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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

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Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#21

Post by drzaiusapelord »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #9
smoldesu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#22

Post by alexey-salmin »

jaclaz wrote: post #12

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.

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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#24

Post by kjellsbells »

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?(!)

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#26

Post by alexvitkov »

Karellen wrote: post #8
jiofj wrote: post #4

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There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf).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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#27

Post by alexvitkov »

smoldesu wrote: post #6
jiofj wrote: post #4

>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?

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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#28

Post by layer8 »

kjellsbells wrote: post #24

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 sweat…

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#30

Post by PrimeMcFly »

kjellsbells wrote: post #24

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 sweat…

> 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.

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