Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor Microsoft has begun ditching WordPad from Windows and removed the editor from the first Canary Channel build of 2024. We knew it was coming, but the reality has arrived in the Canary Channel. A clean install will omit WordPad as of build 26020 of Windows 11. At an undisclosed point, the application will be removed on upgrade …
Sure, WordPad wasn’t a great editor - but in the grand scheme of poor quality software, it really wasn’t that bad. Even in the grand scheme of the wider Windows operating system it was far from being the most egregious mis-feature. Anything that requires me to waste time uninstalling it / hiding it is going to come further up my personal list of Microsoft errors - not least the in-your-face advertising that Windows insists on throwing at users or the Xbox Game Centre (or any gaming stuff since I’m not a gamer).
I’m sure I must have used WordPad at some point, or more likely it’s direct predecessor (Write). I used to use that kind of stuff a lot until I graduated to just using plain text editors like Notepad++ and BBEdit.
While it's default Rich Text format wasn't all that useful, it did allow one to do basic mark-up-ish style text formatting without going way more exotic.
It had one killer feature that Notepad didn't have: It could properly deal with UNIX, i.e. LF-only line endings. And preserve it through loading and saving. That saved my bacon a few times when I had to edit config files, especially for Unix/Linux command/tools/utilities ported to Windows. I believe it could also handle much larger files (>64KiB?) than Notepad without groaning or falling over.
Win3.x, Win9x etc Notepad could only load a 64K file.
NT Notepad always worked with larger files. But couldn't do UNIX text.
So replaced with something else and then Notepad++
I used Notepad++ on WINE for a while after jumping ship full time to Linux and then switched to KATE, for its session management.
I had a Windows 3.11 machine in Year 6 that I would write stuff up on Write. When I got to secondary school we got a brand spanking new eMachines with Windows ME on it. I was so annoyed when I couldn't find Write, but became increasingly impressed with WordPad when I had to use it.
I see pictures of Write from time to time, never fails to make me smile.
Not wanting to get into too much of a "Ah yes, but in my day competition", but ....
What is this "server" you speak of?
I took the first O-Level Computer Science, when it launched back in 198<cough>. The whole school's computing capability was a single Commodore PET with a very noisy floppy disk drive for storage.
Oh darn, I can't resist it.
Computers? Luxury!
Up to about age 12 our school desks still had china inkwells in them, and a pupil appointed Ink Monitor, charged with filling them with Stephens Blue-black Ink (why in god's name not Royal Blue Washable? Would have saved so much grief). And struggling with the steel dip pens that went with them, while trying to learn cursive handwriting. Later I had to teach myself to write all over again, to get rid of the illegibility caused by cursive.
Any hint of computers didn't appear until the later secondary school, wben a Physics teacher introduced us to binary addition and subtraction via a home made switch-&-light board.
I valued Wordpad for its ability to leave simple formatted files alone, retaining formatting witbout adding anything unwanted. And as others have said, it could open almost anything - you could get useful clues from the opening bytes of a mystery file as to what it was infended to be - a sadly not infrequent occurrence with easily corrupted floppy disks.
I agree I could have done without the hours in primary school learning to write cursive. On the other hand, back in the day being able to read cursive was indeed very useful, sometimes indispensable.
And I do occasionally wish I'd been forced to learn some sort of impressive script, like copperplate, in my formative years. Had an acquaintance in grad school who had, and his handwriting — just the everyday stuff he did taking notes in class or drafting papers — was a thing of beauty. I eventually developed passable calligraphic skills in Japanese (not that I remember a single kanji these days), but my English handwriting is a scrawl illegible to all others.
The state primary school I had a Beeb model B or a Master in more or less every classroom from the mid 1980s. They were swapping to Archimedes 3000's more or less as I was leaving that place. Nobody got any good at Virus, but there wasn't anyone in the building that didn't know how to play it.
The secondary school was reasonably equipped; the electronics and physics classrooms had BBC Masters (lovely GPIO interfaces!) Maths had a network of RM Nimbus dumb terminals, so we could do fun stuff in GW Basic. Design & Technology got itself a shiny 486 in maybe 1993, though Windows 3.1 was ruined entirely by someone installing ALL the fonts from Corel Draw so the boot-time was ruinous and continuously swapping to disk.
Much more entertainingly the chemistry lab picked up dozens of 8086 clones, which we made up our own null modem cables. Many hours burned on F16 Combat Pilot duels.
