241–250 of 367 posts
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.
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) sinc…
Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.
> 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.
When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.
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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…
Notepad.exe have lots of improvement in past 10 years. A major revamp in 2022 It is no longer a "thin wrapper".
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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.
correct. wordpad is one of peak microsoft's assholery and its death should be celebrated. too bad, it won't help libreoffice's adoption.
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Aren’t you describing Frontpage Express? I think it was bundled with Windows 98?
no so complex.. just everything that a online wyswyg editor like tinymce can do, saving as a single HTML file instead
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…
Nobody uses WordPad, nobody wants to improve WordPad, WordPad will be sunset.
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> It rarely if ever is. You can always pay someone to maintain it. Not every thing has to be free.
Let's try and bring this back to the original example. If WordPad cost money who would use it and not one of the much more robust competitors?
It feels like the era when people needed or wanted WordPad has come and gone. If you're satisfied with something simple and don't care about specific Word features or formatting you're probably using Google Docs or OpenOffice or something.
It feels like the era when people needed or wanted WordPad has come and gone. If you're satisfied with something simple and don't care about specific Word features or formatting you're probably using Google Docs or OpenOffice or something.
Both are quite incomparable in terms of how heavy they are and startup time. WordPad is about as fast as notepad but has most of the features you need except opening Word ecosystem documents of course
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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.
I haven't created an installer for a Windows desktop app in over 5 years, but it was a common format for the embedded EULA. It's not as important these days, but there was a huge file size difference between an RTF created in Wordpad vs Word.