One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack.
This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)
I have a story which predates WordPad, but concerns OLE support in it's predecessor Write:
At my secondary school, a long time ago now, they used PCs from educational vendor Research Machines (RM). These ran a locked down version of the Windows 3.11 Program Manager which didn't allow you to start any unapproved programs. I discovered you could embed EXEs from a floppy disk as OLE objects in a Write document and then start them from within Write by double clicking. In this manner, I could bring my LibertyBasic programs in from home and run them on the school's machines :-).
We also used PCs from RM at our secondary school in the late 2000s. At that time there was still a very similar exploit that allowed me to embed and run unauthorised programs inside of PowerPoint slide shows. Fun times.
Who can forget the first time they opened Wordpad and then tried to drag a text document into the window to edit it, just like you do with Notepad, only to have the text document turn into an icon inside of the empty text document you had open. Fun times.
"The WordPad sample demonstrates how to implement an application that imitates the functionality of WordPad, including the user interface elements and some of the capabilities."
I should have known it wasn't the real Win95 WordPad source code since this version is written using MFC and C++.
C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 components in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.
Hmm. Murray Sargent's blog post states that Win95's WordPad IS written in MFC.
from https://web.archive.org/web/20070127011040/http://blogs.msdn...:
"...RichEdit 1.0 was wrapped in MFC to produce WordPad as an example of how MFC could be used for text processing. This was shipped with Windows 95 as mentioned in the previous post."
Lots of MS groups were using C++ before Win95, including the Exchange group.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1+ included C++ code.
I recall that in the initial Win95 group meeting, C++ wasn't allowed. I moved to another team, so I don't know if that restriction was relaxed or not and/or when they allowed C++.
The email client included with Win95 wasn't allowed to use C++, including the RichEdit windows control, which had to use C for OLE code - not many other codebases could boast about that - no one signs up for that sort of masochism by choice.
One neat OLE object (btw this works even in Windows 10 - i don't know about 11) is the "package" which allows you to embed any file as an OLE object. So basically you can drop an image file, PDF, video, program or anything else in WordPad and it'll put an icon representing it that if the user double clicks it'd be equivalent to them doubleclicking a file.
Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPad chokes at anything above a handful of MB) since you're making a bad archive file (using the default .rtf format will encode the binary data in hex which will actually increase file size), but i always liked how general the idea was.
(also it isn't limited to WordPad but to anything that uses OLE - e.g. you could do the same with Delphi which has a "OLE object" control that can embed any OLE object and the object becomes part of the executable - so you could, say, throw a PDF file in a package OLE object in a form and when the user doubleclicks it the control opens the default PDF viewer)
Seems like the implementation was impractical, but it's basically what we do with Obsidian and any modern knowledge management software. Feels to me like it was ahead of its time.
OLE has always fascinated me. I’ve wanted to play around with it just to see what sort of cursed things I can do, but my eyes glaze over looking at WinAPI docs.
OLE isn't any more "malware riddled" than anything else you install on your PC, at its core it is just a fancy plugin system for embedding stuff in a document without the document editor knowing about it. OLE is as susceptible to malware as any other plugin system - in other words unless you somehow[0] install malware, you wont get malware.
[0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE
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 way to prevent future reading.
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.
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 the RichEdit windows control was created.
Wordpad.exe is a thin wrapper around the RichEdit control, like Notepad.exe is a thin wrapper around the text edit control.
Searching in notepad no longer opens a separate window but squeezes the search input in between text lines, and while creating space breaks the display. Searching highlights but doesn't move the cursor, losing the ___location found when closing search.
1. Ship Word with Windows and not get paid for it, even though they had hundreds of engineers working on it.
2. Ship no word processor with Windows, and make the end user find one on their own.
3. Ship a basic one and let the user upgrade to Word if they needed something more.
At the time with option 2, it's not like you're going to hit google and download some FOSS solution - you would need to go to the computer store and pay $200 for something in a box off the shelf.
I'm thinking option 3 was a good middle ground, and a win-win for MS and the customer.
Microsoft had a cheaper office suite that they sold as a middle ground. I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home and had to do some things on school computers instead.
> I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home
The irony was that Microsoft included Microsoft Money in the Works suite, likely to give an aspiration of saving and making enough in order to upgrade to the Office suite.
From Wikipedia: "The Windows 3.1 version of Cardfile was included with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not installed by default. For the later two versions of Windows, the user would have to manually copy the Cardfile application from the Windows install CD in order to use the application."
This is their strongest point. I still remember being able to install Microsoft Money 99 on a brand new Windows 10 for my uncle, without much difficulties.
> > Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today
> pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint.
And in both cases, the reason was most probably backwards compatibility, so that programs which directly called WRITE.EXE or PBRUSH.EXE to open a file would keep working. Most of these are going to be 16-bit Windows programs (which AFAIK no longer work, unless you're still running a 32-bit build of Windows), or 32-bit Windows programs directly ported from 16-bit Windows programs (Microsoft designed the 32-bit Windows API to make it easy to have a single source code building both 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the same program, and to make it easy to adapt the source code from a 16-bit Windows program into a 32-bit Windows program; it was not unusual back then to offer both 16-bit and 32-bit builds of the same program, built from the same source code).
The binary for Microsoft Paint is called mspaint.exe, and there is no "paint" alias AFAICT -- typing "paint" in the run prompt results in "Windows cannot find 'paint'".
