUSH.EXE to open a file would keep working. Most of these are going to be 16-bit Windows programs (which AFAIK no longer work, unless you're still running a 32-bit build of Windows), or 32-bit Windows programs directly ported from 16-bit Windows programs (Microsoft designed the 32-bit Windows API to make it easy to have a single source code building both 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the same program, and to make it easy to adapt the source code from a 16-bit Windows program into a 32-bit Windows program; it was not unusual back then to offer both 16-bit and 32-bit builds of the same program, built from the same source code).

Cool exe's don't change

Ever. So cool.

You can use otvdm to run 16-bit Windows applications directly under modern Windows. It emulates the CPU and translates all the Win32 API calls.

I wish sol.exe still opened up Solitaire. The original one.

can i do something in regedit so that "paint" loads up "paint.net" and not og paint?

The binary for Microsoft Paint is called mspaint.exe, and there is no "paint" alias AFAICT -- typing "paint" in the run prompt results in "Windows cannot find 'paint'".

You could create a paint.bat file in C:\Windows\System32 (usually the first dir in %PATH%) that calls Paint.net instead. Something like this should work:

    "C:\Program Files\paint.net\paintdotnet.exe" %*

Add entry to. Works atleast in Win 11

   Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths

I don't have a reference for this but I remember reading that Microsoft had to create Wordpad from scratch because they lost the code for Write. I do remember that when they introduced Wordpad it was missing several features present in Write and a very visible one was justified text.

According to Murray Sargent's blog post on RichEdit version history, justified text was added to RichEdit in v3.0. The Win10 version of WordPad seems to support fully-justified text per paragraph.

see https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...

Write had an interesting cursor with the vertical pipe line and something like an asterisk. I used it for a while on Windows 3.1 before someone set me up with a copy of MS Office 4.3.

Off topic, but I'm loving the Mac equivalent, TextEdit.

After trying every kind of fancy task management and note taking system from org-mode to Obsidian to Logseq, I now use a .rtfd (.rtf + images) on iCloud to act as a note-taking system / todo-list. I would have used pen and paper but I need to paste screenshots and URLs.

There's an iOS app called RTF Write for 99c. Now I always have my notes, tasks, and shopping, and above all, it's so simple and quick.

TextEdit dates all the way back to NeXT

Correct. The Macintosh lineage was SimpleText IIRC.

Yeah TeachText, then SimpleText.

You'd make the Read Me documents on classic Mac OS by changing the type of the file from 'ttxt' to 'ttro'

Actually, you changed the file type from 'TEXT' to 'ttro' to make a Read Me document read-only. 'ttxt' was the application signature of TeachText and SimpleText and is now the signature of TextEdit.

As a tangential aside Textedit I believe used to be provided as sample source code with Xcode. So even if it was removed it may never die.

It still basically is — the document-based app template is pretty much TextEdit minus some settings.

I remember reading that the TextEdit.app is very simple as the basic widget the OS provides is fully featured with all the functionality.

Yeah, the Cocoa text input system is very full-featured and TextEdit.app is basically a demo of it the way WordPad demoed the windows rich text editing component

why not use the notes app? you get in built folders and shari g options too

For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down.

TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.

If you like plain text, you'd probably love it even more with a better text editor.

I’ve tried many, but the featurelessness of TextEdit is what I like about it. “Better” ends up being more distracting. I do like Sublime for actual dev tasks, though.

P.S. Auto-heading is a setting (I turned it off).

Counterpoint: syncing across devices, sharing, embeddable media and searchability are actually all kinda table-stakes if I'm going to be using these notes for the rest of my forseeable life. I have shared notes with my wife where we have shopping lists, shared notes with my co-founder on roadmaps, have my vaccine cards and IDs in there for presenting at bars, and all my code snippets in a folder called "Snippets" that is searchable and available to me at my work and home computers. Kinda hard to replicate with a folder full of text files without even more complexity and crud.

Oh for sure. For those use cases, more features make sense. My use case here is “swap file for disorganized thoughts”, and I don’t need them to be replicated, archived, or searchable—and the mental overhead of those features is a detriment.

A notes .txt represents my current unit of work, and moving it into the archive folder is equivalent to deleting it in that I will likely never need or use it again. Documentation goes into the repo or Notion or whatnot, grocery lists are shared with my wife, etc., and I see the value in additional features there.

You’re right - it’s a great option.

But you can have multiple notes, and as soon as there are lots of notes to look at, I won’t do it every day.

With my .rtfd file, there is only one file with one todo list, and that’s it. I can never lose it or get lost in it, or spend time finetuning it.

