I thought it was just a wrapper over the rich edit control, but the control only supports RTF and WordPad supports docx.
Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
11–20 of 367 posts
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#12Cannot 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.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#13This 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.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#14>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf).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…
Are you too good for LibreOffice?
LibreOffice doesn't come preinstalled with Windows. It also is very bloated compared to WordPad.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#15This 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.
This happens in opensource too, its just more rare. Terraform relicencing comes to mind, but there has been many, many other times too.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#16>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf).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…
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 was going to suggest abiword but even their website is gone now? first itunes apple movie trailers and now wordpad
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#17Cannot 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.
I think it's killed by Word Online (free-ish) and VSCode over at the Seattle company.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#18Honestly, 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?
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#19Word 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.
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.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#20This 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.