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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

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Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#151

Post by toast0 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #21
vouaobrasil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pre-loading at boot time is a tradeoff, and it'd be nicer not to have to pay it.

Cold load times aren't terrible on modern systems, but wordpad is much faster. (Microsoft Office isn't great at fast loading either).

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#152

Post by danzk »

lockhouse wrote: post #103
tredre3 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I literally could write a WordPad clone in an afternoon You might be able to make a Notepad clone in an afternoon, but not wordpad. Creating parsers for all the formats it supports (rtf/doc/html) as well as the renderer/wysiwyg editor would take anyone several days of either coding, or stitching libs together.

The parser and renderer is a pre-existing RichTextEdit widget. Add menus and save, open, and print functionality and you are over 90% of the way to a WordPad clone.

Microsoft used to distribute source code for a WordPad sample app with Visual Studio.

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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#153

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

dawidpotocki wrote: post #31
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.

They did indeed add LF support to Notepad, 5 years ago: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#154

Post by gaganyaan »

no_wizard wrote: post #147
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Rarely isn't a good term either. I use a fair number of open source apps that were picked up by a different maintainer after the original one got bored. I have no idea what the overall rate is, but it works well enough for me.

Maybe PhantomJS wasn't as critical as you thought it was? Or maybe the JS ecosystem doesn't lend itself towards this model because JS developers have the attention span of a goldfish

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#155

Post by protastus »

bombcar wrote: post #3

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#156

Post by ywain »

w-ll wrote: post #149
sjkna wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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" %*

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#157

Post by vbezhenar »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #13

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.

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

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#158

Post by cesarb »

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.

> 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).

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#159

Post by forgotmypw17 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #129
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see this as "bullshit", but the opposite: Instead of going from one useful software to zero, we've gone from one to two.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#160

Post by canucker2016 »

canucker2016 wrote: post #145
smackeyacky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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