If a day I decide to change note-taking app, I can do it by just opening it. With notes I have to figure out an export strategy and third-party export app.

There's something great about dealing with raw text files (and I say this as a happy Photos.app user)

Notes would be a total killer app if it supported Markdown.

They forced people to upgrade the full operating system when they ever so slightly changed Notes' format recently. I shudder to think what it will take them to support Markdown.

(And yes, I use Notes for everything :) )

I found notes-up when I moved to Linux mint. It supports markdown! Ans it doesn't change quotes like notes does .

This is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get.

I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.

There are many arguments for FOSS. This isn’t one of them.

Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Few users, if any, are depending on this app that hasn’t been getting attention for years. There’s plenty of replacement apps as good or better, including FOSS ones.

If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

On the contrary, the difference is precisely that an abandoned FOSS program can be picked up by someone else; that this ability is not always used is beside the point.

Not always is a misnomer.

It rarely if ever is.

Anyone remember PhantomJS? It took years before a replacement emerged and nobody was willing to take in the project, and this was a critical piece of tech at the time

Just because it can does not mean that is.

> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.

> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

Taking over write isn't really hard. It is not a complex app. The core is the rich text edit control from Windows. Writing a comparable application from "scratch" using the controls isn't a huge task and there are plenty comparable programs.

(The full OLE capability needs a bit tweaking to get it working right, if one needs it)

Just copy latest available wordpad.exe into your new OS. I'm 100% sure it'll work for the following century. It's Windows.

It seems strange to call it "non-consensual" for them to not maintain a now-little-used application in perpetuity.

They are actively removing it from existing installations, if I understand correctly.

But even if that was not the case, it is a change in a user's workflow that they did not request.

Is this a high bar I have set for the developer? Yes, perhaps it is.

And yet I believe in it and stand by it in my projects.

I consider it my responsibility to accommodate the user, and not the other way around.

Microsoft did choose to open source WPF a few years back [0], but I don't fully remember the situation there. I remember hearing discontent about the decision on /r/dotnet.

The opposing reactions (discontent MS did open source something, discontent that they didn't) are odd. I don't fully remember the details there though so can't make a meaningful comment.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-told-were-not-happy-...

WINE ships with a WordPad clone.

Source code: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/tree/master/programs/wor...

This happens in opensource too, its just more rare. Terraform relicencing comes to mind, but there has been many, many other times too.

It happens, but there's a way out: forking.

With proprietary software, the option of forking does not exist.

ffmpeg had a schism just over a decade ago and the splinter group forked off into libav.

One of the splinter group members happened to be the now-former ffmpeg maintainer in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories and switched them from ffmpeg to libav. Yes, this was done purely for ideological reasons.[1]

So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world. In a way, I would argue it's even worse in the open source world because when it happens the driving factor is oftentimes ideological dogma instead of something simpler like lack of money or interest.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg

Cannot say if Notepad does it in recent versions, but on older Windows systems Wordpad was useful to quickly open texts made on Linux (with just LF instead of CR+LF) which in Notepad would show as uninterrupted.

They did indeed add LF support to Notepad, 5 years ago:

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

Took them long enough, honestly it was bizarre how long it took them.

Even worse was how resizing the notepad window would introduce newlines into the text if you saved it.

Thank you, though now I cannot anymore honestly state that MS did not introduce any new meaningful feature in Windows 10 ;).

I know you're being sarcastic but it also introduced the virtual desktop switcher, (full) DX12, made significant improvements to the console, added real ARM support for the desktop OS, replaced IE, implemented proper DPI support (all the way to per-monitor true fractional), added openssh, actual HDR support, and many more things that can be surprisingly hard to go without if you revert to a previous release.

There is always plenty wrong with each new release but the comments and jokes about ${"LATEST_RELEASE"} of ${"SOFTWARE"} being unilaterally worse just make me think the person can't deal with something changing instead of the software actually being bad.

Comments and jokes about how they could have an entire new release worth of features just bringing back what they've removed or reverse-improved over the years however... that I agree with ;).

It still sucks at opening HL7 files, which have line endings as CR (and just CR). WordPad handles these out of the box.

Exactly, the only reason why I was sticking to WordPad whenever I had to use a windows machine

I think it's killed by Word Online (free-ish) and VSCode over at the Seattle company.

Word Online requires sending docs to MS cloud and VSCode doesn't provide text formatting, so they are different things.

>and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed

There are texts I don't want to write in a browser

And now that newspapers and magazines are dead, you can’t cut and paste your ransom notes either.

There’s a million and one offline open source solutions that are higher quality than wordpad.