You could create a paint.bat file in C:\Windows\System32 (usually the first dir in %PATH%) that calls Paint.net instead. Something like this should work:
I don't have a reference for this but I remember reading that Microsoft had to create Wordpad from scratch because they lost the code for Write. I do remember that when they introduced Wordpad it was missing several features present in Write and a very visible one was justified text.
According to Murray Sargent's blog post on RichEdit version history, justified text was added to RichEdit in v3.0. The Win10 version of WordPad seems to support fully-justified text per paragraph.
Write had an interesting cursor with the vertical pipe line and something like an asterisk. I used it for a while on Windows 3.1 before someone set me up with a copy of MS Office 4.3.
Off topic, but I'm loving the Mac equivalent, TextEdit.
After trying every kind of fancy task management and note taking system from org-mode to Obsidian to Logseq, I now use a .rtfd (.rtf + images) on iCloud to act as a note-taking system / todo-list. I would have used pen and paper but I need to paste screenshots and URLs.
There's an iOS app called RTF Write for 99c. Now I always have my notes, tasks, and shopping, and above all, it's so simple and quick.
Actually, you changed the file type from 'TEXT' to 'ttro' to make a Read Me document read-only. 'ttxt' was the application signature of TeachText and SimpleText and is now the signature of TextEdit.
Yeah, the Cocoa text input system is very full-featured and TextEdit.app is basically a demo of it the way WordPad demoed the windows rich text editing component
For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down.
TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject} notes.txt”, throw it in the “old notes” folder when it gets too unwieldy is the only notes workflow that I’ve found actually works for me.
I’ve tried many, but the featurelessness of TextEdit is what I like about it. “Better” ends up being more distracting. I do like Sublime for actual dev tasks, though.
Sublime is my go-to for this. It can be customised to be much more comfortable to use, and projects let you have a set of files accessible with Cmd+P. I have different projects for each of my static sites. It's fantastic.
Counterpoint: syncing across devices, sharing, embeddable media and searchability are actually all kinda table-stakes if I'm going to be using these notes for the rest of my forseeable life. I have shared notes with my wife where we have shopping lists, shared notes with my co-founder on roadmaps, have my vaccine cards and IDs in there for presenting at bars, and all my code snippets in a folder called "Snippets" that is searchable and available to me at my work and home computers. Kinda hard to replicate with a folder full of text files without even more complexity and crud.
Oh for sure. For those use cases, more features make sense. My use case here is “swap file for disorganized thoughts”, and I don’t need them to be replicated, archived, or searchable—and the mental overhead of those features is a detriment.
A notes .txt represents my current unit of work, and moving it into the archive folder is equivalent to deleting it in that I will likely never need or use it again. Documentation goes into the repo or Notion or whatnot, grocery lists are shared with my wife, etc., and I see the value in additional features there.
If a day I decide to change note-taking app, I can do it by just opening it. With notes I have to figure out an export strategy and third-party export app.
There's something great about dealing with raw text files (and I say this as a happy Photos.app user)
They forced people to upgrade the full operating system when they ever so slightly changed Notes' format recently. I shudder to think what it will take them to support Markdown.
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.
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) since it’s basically redundant at this point.
On the contrary, the difference is precisely that an abandoned FOSS program can be picked up by someone else; that this ability is not always used is beside the point.
Anyone remember PhantomJS? It took years before a replacement emerged and nobody was willing to take in the project, and this was a critical piece of tech at the time
Rarely isn't a good term either. I use a fair number of open source apps that were picked up by a different maintainer after the original one got bored. I have no idea what the overall rate is, but it works well enough for me.
Maybe PhantomJS wasn't as critical as you thought it was? Or maybe the JS ecosystem doesn't lend itself towards this model because JS developers have the attention span of a goldfish
I had a copy and made changes to my fork when others stopped updating. Having a copy let me make changes that work for me. Running a replacement foss project is totally different beast and the time/effect involved is a lot different nevermind the marketing/rebrand required
That's a false equivalency and you know it. When I pay for electricity and computer hardware, that money doesn't go to any software developer. When I pay for a Windows license, that money goes to Microsoft who maintain WordPad.
> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.
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.
Taking over write isn't really hard. It is not a complex app. The core is the rich text edit control from Windows. Writing a comparable application from "scratch" using the controls isn't a huge task and there are plenty comparable programs.
(The full OLE capability needs a bit tweaking to get it working right, if one needs it)
Microsoft did choose to open source WPF a few years back [0], but I don't fully remember the situation there. I remember hearing discontent about the decision on /r/dotnet.
The opposing reactions (discontent MS did open source something, discontent that they didn't) are odd. I don't fully remember the details there though so can't make a meaningful comment.
ffmpeg had a schism just over a decade ago and the splinter group forked off into libav.
One of the splinter group members happened to be the now-former ffmpeg maintainer in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories and switched them from ffmpeg to libav. Yes, this was done purely for ideological reasons.[1]
So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world. In a way, I would argue it's even worse in the open source world because when it happens the driving factor is oftentimes ideological dogma instead of something simpler like lack of money or interest.
The crucial difference is that with FOSS, unless a piece of software has some particularly gnarly and/or finicky dependencies, you can easily bypass whatever is in your package manager's repositories and just use the version you want (by compiling it from source, or by using a ready-to-use version provided directly by the maintainers of the software itself, which is often, if not always, a possibility), regardless of what the maintainers of the aforementioned repositories do. With proprietary software, you simply do not have this option.
