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RIP Microsoft WordPad

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41–50 of 100 posts

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#41

This is slightly off topic but might be helpful to some people who use both Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac but are tired of the open document screen that starts by default when opening TextEdit. For example, I take calls while at my Windows based workstation. When I'm starting a phone call, I instinctively open notepad and jot down notes while on the phone. I don't usually save the file but I will complete th…

I use notepad++ on windows and have open all the time. Any more I want to write down I open a new tab. Notepad++ keeps the tabs even if not saved and automatically reopens them next time you start it. Combined with search in open files feature it makes it extremely useful.

I use the autosave and take notes plugin in notepad++ which makes it perfect for this use case. I have it set to autosave when the window loses focus. And the take notes plugin lets me set a default filename with timestamp and save directory, which I set to my dropbox. The plugin also has an option to delete all empty text files when notepad++ is closed.

It feels as friction free as writing on a physical notepad with a paper and pencil.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm indifferent about Wordpad; always surprises me to read people don't regularly use Notepad. 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…

For small amounts of text, another simple way is to paste it into the Run dialog (Winkey-R) and then copy it back out again. Works well for turning URLs into plain text and removing the editor formatting from function names before pasting into a bug report, for example.

Since I spend a lot of time in the web browser, I use the address bar for the same thing. Ctrl+(C then T then V then A then C then W) is my muscle memory "copy without formatting" shortcut.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#45
Wordpad was essentially just the Text Edit control, wrapped in some GUI cheese. Unless they plan to remove that control, it's trivial to re-constitute the program. When I took a Windows programming course, this was actually one of the homework assignments.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#46

We used to use RTF for walls text in our game launcher (EULA, MOTD etc). We chose RTF because raw Win32 could render it without extra work and we wanted to minimize both launcher complexity and dependencies. One thing we noticed was that RTF documents made in WordPad instead of Word were much, much smaller and since every byte added to our CDN bill we made a point of re-saving all our files in WordPad before publishi…

It's still there in e.g. the NSIS MUI_PAGE_LICENSE.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#47

Wordpad was essentially just the Text Edit control, wrapped in some GUI cheese. Unless they plan to remove that control, it's trivial to re-constitute the program. When I took a Windows programming course, this was actually one of the homework assignments.

It's also a OLE/COM testing application.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#48
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not turn on wrapping in notepad?

Notepad wouldn't recognize Unix line endings and would interpret the whole file as one line. Word wrapping doesn't fix that.

There was also some weirdness where you could not have the status bar and word wrapping enabled at the same time.

Re: RIP Microsoft WordPad

#50
post #8
post #3

Man people are nostalgic about the most bizarre things sometimes. My experience with WordPad was accidently opening something with it and having to change the default app for some extension.

The only use case I have ever used Wordpad for was to open text files with Linux End-of-Lines on a Windows computer with only Wordpad and Notepad (that do not see LF as proper and of lines and just displays one line of mess).

FYI, nowadays notepad does support different line endings.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

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