There a nearly infinite solutions that also contain malware, the one solution of the OS maker gets at least a little trust from me

If all you need is "a little trust", there are also plenty of options

Which do you suggest?

If it doesn't have rich text support, isn't lighter than anything in the OpenOffice family, and is as unstable as AbiWord, don't bother saying it.

I've recently switched to OnlyOffice ("desktop version" - probably Electron) since online reviews seem to suggest it has better support for docx than LibreOffice. You might give it a try, as it supports rtf as a document format, but not sure how well that works.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx

Calligra Words looks nice. I trust anything KDE.

I write in iA Writer and code in Sublime. Highly recommend both.

And plain text editors are alternatives to rtf supporting richtext editors how exactly?

Then download one of the various word processors that are available for Windows.

This is deeply unfortunate. WordPad is by far the best implementation of RTF anywhere.

But who uses RTF? I can't recall ever receiving an RTF file. Scanning my drives, I've only found a single Readme RTF file in some old Windows utilities.

I always thought the only common real-world use of RTF was as a clipboard format (rather than a file format), so you could copy and paste with bold and italics.

But then at some point I think that might have been replaced in practice with HTML as a clipboard format instead.

I'm not sure if you copy text from browsers or word processors today, if it's usually available as both RTF and HTML, or only one?

TextEdit on macos use rtf by default

Scrivener saves everything in RTF files.

It’s used a lot in the localization industry.

I haven't created an installer for a Windows desktop app in over 5 years, but it was a common format for the embedded EULA. It's not as important these days, but there was a huge file size difference between an RTF created in Wordpad vs Word.

Back in the day I worked on a desktop shell for senior accessibilty in .net (pointerware) & was tasked with creating a word processor. Went with richtextedit control to do most the heavy lifting, & included being able to forward rtf via email which would convert subset of rtf editor exposed to html

Some health systems still do, but that is thankfully being phased out with the growing adoption of FHIR and / or HL7.

And a regular source of rtf vulns as well unfortunately. But I am with you, needing s cloud word/office to edit rich text sucks.

Which free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.

Something I've used time and again when I was still primarily using Windows: Jarte (https://www.jarte.com/). It's small, portable, and works well with RTF files.

Apparently, it can also work with .DOC and .DOCX files (https://www.jarte.com/features.html), but I've never tried it myself.

Focus Writer. Open-source, minimalist interface (but enough useful options in settings) and many more. I've been using it for years, very happy with it

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

Edit: Also available for Linux (deb/flatpak)

Hard to complain about free, but overall it feels a bit .. unpolished. On Ubuntu 22.04 jammy you can't change the font reliably

Notepad++ maybe?

Notepad++ doesn't support RTF nor DOCX.

Html with contenteditable I guess?

You just gave me the idea for an HTML file format that writes changes to contenteditable back to the file.

Has anyone tried this before? I'm likely ignorant. But it would be a pretty exciting document publishing format.

With a little server-side support it wasn't all that rare an approach back in the early-mid 2000s days of web dev, when none of us had any idea what we were doing and couldn't wait to find out.

"Exciting" is certainly a word I would use to describe the results, especially in the common case where no VCS was in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki is kind of like that, albeit way more involved

There are already multiple WYSIWYG HTML editors such as BlueGriffon.

Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types. Plain text or Office formats, PDF, thats it.

That might well be true for 99% of people, but it isn't true for me. I'd like to have an editor built into windows that was way lighter than an IDE but could handle things like JSON, XML, and CSV without sweating.

Notepad++ serves that purpose today but would be nice to have it bolted into Windows. Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)

I think it’s more a recognition of the fact that Microsoft expects Windows users to purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, as part of their push to replace local-first applications with cloud services.

Also look at how they are changing desktop Outlook to a web-tech based UI, which is a prerequisite for eventually moving it to the cloud altogether.

Microsoft knows that windows users will eventually cave in to some of those second option subscription reminders.

> Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types

Regular windows users are mostly corporate and there are (management excepted, of course) a lot of file types to be manipulated. (CAD, MS Office, etc)

True, I didnt explain myself very clearly. An editor serves two functions: to open text files, and to act as the Program of Last Resort to open an unfamiliar file type. Id like something beefier than Notepad for the first, but I could live with it: but Id really like something with the power of Notepad++ for the second use case, built into Windows. However its far outside the mainline for windows corporate users since they probably never get sent filetyoes for which they do not already have the right app to open it.

> Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)

An awful lot, maybe most Windows users who need to inspect non txt filetypes still wouldn't be comfortable with Vim, even with a user friendly keybinding.

> We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf

Doesn’t Office require a paid license on top of the Windows license, unlike WordPad?