"(by compiling it from source, or by using a ready-to-use version provided directly by the maintainers of the software itself, which is often, if not always, a possibility),"
This is fine for those of us who know how to compile the source or find a ready-to-use version. Trouble is, I've often been in situations without updated sources being available and or where maintainers haven't been contactable.
Ordinary users are in a worse position as most wouldn't know how to go about compiling code even if available. It's a significant problem.
That's why ordinary users they pay for Windows. And iPhones. They couldn't be bothered with "you should learn to compile arbitrary programs from source for the particular version of a particulr linux distirbution with particular library versions and available software".
In all fairness I, as a programmer, couldn't be bothered to do that either.
It is not detachment from reality. Those of us that are comfortable with compiling some of the programs we use from source don't by any means expect ordinary users to be capable of doing the same. It's an option that works for us and that's fine for many of us, though I personally would prefer if regular users had options as well.
It's also a straw man. Compiling from source is just one option (that is particularly relevant for the HN demographic), but many (most?) notable apps, the kinds regular users would be using anyway, seem to provide ready-to-use versions that can be downloaded from their site and run without even having to be installed. This is a very convenient workflow that even regular users would be capable of using, and is quite reminiscient of what people often do on proprietary desktop operating systems.
"...though I personally would prefer if regular users had options as well."
I must agree with that. Whilst I've written code and compiled it—even Assembler—when it comes to using compiled programs without source, MSO for instance, then I am essentially in the same position as the average user.
I've lost count of the times that I've wished I could change a program to alter a feature or provide one that was missing. Like the average user I'm powerless to change it in any practical sense as it'd be so difficult and timeconsuming (even with source, it could still be very challenging and not worth the effort).
I think that there is a lot of room for compassion and donated time and effort here. I have helped family and friends adopt foss on many occasions, and it has been worth my time.
> So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world.
The detail is what happens after this happens. In a closed source world, most of the cases, that's it. No more builds for any reason, it's dead. You want to change it? Then first reverse engineer it.
But if it's open source, I can if I must, pull down the source code myself and build it. It can continue to live, if someone wants.
Absolutely true. This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation. I've the same problem in supermarkets when confronted with dozens of brands of an item in that they all seem the same.
> This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation.
This is probably a good thing for those who want something very particular.
For example, something like Ubuntu for the desktop, but without snaps everywhere - that'd be Linux Mint. Or maybe something like RHEL, but without necessarily having to (or being able to) pay - that'd be Rocky Linux or Alma Linux.
On the other hand, this also means that the community's efforts are spread thin, there's lots of fragmentation and the whole experience is just way more messy.
Instead of writing install instructions for The One True Linux Distro, you now need to write those for many, deal with multiple packaging formats and repositories, or just live with the reality that something available in one distro won't be available in another. I even had that issue with WireGuard, where it worked in Ubuntu but not Debian for a particular use case, shortly after it came out.
For as niche the types of BSD OSes are, they feel more coherent. I wonder what things would be like if we'd have similarly focused efforts for Linux, even stuff like one audio solution that's made to always work everywhere, one display server/compositor, one desktop that scales back to run as fast as XFCE or be as pretty as KDE.
But that's not how humans work and instead we'll just get new packages replacing older ones, sometimes for the better, but not always.
The very same thing applies to many FOSS software packages out there, but in a sense it's still better than some closed source package being abandoned and nobody ever being able to do anything about it.
ffmpeg kept being available and developed. It is a good example that shows that whatever reasons are behind, it is never worse in the open source world.
Cannot say if Notepad does it in recent versions, but on older Windows systems Wordpad was useful to quickly open texts made on Linux (with just LF instead of CR+LF) which in Notepad would show as uninterrupted.
I know you're being sarcastic but it also introduced the virtual desktop switcher, (full) DX12, made significant improvements to the console, added real ARM support for the desktop OS, replaced IE, implemented proper DPI support (all the way to per-monitor true fractional), added openssh, actual HDR support, and many more things that can be surprisingly hard to go without if you revert to a previous release.
There is always plenty wrong with each new release but the comments and jokes about ${"LATEST_RELEASE"} of ${"SOFTWARE"} being unilaterally worse just make me think the person can't deal with something changing instead of the software actually being bad.
Comments and jokes about how they could have an entire new release worth of features just bringing back what they've removed or reverse-improved over the years however... that I agree with ;).
Yep openssh, the best thing microsoft did for windows 10 was to include openssh almost verbatim, rather than trying to make a native ssh. it does feel a bit foreign at times. but that is a good thing. can you imagine having to dig around in the windows trust store in order to make or use ssh keys. bust out regedit to change the config.... Shudder. Nope, it is perfect and works just like any other openssh install(within the limits of windows general weirdness)
> I know you're being sarcastic but it also introduced the virtual desktop switcher
Which is a PITA to use, so useless.
> , (full) DX12, made significant improvements to the console
Cmd.exe is still the same
> , added real ARM support for the desktop OS,
Not relevant
> replaced IE,
Not fully. They still have it as a menu item in Edge
> implemented proper DPI support (all the way to per-monitor true fractional),
YMMV. This one is hit or miss.
> added openssh, actual HDR support, and many more things that can be surprisingly hard to go without if you revert to a previous release.
