RIP Microsoft WordPad. You Will Be Missed::It’s truly the end of an era as we say farewell to a real one.
WordPad is what MS Word should be. It’s most of what everyone needs in a word processor and it’s lightweight. MS Word is becoming a bloated nightmare of toolbars and creeping featuritis.
Is becoming? It already has been for decades. I think the extent of adding an entire VBA automation backend was somewhere near the tipping point…
Fortunately LibreOffice is a thing for anyone who wants a $0 rich text capable editor, and I’m sure there are a zillion other alternatives by now both open source and not.
Yeah, “becoming” is a strange choice of wording… Word has been bloated and overkill for 2 decades at this point.
Libre Office is still bulky for anything I want on my PC. If I’m going to do any serious writing, I’m using Google Docs for backups and such. If I’m doing quick txt edits I’m using Sublime or Notepad. I use wordpad for stuff in the middle so I will definitely miss it and not sure how to solve this problem.
That said, I’m not fucking installing Win 11 so guess this isn’t a problem till 12.
I must admit, I really enjoyed fucking around in M$ Office 2003 (PowerPoint, FrontPage and more) as a kid — we made our own fictional “OS” Desktop Environments in PowerPoint, copying text boxes, drop-down menus etc. from FrontPage. It had a lot of new features that Office XP didn’t have, which made our projects much cooler. It was like the best of both worlds, since it had a somewhat classic UI but also added features we found interesting for our weird niche usecase. Since Office 2003, it’s only been getting worse, IMO.
I like LibreOffice, I used it it university, and before Libre I used openoffice and staroffice before that.
BUT! Since working in an ms office reliant organization for more than 10 years, I’ve become addicted to ms office’s grammar checks and integration with onedrive/sharepoint. Version control is integrated, I don’t have to alt tab to a terminal to submit to svn/git, and we have comments and live collaboration.
I sometimes wish that I could have working grammar check in other software than microsoft’s. Writing my final thesis in word, only to copy the sections into texniccenter for layout was tedious.
OnlyOffice if you want an editor similar to Word. I switched to it also because LibreOffice’s UI bugged out and I didn’t see any buttons.
I feel like anytime I’ve ever taken a class to learn how to use Word, it’s been one of two things.
First is essentially how we will use Word. It’s a note pad with a few extra things for editing text, but the main thing is headers, footers, and the margin sizes.
Second is nothing I will ever use. When I was going to school for accounting I had to take a class on Windows programs, and we spent so much time learning how to post images, how to edit them, and shit like that. By the end of the class I could probably make a profesional looking flyer, but it would have taken half the time with any image editing type program.
Also in that class we had a free students version of Word, which meant that there were usually steps in the homework we couldn’t do, but we still got points docked for it. Even though we all told the professor about this. So that was fun.
Old word processors were designed to make sure to include features both the consumer and the professional (who would need things like markup tools, special margin widths, etc.) would need. Then professional printers moved on to better software, but Microsoft (and others) never removed those features and that turned into ‘how many features can we add’ until now Word is like some sort of shitty combination of a WordPad and PowerPoint. It’s so full of unnecessary features that have a one case in ten thousand uses.
It’s not even just the word processors themselves. This has been going on for decades. Why are dingbats fonts packaged with computers? Because they were printers marks and Apple wanted printers to use their computers, so they added a font with printers marks and then Microsoft did the same with Windows and now we still have a font which is used mostly by kids fucking around because there are now better and easier ways to use the one or two characters in that font set that you will ever likely even think about using.
The more OSes and software trim themselves of this fat, the better, but it goes the other direction most of the time.
I couldn’t care less. I never used it. Was either notepad++ or office. I’m pretty sure with all the telemetry they have, they knew no one really use it anymore and it’s not worth it.
I mean Notepad++ is like a monument to Microsoft incompetence and them not caring about technically minded people for decades. Where a single guy beats trillion dollar company’s ass, actually not just beats, absolutely destroys big time. And they were either not able or didn’t care with responding and providing some power text editor. The fact that their OS was able to acquire any significant market share in developer’s community is an ultimate triumph of marketing department
Will it?!
I thought WordPad was the best thing ever in 2001.
Then I got Microsoft Word. Then Google Docs changed everything by making it free and haven’t even thought of WordPad since.
I dunno something something LibreOffice before the Linux nerds beat me up.
Wordpad was good for notes with wrapped text. However then I discovered Notepad++ and that’s the far better note taking application - you can even get plugins like a comparitor that compares two different files, as well as being an excellent application for typing and viewing code.
The only times I’ve ever opened wordpad was on new Windows installs when I hadn’t installed another word processor or hadn’t changed the default editor for RTF files.
Not a dumb question! I wouldn’t be surprised if it does though I can’t say for sure it does. With how little development it’s gotten recently, I want to say no it doesn’t spy nearly as much because it likely hasn’t been updated with more spying, though. But I obviously don’t know for sure, they might have went in and added telemetry while changing little else UX or functionality wise.
LibreOffice has its flaws but it’s functionally superior to Wordpad and (IMO, and this is probably an unpopular opinion) not far behind Microsoft Office, almost on par. It’s also open source and still gets regular updates. So if you’re looking for a privacy friendly alternative to Microsoft Office I’d suggest that and not risk it with Wordpad.
Though, the Windows OS itself’s spying definitely swamps whatever spying Wordpad does or doesn’t have, so the point is kind of moot, you’re being spied on about the same with or without Wordpad, same applies to LibreOffice as it can’t do anything about Windows’s spying. I encourage everyone to at least try Linux as a dual boot or on a second computer if you already have one of those, even if you can’t fully migrate away from Windows for whatever reason.
Will it? Notepad++ all the way man.
Regular notepad is starting to get a LOT more features. I could see notepad essentially filling that void if they keep up the pace.
I absolutely love the multiple tabs and automatically preserving unsafe stuff.
At the same time, if I open notepad I’ve got like 400 pages of unsafe craft sitting around. Still worth it though.