All things considered I think I got pretty lucky having that variety of stuff. The local authorities were obviously big fans of tech, realising that it was the only way to recover from the ruinous unemployment levels that had emerged from the 1970's.
Amazing what a bit of forward thinking investment in the future does.
Wordpad had the advantage that it managed with Unix newlines, so if you got a file from Unix/Linux, you could view it without having find unix2dos somewhere to fix it. I think that was my main use of it over the years.
It's a passably usable word processor without any of the bells and whistles, but it's certainly capable of creating some simple documents with basic formatting. Hardly surprising they're ditching it, probably to encourage use of O365.
This.
I used to use it on Windows 3.1x when I had files on a floppy created with RISC OS that Notepad completely choked on.
I have a dim recollection that Notepad might also have choked on files over ~64K.
Wordpad, on the other hand, didn't choke, supported basic formatting, and when your output was the sort of lowish quality lasers of the day, it was fast enough and good enough.
I liked wordpad. For a short and simple (couple lines) job it worked without adding all kinds of extraneous formatting characters. But its main virtue was that it would try to open ANY file, and often come close to succeeding. If nothing else, you could probably figure out what the file was, and what programs worked with it.
Notepad++ does that and much more.
I will not regret WordPad. I will not regret Notepad. Borkzilla has spent billions on pie-in-the-sky failures, but improving basic tools is not part of its preoccupations.
Thank God for open source contributors who do a much better job.
Its predecessor, Write would not only open binary file, but it would save them again - there was a trick where you could load the Flying Windows Screen Saver, change the windows symbol character and save it again - then have whatever wingdings character you wanted flying at you
And HW TPM 2.0 or maybe later.
Was looking at Win11 info after installing Win10 on a spare slightly broken laptop, Pleanty of good ones here with Linux. Why does MS think spamming Win10 users with apps you can't remove, ghastly flat UI with an insult to claim to have themes. And then have a world of pain with Win11. At least Win2K, XP, Vista and to an extent Win7 you could find stuff and change the appearance of the UI (though not as much as current Mate Desktop or Linux).
A pile of poo. Though the 32G isn't needed (likely 8G works), the min specs here sound a bit like fantasy!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-system-requirements-86c11283-ea52-4782-9efd-7674389a7ba3
I could see reasons both practical - reducing unmaintained lines of code that are out "in the wild" past a certain version number - and cynical - removing one avenue to creating and using data outside of the 365 ecosystem - why they'd want to.
Not saying it's a good thing, just potentially understandable given a specific goal.
Because there is a risk in telling people that they ship this binary on everyone's installation but it's not supported. If, for example, a security vulnerability was found in it, would they really be able to claim that they don't support it, so that's not their fault? They would be blamed for that, so if they're no longer going to maintain it, they remove it. You can always put it back. It appears to be one executable, one DLL, and a resources file for each installed language, so it should be pretty easy to keep even after it's removed from preinstallation.
Especially since they'd be removing it off of Windows 10 systems that are going to be EOL 2025, but plenty of people will be holding onto it for a long time afterwards. That's a really low blow.
(Unless, by some divine magic, Microsoft sees the light with Windows 12 and Makes Windows Seven Again.)
WHAT! GIVES! *THEM*! THE! RIGHT! TIO! DO! THIS!???
(ESPECIALLY when "up"grades are *FORCED*)
Dear Micros~1: ASK PERMISSION FIRST, at the VERY LEAST. Other kinds of things done WITHOUT PERMISSION like that can land a NORMAL PERSON in JAIL.
But YOU *FEEL* as if you are GOD don't you...?
Removing features when you install an update doesn't, in fact, send anyone to jail. It's the reality of software: if you choose to run someone's software, and you choose to install updates, then those updates can break things and they get the right from you having chosen to do that. If you don't want them to do that, you have to make other choices such as copying Word Pad and keeping it around, which looks to be pretty easy to do, or blocking the update, which we've known how to do since Windows 10 introduced the automatic updates feature. It's been around for ten years. Anyone posting here either knows at least three different ways of blocking Windows updates or can find them online. It's been pretty easy with a few minutes' effort since the beginning. You'll have to deal with the consequences of that choice if you choose to make it, which is why I suggest copying Word Pad if you use it and want to keep it.
