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Windows Notepad’s midlife renaissance continues with spellcheck and autocorrect (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Now Windows' only built-in text editor, there's more room for Notepad to grow.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The entire point of Notepad was that it didn’t have fancy features, it just edited text files. They got rid of Wordpad, and now they’re gonna turn Notepad into Wordpad.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that -- though honestly, I don't see who the possible customer is for those features either. It's a waste of time, but it doesn't undermine the application.

What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don't get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I've lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

I found it useful occasionally for a pretty niche use case. I automated generating documents with a program I wrote, then cleaned it up a bit in Wordpad before sending it on.

That's about as niche as you can get, but I wonder if it's not too uncommon. RTF is easy to generate programmatically, and it's pretty widely supported across various platforms. I have since moved on, but maybe others haven't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

but I just don't get who was using it.

way more than you realize. i've been supporting home users and small businesses for thirty years. i run into wordpad users frequently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

RTF has to be one of the most atrocious document formats. It's such a jumbled mess, it should be buried and forgotten. You can make it clean but of course Microsoft doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I like my basic-ass notepad. I didn't even like when they added tabs..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

i think its tasteful to have a couple QOL features like code highlighting, tabs, spellchecking etc.

i didnt notice this until i went back from gedit to notepad the other day