Install LibreOffice.

If you were using WordPad before, LibreOffice will be a fine replacement for your purposes.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

What’s the load time on LibreOffice these days? Years ago on Linux it took awhile. I use Notepad and Wordpad because they load fast.

The latest version of LibO, 7.6, loads considerably faster than it used to. I now use it almost exclusively but I've MS Office 2007 still installed as there are times when I still need it. LibO's Write still has many bugs and can become incredibly slow when loading large tables (60 to 100 pages or more). To get myself out of trouble I've exported the .ODF file to .DOC and used MS Word to continue.

Nothing irks me more than having to do this, I wish The Document Foundation would address this instead of adding new features. Damn it, MS Word has bugs and quirks but it's much faster and than LibO when dealing with large tables and inserted images.

If LibO were fixed properly it would then be a true competitor to MSO.

95% of the patches __are__ bugfixing. New features are pretty rare.

We're mostly volunteers, so people implement whatever they feel like doing :-) The essence of open-source.

Come help out if you can, or sponsor some fixes with one of the LibreOffice consulting companies.

I use libreoffice on linux and the load times are fine, maybe a few seconds on the splash screen.

Its never been long enough that I thought it was slow

LibO loads considerably faster on Linux than Windows but it still suffers bugs and quirks mentioned in my earlier comment.

Abiword still is great.

Load time is fine, less than a second.

The flatpak version of libreoffice write loads in about a second on my 5 year old desktop.

Curious that Microsoft doesn't mention this and pushes their expensive licenseware instead, especially if one were happy with WordPad which has compatibility issues with Word documents, so you managed to avoid the ecosystem this far but now you're recommended to buy in after all.

Yeah of course they wouldn't recommend a competitor, but to me that makes it seem like this announcement is an attempt to get a handful more people to buy Word by removing a finished and functional product that was fast and available to anyone with a Windows computer

How does it compare to openoffice? Better alternative?

Both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice are descendents of the original OpenOffice (what you're probably thinking about.)

LibreOffice is under very active development and can be downloaded from https://www.libreoffice.org/

Apache OpenOffice is effectively abandonware at this point, see https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Product_Release It's mostly been maintenance releases since 2013.

If you want LibreOffice with support (or just want to support development), you probably want Collabora.

Yes, it does. Both Office 365 and Office 202X are paid products.

There used to be Word and PowerPoint viewers available for free but I think Microsoft discontinued them.

I think you can still use them through the browser only with OneDrive account.

They do have the cloud version of Office which is "free".

OneDrive consumer is free but you have to put files on the cloud.

Office Online is free.

But that’s not a replacement for WordPad as WordPad is a local app.

Bundling a word processor is anti competitive based on all the objections to Microsoft bundling anything else. So what if you have to pay for it? Wasn't that the whole point of making this fair? You can buy any word processor, or find a free one.

Like they give a fuck. They've gone back to forcing use of their own browser and others.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t then.

Word pad was basically Word for Windows 6 and was quite usable for basic needs. Really only finally out to pasture by the free Google Docs, I’m sure wordpad killed a decent ecosystem of editors that may one day have competed with Word.

Word for Windows 6 was a proper version of Word -- far more capable than Wordpad. An image search will refresh your memory.

Wordpad is very basic in comparison.

I doubt WordPad killed anyone, It didn't even have a spell checker.

Lol

Everything MS does is for the business case. Wordpad, windows, etc exist only in a capitalist context and need a financial justification to exist. It was there exactly for the reasons you state, to kill the word processor market in Windows. Previously you had all these other players but Win95 came with Wordpad for free which had a lot of functionality. For pros, you could buy Word. I don't think we appreciate how many competitors Win95 killed with all its built-in GUI apps when people upgraded from 3.1.

Now I'm starting to see Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors. I also read that RAR support is now native in Windows, so WinRAR and other RAR programs are probably going to finally die. I think this comes with further ZIP support and improvements which means apps like 7-zip are going to be less in demand.

I don't think Notepad is going to be anything more than a basic text editor. It certainly gets new features from time to time, but it is more about making it usable in the modern world than adding advanced features like Notepad++ has.

It does compete with Notepad++ in a sense that now, Notepad can actually edit text files, and if you want advanced features, there is VSCode. And I must admit that I don't have any use for a middle ground text editor like Notepad++ or PSPad anymore, so maybe their strategy is working.

What exactly do you mean notepad can "now" edit text files? I'm pretty sure it could always edit text files.

It now has support for LF line endings and can save UTF-8-without-BOM.

> so maybe their strategy is working

I don't think there's any strategy here, with Notepad.

>Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors

That seems unlikely when Microsoft is already investing so much in VSCode.

In the era you mentioned, most new PCs came bundled with Microsoft Works. A basic word processor feels like a sensible inclusion in any OS that is useful to consumers out of the box, it was Works that was more problematic for the competition.

The floor has fallen out since then and there are so many free or cheap office productivity options. Works stopped being a thing eons ago and I would guess WordPad is rarely chosen. Disuse is a good reason to say goodbye.

> Works stopped being a thing eons ago

Well, some people would say that Microsoft Works is a contradiction in terms. /s

Yes, Notepad, WordPad, Paint existed to have a baseline of utility and especially when selling a complete PC setup to customers in the 1990s:

At a time when there was no internet! The PC sales guy could demo the customer fancy text-editing with fonts and colours, draw pictures and even print to dot matrix! right in the store.

Today people like these minimal OS apps because they are simple, avoid bloat and feature creep, especially notepad and paint. Its probably an error on MS part to get rid of WordPad..

Win95 was very much sold in the internet age. In fact, its large marketing push was mostly about how easy it was to get online.

We are not discussing 1985 here. By the mid to late 90s, internet access was greatly normalized.

Sorta, Win 95 was more on the cusp, predating the first internet boom by a few years, and it was certainty designed for a pre internet world. The marketing push was about how easy it was to get online with MSN. Microsoft leadership famously bet against widespread adoption and growth of the internet and put their bets heavily into MSN with the web as a hedge. The first release of Windows 95 didn’t even come with a browser.

Even so, as a consumer if you had better than 14.4k dialup you were quite lucky. Almost nobody selling computers in those days was tying up a phone line to keep the internet connected for sales demos.

> Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors.

Won't ever happen. For it to even have a chance, it would need to have syntax highlighting, which Microsoft will never add.

WordPad was always useful to read RTF files, which used to be pretty common. I guess they have been replaced by PDFs at this stage.

Would still be nice if Windows had some sort of basic word processor, as WordPad had functionality that many users would still find useful, basically just fonts and headings.

pdf and rtf are totally different things. rtf is nearer html - in fact Apple Mail changed from rtf to html in very early OSX possibly 10.3

Sure but PDF seems to have replaced RTF in some ways. When you used to download software it would often come with an RTF file as documentation, now it would be a PDF.

Yes but not if you need editing which is what WordPad can do.

In this case we have an improved fuction as instructions should not be editable.

>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision

Actually, I have a reason to be outraged by this decision.

I like using WordPad, and it will take me time and effort to find an adequate replacement for a simple note-taking application.

Rip C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories and back it up somewhere. WordPad.exe is standalone. If you're running Win7+ you'll need the en-us/muis/etc, if you pull from an XP install wordpad.exe is all you'll ever need to do.

Thank you, that is the best advice I've seen so far in this thread.

I want to add to this, to address all the "just ..." suggestions posted in reply.

This change constituties a NON-CONSENSUAL CHANGE to my computing environment.

My workflow is broken, and I have to fix it.

This is one of the million paper cuts by which my relationship with Windows was broken.

This is why CONSENT is important in computing.

It is absolutely fucked up, and I won't tolerate it.

The user consented to it by agreeing to the EULA:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/UseTerms/Retail/Windows/11/U...

"6. Updates. The software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you. You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources, and Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with those updates. By accepting this agreement or using the software, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice."

If you don't want this kind of thing to happen, don't use proprietary software that requires you to to agree to it.

I don't buy this, because the user did not read the agreement, and did not have a real choice to reject it. Without choice, and without clear agreement and understanding of the terms, there can be no consent.

But I agree with you that this abuse is a symptom of proprietary software.

so keep using it? ending development doesn't mean the executable stops working.

the good news for you is this is essentially a promise that wordpad will never change.

I took

> will be removed in a future release of Windows

to mean it's not just unmaintained (indeed that's fine) but actively removed from your computer

Yeah, but it’s not like it’ll be impossible to find a copy of it

Also to this point it’s usually pretty easy to copy built in Windows applications over. For example, I like the older Win10 snipping tool better and I just needed to copy the executable and maybe a DLL file.

Try Obsidian.

Thank you for the suggestion, but Obsidian does not meet my needs. It is a completely different class of application.

I just want a basic rich-text editor that opens quickly and lets me quickly jot something down and save it as a file.

wordpad.exe is less than 3MB, while just the installer for Obsidian weighs in at 72MB.

Well, the new notepad in win11 is very nice. Obsidian has many amazing plugins make it super easy to use and you don't need to worry about unsaved files crashing and disappearing.