It's like asking what gave my distribution maintainers the right to remove Python 2 from their repositories, because now old scripts from 2008 which don't run in Python 3 (and might not run correctly anyway) can't be run unless I install Python 2 manually. I gave them the right by using their distribution, or rather they didn't need the right because they choose what they put in it and I choose to take it. If I don't like it, I change what I'm doing so it doesn't happen.
Not sure what you're using, but if it's better than O&O AppBuster (I think El Reg mentioned it a couple of years ago) then please let me know. OOAPB is the first thing that runs on any new PC that crosses my path. Just why each PC has so much X Box crud on it, I don't know...
Extra stuff on Windows, surely you jest. I mean, why wouldn't you want tablet functionality on your desktop computer, or Cortana on your servers? The stuff that is installed by default doesn't bother me so much anymore (we survived 20 years of IE being loaded as part of the core OS), it's the stuff that silently adds scheduled tasks or loads background services on startup that annoy me.
OTOH, in the ever increasing locked down corporate world, if it doesn't come with Windows you might have to do without. It doesn't matter if it's free (to use) and open source, corporate IT sees it as a risk. I guess it's back to waiting an eternity for Word to load so you can view a simple RTF.
I don’t understand this. They are supposed to do this for security, yet they let some third party (Microsoft) control what does and doesn’t go on their machines? Surely they would want to be the ones with that control. Clearly Windows doesn’t give it.
If you’ve figured out a way to remove the annoying “Microsoft Points” and “Use a Microsoft Account” nags from the main Settings window on 10/11, do let me know. There used to be a method using Vivetool but Microsoft conveniently “broke” that a couple of years ago, quite by accident of course.
I use the “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win10 specifically because they streamlined most of the MS bloat out of there. But they never culled Wordpad.
(Besides Notepad++ there’s another really interesting freeware app, and that’s Notetab.)
I never liked Wordpad. Well it doesn’t open Word files and the “rich text” markup isn’t of any use.
These days I’m using Libre Office, or else Ubuntu Edit.
I don’t think I care about Microsoft anymore… they can do whatever they want in their abandoned mall. I’m not ever going back again!
The only reason I used wordpad was that notepad had ridiculous size limitations... something like 64 kb for text file size. Other than that, wordpad was a crappy rich text editor. It wasn't long in Windows 95 until I switched to a third party editor called UltraEdit 32. Supported all text encodings you'd encounter, and it was also seamlessly a hex editor. You could right click and "open with UltraEdit 32"and it would open any file appropriately.
I used UltraEdit (newer version) in Windows 7 too, right up to the end. (don't need Windows even for games anymore)
“WordPad .. didn't insist on having a connection to the internet for it to work.”
At a local place of education, I've noticed both WordPad and NotePad have disappeared. The only word processor provided is an online one provided by the place of education - in the cloud.
I'm sure that, if this is true, it was done intentionally by the place of education. If so, they likely did it to prevent students from writing something locally, saving it to a disk which isn't meant for storage of student work, and either losing important work or claiming that they did to get out of turning something in. The same reason why I've been asked to prevent people from being able to save documents except to a network drive, because evidently just telling people is not working.
It appears people disagree with my supposition. I'm curious if others have another reason they'd like to propose for why a school would intentionally remove both editors from a system? It can't be Microsoft doing it; Notepad is always there and Word Pad has been thus far as well. To actually remove them would take someone deliberately trying to do so. As much as we might try to blame Microsoft for it, can you actually name a version of Windows that has had them stripped out to push Office365, or for any other reason?
It's probably not on the syllabus so the teachers don't know how to use it. It was very striking that after KCL had its big outage and lost goodness knows how much stuff they got all arsey about people saving stuff locally. I suppose it didn't look good if users were doing a better job about looking after their work then IT did.
It wasn't exactly the bees knees, but it was really handy when you had to deal with a .doc file on a system with no Word on it. I feel bad for the system installers and vendor maintenance techs who have to work on a fresh install who are given a .doc file for instructions and now have to download MSO365 just to read it.
Renormalize lightweight tools!
it's not not knowing about Open Office or Libre Office, but not being *able* to obtain Open Office or Libre Office. I've worked on some installations where any connection to the outside would was severed and without WordPad being already on the machine it was impossible to read anything other than plain text. Hell, I've had to (attempt to) do system admin on installations where my only access was a *user* account.
...and Microsoft will destroy everything that just works and reduce every aspect of your computing experience to tortuous misery.
There doesn't appear to be any reason to remove WordPad. It's like a sociopath pausing on their way to the shops and shooting someone's dog. Because it was there.
