Microsoft Pulls the Plug on WordPad (theregister.com) 58
Microsoft has begun ditching WordPad from Windows and removed the editor from the first Canary Channel build of 2024. From a report: 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.
The People app is also being axed, as expected, and the Steps Recorder won't be getting any more updates and will instead show a banner encouraging users to try something else. Perhaps ClipChamp? WordPad was always an odd tool. Certainly not something one would want to edit text with, but not much of a word processor either. It feels like a throwback to a previous era. However, it was also free, came with Windows, and didn't insist on having a connection to the internet for it to work.
The People app is also being axed, as expected, and the Steps Recorder won't be getting any more updates and will instead show a banner encouraging users to try something else. Perhaps ClipChamp? WordPad was always an odd tool. Certainly not something one would want to edit text with, but not much of a word processor either. It feels like a throwback to a previous era. However, it was also free, came with Windows, and didn't insist on having a connection to the internet for it to work.
OLE/ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
WordPad is the one program that ships with Windows that still lets you do "Insert Object" just like it's Windows 3.1 again, and you can import any OLE/ActiveX-compatible object into your document. It's also the program that exposes a GUI for the standard RichEdit control that's available for all Win32 programs.
By taking this out, you're left with no way to import OLE objects in a stock installation of Windows anymore. LibreOffice Writer will still let you add OLE/ActiveX objects to your documents though.
Maybe Microsoft really doesn't want you to be using OLE/ActiveX for anything anymore on your own PC, no matter if you've installed older software which still supports it.
Re:OLE/ActiveX (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe COM and OLE are obsolete but it's also not clear what direction MS intends to go. Microsoft seems pretty aimless for the last 10 years, they've been asleep at the wheel with their own platform (Windows) and while .NET has been embraced by some industries, it's not the universal platform that was originally promised. To me give it 5 years and everything will be WASM based. Theoretically we could make environments where javascript+wasm could be dragged and dropped between documents. There's enough infor
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HTML will never be a good format for documents or really anything, because it doesn't support tabs. Even Wordpad lets you use the tab key.
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It's not hard to add the ability to indent blocks with any policy that you wish using CSS. But then everything becomes a SGML/XML spaghetti. And we already know that WYSIWYG editing and data file format are normally decoupled, allowing for user-facing controls to be different than the structure of the file. Somewhat parallel concept to the well established MVC paradigm.
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Seriously, how do you do tabs with CSS? I need to know so I can fix markdown.
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position: relative; left: 5em; .. then start packing DIV boxes inside each other to get paragraphs that indent. If you want just one line to indent, you can change how you wrap the text so that there is never more than one line in a box. The most JavaScript you put into your editor widget, the more like old-school tabs you can make the HTML you insert into the DOM. The concept is simple, but actually making it look nice takes quite a while.
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That sounds like it only works at the left side of a paragraph. I want to be able to lay out data with tabs, anywhere.
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it's relative positions, you can stack the
's anywhere you want. one limitation I have is that each indent is relative to the first. an absolute positioning option would let you do things like multiple variable tab stops. but then the HTML gets a little unwieldy and you need to write some software to generate it. (as in, you need a WYSIWYG edit control)
Most plain text editors have extremely poor support for tab character. Several popular IDEs completely lack the ability to configure multiple tab stop positi
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Thanks, I will try this when I get home. Hopefully it doesn't break things like text selection. If it's okay I can create an add on for markdown converters that can deal with tab characters.
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The ABI for COM objects is perfectly fine. You get reference counting, and you can free objects created by another module. You don't even need to use the registry if you don't want to. COM is only messy when you are using other people's objects, and that entails using the registry.
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It could also open text files with non-Windows end of file characters without putting it all on a single line. (I think Notepad will do that now, though.)
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WordPad is the one program that ships with Windows that still lets you do "Insert Object" just like it's Windows 3.1 again, and you can import any OLE/ActiveX-compatible object into your document.