You cannot revert to a previous release in Windows.
> There is always plenty wrong with each new release but the comments and jokes about ${"LATEST_RELEASE"} of ${"SOFTWARE"} being unilaterally worse just make me think the person can't deal with something changing instead of the software actually being bad.
When SW changes just for the sake of change (see calc.exe), something is wrong.
> Comments and jokes about how they could have an entire new release worth of features just bringing back what they've removed or reverse-improved over the years however... that I agree with ;).
cmd.exe is a shell so it shouldn't be any different just because the console updated. This article simultaneously explains the difference between a shell and a console as well as explicitly list the feature changes added to the console in Windows 10 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/10/07/consol...
> Not fully. They still have it as a menu item in Edge
Well sure, completely removing IE just because they added Edge would have made the replacement more painful for no real gain. They already committed to ongoing support of IE based applications for many years to come years ago.
> YMMV. This one is hit or miss.
YMMV on what apps support the new DPI features but the APIs and support itself is 100% there all the time in every copy of Windows 10. In previous versions of Windows apps were unable to reach that level of DPI support regardless if they wanted to update and do so.
> You cannot revert to a previous release in Windows.
Where'd you get that idea? I've done it myself, it's quite possible. You're also quite welcome to just install fresh if you're update data has been cleared but you can revert otherwise.
> When SW changes just for the sake of change (see calc.exe), something is wrong.
Calling adding resizability, OS theme following, (fractional) DPI awareness, additions to the unit and time conversions, and graphing "changes just for the sack of changes" is spot on the nose of what I was talking about - the only way they could have made you happy was to not change, it has nothing to do with how much better or worse the new calculator actually is. Maybe you personally aren't a fan of a single one of the changes, that's still not reasoning for why it's changes for the sake of changes.
The rest is more individual so I won't say anything one way or another. E.g. ARM support can be critical to one person and irrelevant to the next, hard to make 1 list containing only what every person on Earth agrees is relevant so I included things many will even if some won't. That doesn't mean I'm saying you specifically must find ARM support one of the meaningful changes.
I've recently switched to OnlyOffice ("desktop version" - probably Electron) since online reviews seem to suggest it has better support for docx than LibreOffice. You might give it a try, as it supports rtf as a document format, but not sure how well that works.
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 always thought the only common real-world use of RTF was as a clipboard format (rather than a file format), so you could copy and paste with bold and italics.
But then at some point I think that might have been replaced in practice with HTML as a clipboard format instead.
I'm not sure if you copy text from browsers or word processors today, if it's usually available as both RTF and HTML, or only one?
how so? if a word is bold in a sentence, you want it to be bold in the translation without having to split the sentence up (which will fail as soon as there is more than one formatted word)
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.
The macOS installer app uses rtf/rtfd as its EULA/readme format as well.
In fact rtf usage is all over the place on Apple platforms. Cocoa/AppKit apps can take an rtf file to present in the app’s standard About window for credits/acknowledgments and if you want to present rich text with low hassle and resource consumption, by far the easiest way is to embed an NSTextView/UITextView with editing disabled which can then have a bundled rtf loaded into it trivially (just a couple lines of code).
A WebKit webview and HTML could be used instead in these instances, but that’s significantly more heavy and doesn’t have an OS-included WYSIWYG editor which makes it less friendly to e.g. non-technical team members whose job it might be to prepare the content being displayed.
Back in the day I worked on a desktop shell for senior accessibilty in .net (pointerware) & was tasked with creating a word processor. Went with richtextedit control to do most the heavy lifting, & included being able to forward rtf via email which would convert subset of rtf editor exposed to html
Which free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.
Something I've used time and again when I was still primarily using Windows: Jarte (https://www.jarte.com/). It's small, portable, and works well with RTF files.
Focus Writer. Open-source, minimalist interface (but enough useful options in settings) and many more. I've been using it for years, very happy with it
With a little server-side support it wasn't all that rare an approach back in the early-mid 2000s days of web dev, when none of us had any idea what we were doing and couldn't wait to find out.
"Exciting" is certainly a word I would use to describe the results, especially in the common case where no VCS was in use.
Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types. Plain text or Office formats, PDF, thats it.
That might well be true for 99% of people, but it isn't true for me. I'd like to have an editor built into windows that was way lighter than an IDE but could handle things like JSON, XML, and CSV without sweating.
Notepad++ serves that purpose today but would be nice to have it bolted into Windows. Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)
I think it’s more a recognition of the fact that Microsoft expects Windows users to purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, as part of their push to replace local-first applications with cloud services.
Also look at how they are changing desktop Outlook to a web-tech based UI, which is a prerequisite for eventually moving it to the cloud altogether.
> Implicit in this is a recognition, or at least a claim, that regular windows users don't have any need to inspect or manipulate anything other than a few file types
Regular windows users are mostly corporate and there are (management excepted, of course) a lot of file types to be manipulated. (CAD, MS Office, etc)
True, I didnt explain myself very clearly. An editor serves two functions: to open text files, and to act as the Program of Last Resort to open an unfamiliar file type. Id like something beefier than Notepad for the first, but I could live with it: but Id really like something with the power of Notepad++ for the second use case, built into Windows. However its far outside the mainline for windows corporate users since they probably never get sent filetyoes for which they do not already have the right app to open it.