Notepad++ is standard for code editing and extremely fast. I use all these 3 alternatives for different reasons but my #1 is still notepad.

The natural upgrade for WordPad did never come: basic html or markdown editing.

Aren’t you describing Frontpage Express? I think it was bundled with Windows 98?

Oh man, FrontPage. I haven’t heard that name in 20 years. I got started learning how to make web pages in FrontPage and then branched out to editing HTML in notepad, aided with my trusty copy of HTML for Dummies.

I remember thinking I was hot shit after switching from FrontPage to Macromedia Dreamweaver for my geocities site... those truly were the days :D

no so complex.. just everything that a online wyswyg editor like tinymce can do, saving as a single HTML file instead

Frontpage Express was an IE activeX control with contentEditable set to true. There was plenty of functionality around building <table> or whatever but comparing it to TinyMCE is absolutely right. Just 6 years before FckEditor was a thing.

Frontpage Express was basically WordPad that saved HTML instead of RTF/DOC.

I use Linux and BSD primarily but at my job where we use Windows I actually quite like wordpad.exe/write.exe (same thing?) for dissecting prod logs complete with highlights, formatting, etc.. Once you turn off line spacing and margins, it's quite good and generally pretty fast at wrangling a bunch of text that you may end up emailing via Outlook.

Notepad++ is much much better for log and config parsing. Also has lots of plugins, like the diff plugin which I rely on a lot when comparing dev/prod config files and such.

I would normally feel neutral/good about this except Microsoft now removes half useful programs and preinstalls or at least shows the icon of total crap like Instagram in a clean install. I mean, what the fuck.

Is Notepad now able to read files with UNIX-style line endings? Because Wordpad was the only one able to read .txt files created on Linux.

Yes it can do that now, at least on Windows 10

WordPad was the only thing worse than MS Word. So good riddance. But Windows still desperately needs an ultralight word processor that can do more than Notepad. I dread Word even opening.

The ribbon and the dreaded save panel make me anxious just thinking about them. WHY is saving a so many clicks?!?

Because they want your documents in their cloud.

This is a shame. I still use is to open RTF and DOCX files.

Wait, it opens files made with Microsoft Office? I thought it refused that and only did rtf and text files like html, txt, etc. Is this perhaps new or do I just misremember?

https://imgur.com/a/48sl0X0

AFAIK Wordpad can only open Word 6 files.

I open DOCX files, and it is listed here http://hs.windows.microsoft.com/hhweb/content/m-en-us/p-6.2/...

Not sure if it is some update or what.

Too bad they can’t open-source it and see if there is any community interest in keeping it going.

Then they couldn't recommend people to buy an expensive licence to have a wysiwyg editor on their Windows

It feels like the era when people needed or wanted WordPad has come and gone. If you're satisfied with something simple and don't care about specific Word features or formatting you're probably using Google Docs or OpenOffice or something.

Both are quite incomparable in terms of how heavy they are and startup time. WordPad is about as fast as notepad but has most of the features you need except opening Word ecosystem documents of course

Which are things that people can barely rouse themselves to care about, especially weighed against the benefits of online storage.

I wonder what program XML files will open in by default instead of WordPad… [0]

Maybe XML Notepad? [1]

[0] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/chang...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/XmlNotepad

Is this somehow symptonatic considering (a presumed lack of) adoption of RTF today, compared to formats such as markdown?

I just was hit by the nostalgia of hearing the app name at all

I remember Microsoft Works better!

I had it on the first computer that I owned and could do all kinds of stuff with it. Aside from Works I also got some version of Visual Basic. I still remember playing around with those programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

A sad loss, but it did seem like Notepad gained a lot of features in recent versions of Windows- surprised it doesn’t support rich text.

I agree. Now would be a perfect opportunity to give it Markdown support. Rich text for a more modern era. It wouldn’t need to be a big feature. Just have a button that toggles text editor and md preview and let it print formatted. Notepad is now a WinUI app so let it render the md with MarkdownRenderer.

Long live the WordPad clone that ships with WINE

Microsoft is slowly removing features, but is it adding any notable features?

Here are some examples of features I would like to see:

- Native Markdown viewer and editor, to replace Wordpad

- Disk space manager - graphically show where my diskspace went; allow me to find and delete large files

- Restartable and reliable file copy (similar to rsync on Linux)

- Notepad with same features as textarea element in browser, including spellcheck, multilevel undo/redo, completion, etc.

- Printing that can stay connected to printers on my local network

- Dictionary app (MacOS has it)

- Air drop compatible with iPhone

- A screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)

- No system processes that randomly consume high CPU

- Command-line zip

- Instant search (Mac has had it for how many years now?)

