RIP Microsoft WordPad

To me it's emblematic of a time when software tried to be self-contained and to serve the user, when operating systems (Windows in particular) had consistent interface conventions between programs, and when there was some consensus about what people could be expected to have.

Now, you'd probably point Grandma to Google docs. Which would be a little heavier, a little laggier, yes more capable, but also somewhere out there, a service, a thing available only thanks to the largesse of Google, a thing that can be taken away at any time, a thing that fosters dependence.

Its removal is consistent with the ongoing enshittification of Windows.

For text files, Notepad is pretty much useless. For short files I'm using Notepad++, I tried using plain Notepad and I can't describe exactly why but it's almost unusable in comparison. And for large files (MBs to GBs) I'm using less. From git bash.

And if I need any sort of rich text formatting, there's the free Libre Office which is usually good enough for the job. In case I need the actual MS version suite, I've got a Microsoft Office Home and Student retail license on my wife's laptop. The one that I actually own, not the SAS crap they're pushing nowadays.

Otherwise I find Libre Office fairly crappy and barely usable but for opening and looking in the occasional MS file, it's good enough. The "Excel" (Calc) is by some reason horrendously slow in drawing charts. Like if I got an 1000 rows CSV, it becomes almost unusable. On a machine that could have been used in the 90s to do galaxy collision simulations at NASA. Excel, obviously doesn't have this problem.

In summary both Notepad and Wordpad are useless to me.

I use it as a clipboard scratchpad. It strips RTF when copying between programs since Windows itself has no built-in way of doing so and you can also use it to clean up whatever you're copying. It loads fast and is minimalist.

Some programs on Windows vomit all over themselves when receiving RTF information, like Teams for example. I also read people use the Address Bar/OMNIBar in browsers, but that may transmit to the search provider.

I also use Notepad++ and VSCode. Notepad remains my favorite clipboard toy because it is so fast and light-weight. I use Notepad++ when I need to use its advanced search/replace and visualization tooling (e.g. View -> Show Symbol -> Show All) and VSCode when I need actual language colorization/structural auto formatting.

PS - Ctrl+Shift+V isn't a Windows feature and never was. It is a Microsoft Office shortcut that only 50% of Microsoft Office even supports (e.g. try it in Outlook). A couple of third party programs support it, but it is incredibly YMMV.

And then I learned that sometimes software is freely available online if you know where to look.