> Or maybe msft agrees to a giant stipend to the Moolenaar estate (RIP) and licenses Vim with a user friendly keybinding?(!)
An awful lot, maybe most Windows users who need to inspect non txt filetypes still wouldn't be comfortable with Vim, even with a user friendly keybinding.
The latest version of LibO, 7.6, loads considerably faster than it used to. I now use it almost exclusively but I've MS Office 2007 still installed as there are times when I still need it. LibO's Write still has many bugs and can become incredibly slow when loading large tables (60 to 100 pages or more). To get myself out of trouble I've exported the .ODF file to .DOC and used MS Word to continue.
Nothing irks me more than having to do this, I wish The Document Foundation would address this instead of adding new features. Damn it, MS Word has bugs and quirks but it's much faster and than LibO when dealing with large tables and inserted images.
If LibO were fixed properly it would then be a true competitor to MSO.
"We're mostly volunteers, so people implement whatever they feel like doing :-) The essence of open-source."
I am extremely appreciative of what open-source developers do. One only has to look at the Linux ecosystem to see how much work they've contributed—and of course there's much more than just that.
What you say is obvious, volunteers are unlikely do work they do not like and I'd certainly not expect them to do so. However, unfortunately, that, in my opinion, is often (but not always) the Achilles's heel of much open-source software.
For example, open-source software often lacks drivers or that good drivers only arrive much later than they do for commercial software. The two mitigating reasons for this are that hardware interfaces etc. are often proprietary and the info is more likely to be released through commercial agreements leaving open-source developers to reverse engineer them which is messy and timeconsuming. But a second factor is even more important, which is that very few developers like writing drivers (I hate doing so and it's years since I've done so—so I'd not expect others to do so for free). A good illusion of this is Linux's old NTFS driver, it was a 'dog' and often corrupted files. Luckily it was fixed recently when the commercial operation Paragon donated a revamp/rewrite of their commercial NTFS code (no doubt out of vested interest, compatibility etc.). That new driver probably doesn't do much for Linux Diehards who interface with ext4, etc. (and it's likely why the old code was never properly developed), but the replacement is a godsend for mixed environments where one is trying to introduce Linux to Windows users.
The problem then is how do we fill the gap between what open-source developers want to do and what users actually need? It's really a vexed problem that remains to be solved if open-source software is to become widely competitive with its commercial counterparts.
For a long time my view has been that we need a middle-ground solution here. For example, large projects such as LibO should be developed under a nonprofit structure that would pay developers for their efforts. The amount developers would receive as compensation would be less than that paid by commercial interests but it'd certainly be more than a token amount. This way, only those who had a true commitment to the project would work on it and payment would also provide the incentive to get the less popular development done, thus projects wouldn't be held up.
Revenue to pay developers would come from the sale of the software, which, say, for LibO could be around $20 - $30 which is only a fraction of what MS charges for MSO. Such a scheme would be criticized on grounds that the source would then have to be closed. That problem is also easily solved if the license agreement required that the source could be only be compiled on condition that the binary was only for one's own personal use—resale of the complied code would be strictly forbidden. Given its nominally low price then by far the vast majority of users would opt to buy the program already compiled.
No doubt, there are many variations on such a scheme and much tweaking would take place before an optimal solution was found. Overall, with such a scheme users would be better off as development would be faster and proceed more smoothly.
I can only stress again that I am in favor of open-source development and I do donate to open-source projects, also if I have to buy software then I only do so from small independent commercial developers. In fact, in recent years, I've bought no code from the Big developers except for Windows which was already installed on a machine, even then that's been strictly limited as most of my machines run Linux.
What prompted my original comment about LibO was my recent bad experience, in fact it was quite horrific. It needs a separate post to provide even a reasonable outline as so many things went wrong. However, in brief, it goes thus: I'd not written long and detailed documents in either MSO or LibO for some time and by that I mean complex documents over 100 pages. LibO has been the default WP for ages but I occasionally use MSO on .doc files created by others to ensure no page format anomolies.
Anyway, recently I had to produce a legal document in which some drafts were in excess of 150 pages and about 100 were in the form of a complex landscape table where some cells were split horizontally and vertically. Not only were there memory leaks, the table would take ages appear, certain operations such as deleting cells that split across pages would lock the program and it could only be killed by the task manager (this, unfortunately, was in Windows), moreover there were multiple instances of Write that had to be killed or it wouldn't reopen. Also, the LanguageTool extension (which I needed) caused Writer to cease up when certain actions were invoked, these were separate to the earlier mentioned problems which were present even if LanguageTool was disabled or not installed.
Somewhere between revision 200 and 550 the file became corrupted but it was not obvious until around rev 550 when I found I couldn't delete some parts of the table. Backups didn't help as they contained the corruption from early on. I then had to cut-and-paste into a new file using plaintext to get rid of the corruption which still wasn't obvious, I thus lost almost all of my complex formatting. These problems cost me several weeks lost work, and to make matters worse I was on a court-imposed deadline that I could not alter.
That's only part of the story. Moreover, I wish to hell LibO had some utility that would find corrupt parts within an .odt file and either correct them and or bring them to my attention. Finding some way to edit—or even examine—a raw indigestible and unintelligible .odt file would be extremely useful.
Also, it would have been good if I could have sent the hundreds of crashes to The Document Foundation but with the sensitivity of the doc and the fact that I couldn't carefully review exactly what was to be sent back I found most annoying. That process for advising crashes isn't fit for purpose.