- Stock app (MacOS has it)

- Beautiful widgets (like the old Konfabulator) https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/konfabulator/

Robocopy may be an approximate equivalent for rsync. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

For me the "canary in the coal mine" for when Microsoft actually starts caring about the user experience is when the taskbar dynamically expands and contracts with the number of open windows.

> - Command-line zip

Does https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof... do the trick?

Windows includes BSD tar, which can produce ZIP files.

    tar -c --format=zip -f foo.zip path/

Only if you don't need to create ZIPs over 2GB.

> - Disk space manager - graphically show where my diskspace went; allow me to find and delete large files

Try WinDirStat.

I rather run Directory Report over WinDirStat. DR can save more reports, Scan millions of files, Find duplicate files too

I rather run Directory Report than WinDirStat. DR can save more reports, Scan million of files, and find duplicate files

I thought it was just a wrapper over the rich edit control, but the control only supports RTF and WordPad supports docx.

Nice to see that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are also on the list: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...

Next to things like Notepad, the Calculator, and Command Prompt, Wordpad is and has been one of the most useful programs ever bundled with Windows in terms of functionality and user-friendliness, so the idea of getting rid of it (even if it gets replaced) just seems kind of asinine.

I know your deeds, that you are neither notepad nor word. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm - neither notepad nor word - I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

I haven’t used Word Pad in over a decade. I suspect a lot of people fall into this camp

I don’t see the point of word pad anymore. Its purpose was a lite free alternative to MS Word. With online word processors like Google Docs and even Word online, both of which have free versions that can work offline, it just makes Word Pad entirely pointless especially when there are open source word processors.

I feel that this would be a bigger deal if notepad was killed, but then there’s notepad plus.

I wish they would open source it so it would continue to exist

I must be the only one who didn't know what a WordPad was before reading about it being removed on here.

What do you use it for? I can't remember the last time I had to edit a text document that wasn't either pure text (like markdown), a pdf, or an office file. Some people mentioned ".rtf" files in this thread, but I don't believe I've ever heard of one of those being used for anything.

WordPad had one real use in my world: if you edited a Linux document in WordPad it was smart enough to not mess up the line endings CR/LF versus LF IIRC. It was nice to not have to worry.

But doesn't a basic text editor like notepad++, or sublime text, I guess nowadays people use vscode too, take care of that? Why would you want to use some kind of rich text editing program for those?

I’m guessing you’re a lot younger than me. Notepad++ didn’t come out until 2003, sublime 2008.

Wordpad was on every windows machine from 1995 onwards - no need to install anything on a machine you might not even be able to, and unlike notepad it could open text files from unix machines properly

Now I believe at some point in the last decade or so notepad was upgraded to be able to open those files so it’s no longer a feature. I dropped windows well before those other editors came out so not sure exactly when notepad was fixed, but I do remember using wordpad to read files

So you have to go out and install third party software rather than just right click and open with WordPad, particularly when using someone else's computer, or a corporate system where you can't just install random software

But the point is moot now that they added support for this to Notepad. Dunno if there are still supported versions of Windows out there that don't have it, but at least the newer systems should

Have they? I'll have to try now, or really.. I haven't worried in a long while, so it's probably had it a long time now.

This is a real shame. There's value in simple apps that come bundled with the OS and don't change for years. Wordpad is the simplest way I know to get a sample of a font. My workplace doesn't use Microsoft apps so there's absolutely no chance I'll be able to use their recommended replacement of Word.

Only on HN: Microsoft including WordPad = anti-competitive, but Apple including their Office Suite for free isn't.

> we recommend Microsoft Word

Which now costs $159.99?!

Which is $0 if you're the kind of person to use Google Docs and GMail and other free web services: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-on...

Of course. Breaking every tracking script that marketers try to share is hard work! And you laugh now, but wait until they roll out Clippy GPT-4 edition.

I used it on text files with non-windows EOL chars, where notepad would get confused.

One of the great things of the windows builtins is trustworthyness: they're always there. Even if notedpad++ is miles better, it can't always be installed, e.g. on a server.

I did not even remember I had this application on my system

Maybe one day they will even switch to UTF-8[1]?

[1] http://utf8everywhere.org/

What about all the MSIs which are using .rtf for EULAs?

in one way, this is a good thing, right? But in another, how do i manage old servers which still use TLS1.0 or TLS1.1... The only browser i can use, most of the time, is Firefox for getting into older IPMI endpoints (old servers that dont get security updates... Thanks HP/Dell...). Guess i will be using a Linux VM for managing that kind of gear now...