Exactly! And the Macintosh standard editor at the time was called "TeachText" -- because it was used as a template for applications on Mac, used to teach us how to write applications for that platform.
But the vast majority of TeachText usage was for reading the installation notes that came with that new app. README
(Although the formatting in TeachText was just a demo for the Macintosh Toolbox library of GUI widgets, it could handle graphics and the results could be very sophisticated. The commercial word processor Nisus Writer started with the TeachText document format -- and is *still available for sale, in active development* nearly 40 years later. Which should be worth a vulture or two!)
To this day, the functionality that Wordpad offered is really all I ever needed.
Sure, I haven't used it for decades, but when it comes to office software, I use the absolute bare bones to get the job done.
If it has paragraphs, bold text, italic text, underlined text, blockquotes and lists then what more do you really need?
It did the job - and you can still use it now to create a perfectly acceptable document.
It was free, came bundled with Windows, and offered pretty much all the functions 90% of people using Word actually use on a regular basis. Namely, bold, italic, underline, changing the font face, and font size. Those five functions are probably the extent to which the vast majority of people use a word processor for. There's no need for "the kitchen sink is around here somewhere" apps like Word when you don't need 99.9% of the functions.
I hope MS will open source it under an Apache style license or something if not GPL. Toss it up on GitHub and let people go nuts with it.
For new files for notes on a topic, I often
- start it as a rich text format (.rtf) file
- keep editing it for days or weeks for content, not style (finally grows to about 10K in size)
- edit (refine) it with Micro$oft Word (ease of changing font styles, size, colors), ease of paragraph changes
Word saves the file as 15K file (old ".doc" files used to be 40K in size)
- edit it once more using Wordpad (add a space, delete the space) and save the file.
I end up with a 10K file.
I have been doing that process for over a decade both at work and at home.
Your Mileage May Vary
There speaks someone who uses a word processor professionally. For the vast majority of home users, WordPad was adequate for writing up a quick letter to send to the BBC complaining about a rude word broadcast before the watershed and other similarly less complex text formatting jobs :-)
Which is basically what I used Wordpad for but in a work context.
Ideal for quick memos and all.
I used it for longer documents when drafting just the text on my ancient Compaq laptop on the way in on the train (Winders 95 era - no MS Office on that machine). Copy over to Word on the college PC and format to Corporate Standard (complete with the logo that made the resulting file 10 times larger). Good days.
These days I suppose people would use Google Docs or something or install OpenOffice/LibreOffice/OtherOffice.
Wordpad always struck me as having just a few more features than the great unwashed could competently use.
The number of users over the years that I have found lost in Word amongst feature or concepts they were never likely to understand let alone use.
One proportional typeface, 3 or 4 font sizes, italic or oblique, underline, bold, justified text (on,off.) Done.
Even an additional monospaced typeface would be an unneeded luxury.
The reality was any documents more complicated than a standard business letter were very rarely required. (How many bright young things can now draft such documents?)
I recall more than one older user drafting their emails in Wordpad and copy/paste into whatever ghastly mail user agent they were lumbered with (lookout express?) With Pine I could smuggly compose with Vi and spell check with Ispell but even that conceit has passed into history.:(
> Wordpad always struck me as having just a few more features than the great unwashed could competently use
MS did bundle Works, until they decided it was competiting with Office…
I suspect an assumption is that users can now read various documents such as .doc in Edge, however, like Adobe Reader and Acrobat (£), if you want to edit them you need to sign up for O365 (£).
A very long time ago I asked our MS rep why there was no spell check in WordPad. He said that If there was, they wouldn't sell many copies of Word/Office. We did agree that (provided a user could spell) it was adequate for the many who wrote simple letters and reports. It became moot when we switched from WP 5.1/Lotus 1-2-3 and a variety of hardware proprietary WP systems like Wangwriters, DisplayWrite, and WPS to (heavily discounted) Office.
I don't use Notepad. I found that Programmers' File Editor was better, and when I need a fancier text editor with things like Column Mode, there's Notepad++.
But I do use WordPad, and have not seen the need for any replacement for it. Although I wish the Windows 3.1 application it replaced was still around: Microsoft Write.
Not that a few extra features wouldn't be appreciated, like the ability to use modern font features provided by OpenType.
I'll see if there is a good replacement around, since the last time I looked, I wasn't happy with what was available.
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