Technology

RIP WordPad.

I almost never used it (in fact, I only heard of it when its death was announced, striesand effect in action), but this is sad. It's a bygone relic of when software was included with what you paid for, simple and efficient, and not marred by endless storage hungry updates that rarely add anything useful.

There is no easy replacement.

Of course, Microsoft wants you to use Word, which is expensive and runs at 0.05x the speed of WordPad.

There's notepad, but it's far too basic.

Notepad++ exists and is really good (I donated to it recently), but it targets a different kind of text editing, focused more on code than documents.

LibreOffice is good for document editing, but it's somewhat slow and clunky in a way WordPad is definitely not.

The closest competitor may be Abiword but that already died years ago.

Will it? Notepad++ all the way man.

No, he won't

I couldn't care less. I never used it. Was either notepad++ or office. I'm pretty sure with all the telemetry they have, they knew no one really use it anymore and it's not worth it.

I honestly remember using this often because it could display .docx/.doc files in a nicer way than libre office. In addition, I never learned how to use word because the interface was too complicated.

When I had to write sth, I used latex and when I needed to view/slightly edit .docx, I used this in a VM.

Not by me. But maybe by like 2-3 folks…

No, it will not, on my end.

I'm going to keep it as long as I can. It's not often that I use it, but it can't be beat for quick one-off things where I need font formatting (Notepad can't) like address labels or recipes. I use Libre Office for its spreadsheet, haven't really tried the word processor, but I totally do not need a full fledged word processor for that stuff.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the Windows 11 Build 26020 Insider Preview’s Canary Channel, Microsoft announced that WordPad will not be auto-installed after installing the new OS build and will officially be removed in the future update.

WordPad was initially positioned in two ways: 1) a text editor that has some functionalities of MS Word and 2) a more advanced version of the Notepad text editor, which was released some 40 years ago in 1983.

According to a Microsoft Learn post on all the Deprecated features for Windows clients, the company says, “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” This somewhat hints at the fact that Microsoft, too, realized that WordPad is just a weird middle ground between MS Word and Notepad and can be done away with.

This is mainly conjecture, though, and there’s a possibility the company had other, more solid reasons for removing the text editor.

GeekWire also points out that they recently noticed that WordPad didn’t get a dark mode update and that it should have been enough to give them an idea of its upcoming demise.

Even though I have probably used WordPad a total of three and a half times in my life, and that too, when I had my reasons for not using MS Word or Google Docs, I can imagine others, like some of my colleagues feeling a bit more nostalgic for the word-processing app when it’s gone.

The original article contains 397 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 38%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The main reason why I used WordPad was because 'write' is shorter than both 'notepad' and 'msword' in the run menu.

Been using Kate editor (yes, it's on Windows as well) if I ever decide to boot into Windows 🤢