I'm confused, what does WordPad have to do with TLS and IPMI?

Feck... i commented on the wrong one... There was one on TLS 1.0 and 1.1 being deprecated... (facepalm)

Honestly, I'm just waiting for the Linux community to figure itself out with Wayland/X and get a bit more stable and I'll probably be switching. The only question in the air for me is how I'm going to manage my cloud files (I've gotten used to having filesystem sync between multiple devices) as the existing offerings seem more or less meh.

I haven't looked yet but on steam deck I've noted that Windows/wine stuff has improved a ton lately - could you just run your sync tool from win32 on *nix?

Important critical files, to run on something like this? No thanks.

Wayland's a solved problem if you use an up to date or rolling release distribution.

No, it's not. A lot of things are a works-in-progress, and it's less stable than X. Calling it solved is understating by a large margin the plethora of issues that still need to be addressed.

Is it better than where we were a couple years ago? Yes, definitely. Is it stable enough to be a daily driver? Somewhat, yes.

That's the sad fate of fifth wheels. Or when you are neither Word nor Notepad.

Yeah, I remember Microsoft Works.

Less bloat is always good. Can't imagine many using WordPad anyway.

I'm calling it now: Word with ads will ship inbox with future versions of Windows :)

Maybe the whole Office suite; if you want a PowerPivot in Excel you'll have to watch a 2 minute unskippable ad for hair loss medication. Totally "private" though, scout's honor.

It wouldn’t be the first time: https://www.cnet.com/culture/microsoft-introduces-starter-ve...

Or something with cloud-login-is-a-must Word Lite. Then make you feel very restricted while showing you "amazing" things with an obnoxious popup about Office 365 every time you open Word Lite (I made up don't look up).

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Shame. Notepad++ should now be the go to, right?

I personally don't know anyone who doesn't have OpenOffice, Libre, or Office (local non cloud most of the time). I do not know anyone using WordPad for any reason while they have notepad for opening simple no-formatting documents (php etc.), obsidian, or notepad++. Seriously, nobody uses WordPad.

>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf).

It can open and edit docx files, no? MS has suggested Office as an alternative, but Office costs money, so yes, this is lost functionality.

And no I am not interested in uploading my docx files to google docs or microsoft office online to edit them, as they may contain private information.

LibreOffice isn't exactly lightweight, but it is a Free (as in beer, and as in speech) local alternative.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

edit: Huh, it's even less lightweight for Windows. The Linux downloads come in around 200-220MiB, but the Windows downloads are around 320-350MiB. Weird.

I'm not sure if that's the case for LibreOffice, but it's common for FOSS projects to have fatter binaries for Windows, since they're often using a bunch of wrappers to get POSIX-y things to work Windows.

In this case they're also shipping rpm/deb packages, it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it.

> it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it.

They have their own toolkit - VCL - which has GTK and Qt backends for Linux, and a native Windows backend for Windows.

> The Linux downloads come in around 200-220MiB, but the Windows downloads are around 320-350MiB. Weird.

I think I can guess at least part of the reason: MSVC redistributables. On Windows, each program is supposed to distribute a copy of the installer for the standard C and C++ library runtime corresponding to the MSVC version used to compile the software; unlike on Linux, these don't come by default with the operating system, and unlike on Linux, each new MSVC version came with a new and incompatible version of these libraries (the exception is very old or very new MSVC versions, which used/use a common version for more than one MSVC version; but even then, you're still supposed to distribute the installer with your software, since it's not guaranteed to be already installed).

i was going to suggest abiword but even their website is gone now? first itunes apple movie trailers and now wordpad

You can still download Abiword from other websites e.g. https://filehippo.com/download_abiword/

Are you too good for LibreOffice?

LibreOffice is good for a lot of tasks but it's bloated, and takes time to start up. Wordpad is great for all sorts of quick tasks when you just need to edit a quick RTF like a poster or some basic letter, and don't want to stare at a ribbon full of functions you'll never use.

LO for Windows launches with a launcher that pre-loads it a boot time. I find Writer to be pretty pleasantly light-weight on a modern computer. A lot of its performance shortcomings are a bit exaggerated especially on modern equipment.

LibreOffice doesn't come preinstalled with Windows. It also is very bloated compared to WordPad.

yes i am, i edit the xml directly in ed.

Yes.

Old software is depreciated. To deprecate software would be to call it names.

"Deprecated features for Windows client" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...

Before the 19th Century "ignore" meant "to not know," in accordance with its Latin origins, if you're looking for other words to try and turn back the clock on against the overwhelming tide of modern usage.

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