I really do need an extended blog to fully explain what happened. I note from the changelog of ver 7.6 that one of the table code bugs has been fixed but I've yet to fully verify that, however, it still locks up when I try to correct a spelling error before the speller autocorrects it (it's so damn slow, I can beat it manually).
Similarly, I also note LT has notched a single point release since my original trouble but Writer 7.6 still often fails to engage or interact with the extension, that is LT is active but no grammar or spelling correction takes place. To fix this LibO must be closed down and restarted. I don't know if this is a bug in Writer or LT, either way it's really a damn nuisance.
Unfortunately tables are a major weak point in the writer codebase.
Hopefully you will be happy to hear that a company has funded some improvements to that part of the code, and those improvements should roll out over the current and the next release.
ODT files are theoretically human-editable, because once you expand the file (using e.g. unzip) you have a small set of XML files, which can be edited as text and then wrapped up into an ODT again.
Finding "corruption" is not really a thing (at least for writer documents), the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself, and compromise solutions must be found in the code.
The writer code to lay the document out is sufficiently complex that it has multiple chunks of guard code specifically designed to make it give up when it cannot make reasonable progress.
Thanks for responding and being so quick about it. In fact, I was still fixing typos and adding a bit at the end when you replied so you may have missed that bit.
Very good to hear about the table improvements, I look forward to seeing them.
Re ODT, I unzipped it and looked at the XML and the stuff in the table section was formatted so badly (tightly together as one huge blob of text sans proper spaces and structured formatting). Given the ODT is over 900k long and having examined the XML for an hour or so I simply gave up. I hate to think how long it would have taken me to examine it in detail
let alone resolve it without me first going crazy.
As I was in a desperate hurry I cut my losses and used my time fixing it in a way where I could at least estimate the time required.
"the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself,"
This sounds like what was happening, in parts of the table when paging up or down between pages sections of text (both within a cell with multiple lines of text and across cells in lines before and after). Text in a cell would mix and fold over itself or fold over the text in the cell in the line above or below it. Given that some cells could have text of several hundred lines in length sections of the table (but not all of it) became an almighty jumbled mess.
Right, at times it just gave up and if it didn't resolve (respond to commands within a minute or so) I killed it with the task manager.
Curious that Microsoft doesn't mention this and pushes their expensive licenseware instead, especially if one were happy with WordPad which has compatibility issues with Word documents, so you managed to avoid the ecosystem this far but now you're recommended to buy in after all.
Yeah of course they wouldn't recommend a competitor, but to me that makes it seem like this announcement is an attempt to get a handful more people to buy Word by removing a finished and functional product that was fast and available to anyone with a Windows computer
Bundling a word processor is anti competitive based on all the objections to Microsoft bundling anything else. So what if you have to pay for it? Wasn't that the whole point of making this fair? You can buy any word processor, or find a free one.
Word pad was basically Word for Windows 6 and was quite usable for basic needs. Really only finally out to pasture by the free Google Docs, I’m sure wordpad killed a decent ecosystem of editors that may one day have competed with Word.
Everything MS does is for the business case. Wordpad, windows, etc exist only in a capitalist context and need a financial justification to exist. It was there exactly for the reasons you state, to kill the word processor market in Windows. Previously you had all these other players but Win95 came with Wordpad for free which had a lot of functionality. For pros, you could buy Word. I don't think we appreciate how many competitors Win95 killed with all its built-in GUI apps when people upgraded from 3.1.
Now I'm starting to see Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors. I also read that RAR support is now native in Windows, so WinRAR and other RAR programs are probably going to finally die. I think this comes with further ZIP support and improvements which means apps like 7-zip are going to be less in demand.
I don't think Notepad is going to be anything more than a basic text editor. It certainly gets new features from time to time, but it is more about making it usable in the modern world than adding advanced features like Notepad++ has.
It does compete with Notepad++ in a sense that now, Notepad can actually edit text files, and if you want advanced features, there is VSCode. And I must admit that I don't have any use for a middle ground text editor like Notepad++ or PSPad anymore, so maybe their strategy is working.
In the era you mentioned, most new PCs came bundled with Microsoft Works. A basic word processor feels like a sensible inclusion in any OS that is useful to consumers out of the box, it was Works that was more problematic for the competition.
The floor has fallen out since then and there are so many free or cheap office productivity options. Works stopped being a thing eons ago and I would guess WordPad is rarely chosen. Disuse is a good reason to say goodbye.
Yes, Notepad, WordPad, Paint existed to have a baseline of utility and especially when selling a complete PC setup to customers in the 1990s:
At a time when there was no internet! The PC sales guy could demo the customer fancy text-editing with fonts and colours, draw pictures and even print to dot matrix! right in the store.
Today people like these minimal OS apps because they are simple, avoid bloat and feature creep, especially notepad and paint. Its probably an error on MS part to get rid of WordPad..
Sorta, Win 95 was more on the cusp, predating the first internet boom by a few years, and it was certainty designed for a pre internet world. The marketing push was about how easy it was to get online with MSN.
Microsoft leadership famously bet against widespread adoption and growth of the internet and put their bets heavily into MSN with the web as a hedge. The first release of Windows 95 didn’t even come with a browser.
Even so, as a consumer if you had better than 14.4k dialup you were quite lucky.
