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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

bleepingcomputer.com

221–230 of 367 posts

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#221
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who uses RTF? I can't recall ever receiving an RTF file. Scanning my drives, I've only found a single Readme RTF file in some old Windows utilities.

It’s used a lot in the localization industry.

I’m curious, why is that? When you’re dealing with semi-structured data like localization files, adding formatting seems counter-productive.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#222
post #46

Which free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#223

One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…

Who can forget the first time they opened Wordpad and then tried to drag a text document into the window to edit it, just like you do with Notepad, only to have the text document turn into an icon inside of the empty text document you had open. Fun times.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#225
post #86

Fun fact: Before WordPad there was Microsoft Write. Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today. They kept the alias for 28 years.

I don't have a reference for this but I remember reading that Microsoft had to create Wordpad from scratch because they lost the code for Write. I do remember that when they introduced Wordpad it was missing several features present in Write and a very visible one was justified text.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#227

I'm always sad to see applications go (especially if the recommended alternative is a paid software), but did that thing ever work properly? In the past decade I used Windows only when someone held a gun to my head, but before that I remember that WordPad always messed up all documents I have ever opened: weird page and line breaks, picture and textbox formatting all over the place, and saving a document was a good w…

Wordpad was able to open RTF files much better than Word. Word will mess up formating.

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#228

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…

Funiest thing is, in win11, the notepad use RichEdit again (but use winui's richedit control, not win32

Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows

#229
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not use the notes app? you get in built folders and shari g options too

For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down. TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject}…

If you like plain text, you'd probably love it even more with a better text editor.
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