Almost nobody selling computers in those days was tying up a phone line to keep the internet connected for sales demos.
WordPad was always useful to read RTF files, which used to be pretty common. I guess they have been replaced by PDFs at this stage.
Would still be nice if Windows had some sort of basic word processor, as WordPad had functionality that many users would still find useful, basically just fonts and headings.
Sure but PDF seems to have replaced RTF in some ways. When you used to download software it would often come with an RTF file as documentation, now it would be a PDF.
Rip C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories and back it up somewhere. WordPad.exe is standalone. If you're running Win7+ you'll need the en-us/muis/etc, if you pull from an XP install wordpad.exe is all you'll ever need to do.
"6. Updates. The software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you. You may obtain updates only from Microsoft or authorized sources, and Microsoft may need to update your system to provide you with those updates. By accepting this agreement or using the software, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice."
If you don't want this kind of thing to happen, don't use proprietary software that requires you to to agree to it.
I don't buy this, because the user did not read the agreement, and did not have a real choice to reject it. Without choice, and without clear agreement and understanding of the terms, there can be no consent.
But I agree with you that this abuse is a symptom of proprietary software.
So you have to go out and install software from the internet rather than just right click and open with WordPad, particularly when using someone else's computer, or a corporate system where you can't just install random software
Similar to a local ice cream store, it may not be the best in existence, but the advantage is in it being right there right now
Also to this point it’s usually pretty easy to copy built in Windows applications over. For example, I like the older Win10 snipping tool better and I just needed to copy the executable and maybe a DLL file.
Well, the new notepad in win11 is very nice. Obsidian has many amazing plugins make it super easy to use and you don't need to worry about unsaved files crashing and disappearing.
Notepad++ is standard for code editing and extremely fast. I use all these 3 alternatives for different reasons but my #1 is still notepad.
Oh man, FrontPage. I haven’t heard that name in 20 years. I got started learning how to make web pages in FrontPage and then branched out to editing HTML in notepad, aided with my trusty copy of HTML for Dummies.
Frontpage Express was an IE activeX control with contentEditable set to true. There was plenty of functionality around building <table> or whatever but comparing it to TinyMCE is absolutely right. Just 6 years before FckEditor was a thing.
I use Linux and BSD primarily but at my job where we use Windows I actually quite like wordpad.exe/write.exe (same thing?) for dissecting prod logs complete with highlights, formatting, etc.. Once you turn off line spacing and margins, it's quite good and generally pretty fast at wrangling a bunch of text that you may end up emailing via Outlook.
Notepad++ is much much better for log and config parsing. Also has lots of plugins, like the diff plugin which I rely on a lot when comparing dev/prod config files and such.
I would normally feel neutral/good about this except Microsoft now removes half useful programs and preinstalls or at least shows the icon of total crap like Instagram in a clean install. I mean, what the fuck.
WordPad was the only thing worse than MS Word. So good riddance. But Windows still desperately needs an ultralight word processor that can do more than Notepad. I dread Word even opening.
Wait, it opens files made with Microsoft Office? I thought it refused that and only did rtf and text files like html, txt, etc. Is this perhaps new or do I just misremember?
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
I had it on the first computer that I owned and could do all kinds of stuff with it. Aside from Works I also got some version of Visual Basic. I still remember playing around with those programs.
I agree. Now would be a perfect opportunity to give it Markdown support. Rich text for a more modern era. It wouldn’t need to be a big feature. Just have a button that toggles text editor and md preview and let it print formatted. Notepad is now a WinUI app so let it render the md with MarkdownRenderer.
For me the "canary in the coal mine" for when Microsoft actually starts caring about the user experience is when the taskbar dynamically expands and contracts with the number of open windows.
Next to things like Notepad, the Calculator, and Command Prompt, Wordpad is and has been one of the most useful programs ever bundled with Windows in terms of functionality and user-friendliness, so the idea of getting rid of it (even if it gets replaced) just seems kind of asinine.
I know your deeds, that you are neither notepad nor word. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm - neither notepad nor word - I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
I haven’t used Word Pad in over a decade. I suspect a lot of people fall into this camp
I don’t see the point of word pad anymore. Its purpose was a lite free alternative to MS Word. With online word processors like Google Docs and even Word online, both of which have free versions that can work offline, it just makes Word Pad entirely pointless especially when there are open source word processors.
I feel that this would be a bigger deal if notepad was killed, but then there’s notepad plus.
I must be the only one who didn't know what a WordPad was before reading about it being removed on here.
What do you use it for? I can't remember the last time I had to edit a text document that wasn't either pure text (like markdown), a pdf, or an office file. Some people mentioned ".rtf" files in this thread, but I don't believe I've ever heard of one of those being used for anything.
WordPad had one real use in my world: if you edited a Linux document in WordPad it was smart enough to not mess up the line endings CR/LF versus LF IIRC. It was nice to not have to worry.
But doesn't a basic text editor like notepad++, or sublime text, I guess nowadays people use vscode too, take care of that? Why would you want to use some kind of rich text editing program for those?
I’m guessing you’re a lot younger than me. Notepad++ didn’t come out until 2003, sublime 2008.
Wordpad was on every windows machine from 1995 onwards - no need to install anything on a machine you might not even be able to, and unlike notepad it could open text files from unix machines properly
Now I believe at some point in the last decade or so notepad was upgraded to be able to open those files so it’s no longer a feature. I dropped windows well before those other editors came out so not sure exactly when notepad was fixed, but I do remember using wordpad to read files
So you have to go out and install third party software rather than just right click and open with WordPad, particularly when using someone else's computer, or a corporate system where you can't just install random software
But the point is moot now that they added support for this to Notepad. Dunno if there are still supported versions of Windows out there that don't have it, but at least the newer systems should
This is a real shame. There's value in simple apps that come bundled with the OS and don't change for years. Wordpad is the simplest way I know to get a sample of a font. My workplace doesn't use Microsoft apps so there's absolutely no chance I'll be able to use their recommended replacement of Word.
Of course. Breaking every tracking script that marketers try to share is hard work! And you laugh now, but wait until they roll out Clippy GPT-4 edition.
I used it on text files with non-windows EOL chars, where notepad would get confused.
One of the great things of the windows builtins is trustworthyness: they're always there. Even if notedpad++ is miles better, it can't always be installed, e.g. on a server.
in one way, this is a good thing, right? But in another, how do i manage old servers which still use TLS1.0 or TLS1.1... The only browser i can use, most of the time, is Firefox for getting into older IPMI endpoints (old servers that dont get security updates... Thanks HP/Dell...). Guess i will be using a Linux VM for managing that kind of gear now...
Honestly, I'm just waiting for the Linux community to figure itself out with Wayland/X and get a bit more stable and I'll probably be switching. The only question in the air for me is how I'm going to manage my cloud files (I've gotten used to having filesystem sync between multiple devices) as the existing offerings seem more or less meh.
I haven't looked yet but on steam deck I've noted that Windows/wine stuff has improved a ton lately - could you just run your sync tool from win32 on *nix?
No, it's not. A lot of things are a works-in-progress, and it's less stable than X. Calling it solved is understating by a large margin the plethora of issues that still need to be addressed.
Is it better than where we were a couple years ago? Yes, definitely. Is it stable enough to be a daily driver? Somewhat, yes.
I'm calling it now: Word with ads will ship inbox with future versions of Windows :)
Maybe the whole Office suite; if you want a PowerPivot in Excel you'll have to watch a 2 minute unskippable ad for hair loss medication. Totally "private" though, scout's honor.
Or something with cloud-login-is-a-must Word Lite. Then make you feel very restricted while showing you "amazing" things with an obnoxious popup about Office 365 every time you open Word Lite (I made up don't look up).
I personally don't know anyone who doesn't have OpenOffice, Libre, or Office (local non cloud most of the time). I do not know anyone using WordPad for any reason while they have notepad for opening simple no-formatting documents (php etc.), obsidian, or notepad++. Seriously, nobody uses WordPad.
>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf).
It can open and edit docx files, no? MS has suggested Office as an alternative, but Office costs money, so yes, this is lost functionality.
And no I am not interested in uploading my docx files to google docs or microsoft office online to edit them, as they may contain private information.
edit: Huh, it's even less lightweight for Windows. The Linux downloads come in around 200-220MiB, but the Windows downloads are around 320-350MiB. Weird.
I'm not sure if that's the case for LibreOffice, but it's common for FOSS projects to have fatter binaries for Windows, since they're often using a bunch of wrappers to get POSIX-y things to work Windows.
In this case they're also shipping rpm/deb packages, it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it.
> The Linux downloads come in around 200-220MiB, but the Windows downloads are around 320-350MiB. Weird.
I think I can guess at least part of the reason: MSVC redistributables. On Windows, each program is supposed to distribute a copy of the installer for the standard C and C++ library runtime corresponding to the MSVC version used to compile the software; unlike on Linux, these don't come by default with the operating system, and unlike on Linux, each new MSVC version came with a new and incompatible version of these libraries (the exception is very old or very new MSVC versions, which used/use a common version for more than one MSVC version; but even then, you're still supposed to distribute the installer with your software, since it's not guaranteed to be already installed).
LibreOffice is good for a lot of tasks but it's bloated, and takes time to start up. Wordpad is great for all sorts of quick tasks when you just need to edit a quick RTF like a poster or some basic letter, and don't want to stare at a ribbon full of functions you'll never use.
LO for Windows launches with a launcher that pre-loads it a boot time. I find Writer to be pretty pleasantly light-weight on a modern computer. A lot of its performance shortcomings are a bit exaggerated especially on modern equipment.
> I literally could write a WordPad clone in an afternoon
You might be able to make a Notepad clone in an afternoon, but not wordpad.
Creating parsers for all the formats it supports (rtf/doc/html) as well as the renderer/wysiwyg editor would take anyone several days of either coding, or stitching libs together.
The parser and renderer is a pre-existing RichTextEdit widget. Add menus and save, open, and print functionality and you are over 90% of the way to a WordPad clone.
No. The RichText control was written for the Win95/Exchange email client.
Since there was now a RichText control that supported RTF in Windows, the Windows group could write a thin wrapper around the RichText control and replace Microsoft Write with Microsoft WordPad.
Support for Microsoft Word file formats came later once the Word group took over responsibility for the RichText control code.
Man… the backstory behind anything in windows is always some insane mishmash of backwards compatibility, repurposed tooling, and other assorted insanity.
Before the 19th Century "ignore" meant "to not know," in accordance with its Latin origins, if you're looking for other words to try and turn back the clock on against the overwhelming tide of modern usage.
This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)