Is it? Good. KILL IT WITH FIRE. Stupid OLE/Active-X object insertion needs to die and never be considered again. The hours of my life wasted opening a PDF with embedded Word document with embedded excel file with embedded zip file to open an damn picture are incalculable. The human race was never supposed to have this much scope to do stupid things with.
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The modern container ActiveX was .Net, which failed to take off, but evolved in steps with C++/CLI, C++/CX, and now C++/WinRT, which is basically all those advancements in modern native C++:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
Windows still pretty much uses the same object model, but added a better metadata (heavily borrowed from .Net, but of course native).
As for a generic container where you can paste objects... Unfortunately I don't know of a solution. But given all their stuff has converged, I would not be
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This goes back a very long way, but back when I was publishing The Sound Blaster Digest (early 90’s) I eventually started publishing using Windows Write on Windows 3.1 specifically because of OLE — I could package an “e-zine” with audio, graphics, fonts, and better formatting than the hand-formatted ASCII I was previously using. I continued with the ASCII format as well every month (which was a good deal of work) and released in both formats, but the Write version (being published a
Why? (Score:3)
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Because Wordpad is too close to Word for people who just want a clean wysiwyg word processor without all the crap.
I used it for years when I was poor and couldn't afford to buy software and just used the net for dictionary and thesaurus, etc, as needed.
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At some point a company has to decide what projects to staff and include in the release test plan. Priorities matter, and if inclusion or exclusion of a component is not going to alter your purchase decision there is not much of a business reason to keep it around.
Disk space is likely very low on MS's list of priorities, based on the bulk of the last few releases. Once they didn't have to fit the installation on a single 4.7GB single-sided DVD things got really out of hand.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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> [...] whoever officially maintained Wordpad, died or resigned.
Or both.
Re:Why? (Score:4)
Because they want O365 rent money, obviously. In 11 (Home at least), they have a nagware version setup as the default. Tried to open a .docx? Pay us or close Word.
Right click -> Open with -> Wordpad, oh look it works for free.
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Re: Why? (Score:2)
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"Because they want O365 rent money, obviously."
But they've always wanted to sell Word licenses.
A static incentive cannot cause a change in behavior. You need to find something else that has changed.
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I don't understand what their reasoning is for targeting something that's been a basic feature of Windows for a very, very long time. It's not as though it takes up a lot of space on disk.
The primary reason people used Wordpad was to open things which didn't display correctly in Notepad. Unix Line endings, large documents, etc. With Notepad having those features included there is so little reason to use Wordpad unless you're dealing with an actual formatted document using a very much legacy RTF format.
Also telemetry. Microsoft knows how little it gets used. There's no point shipping code that isn't used, it just presents a security risk. Heck this year alone saw 3 CVEs related to Wordpad bei
No more clean RTF for you (Score:3)
I was in the unenviable position of needing clean RTF on Windows for a while (to create help files for the oldstyle Windows help system, also brought to you by Microsoft). Word's RTF would not work with their own help file generator. Wordpad was what I had to resort to for this purpose - either that, or the old Applix suite on Linux at the time.
I guess RTF is pretty much a dead thing now, with HTML having pride of place.
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RTF was great in its day, but it definitely shows its age. It's a whole lot easier to generate valid HTML.
Internet connection not required (Score:1)
didn't insist on having a connection to the internet for it to work
This.
just use notepad++ (Score:2)
just use notepad++
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How much can I charge your grandmother for tech support?
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They are removing WordPad, not Notepad.
WordPad is a simple word processor, not a text editor. You can use LibreOffice Writer instead. Or MS Word, like Microsoft intends you to do.
Notepad on the other hand gets much needed improvements. Not big changes, but important ones, like UNIX line ending support.
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Notepad++ is a great program, but it is not a WYSIWYG editor for simple text formatting - Wordpad is. If you want to set up somewhat professional looking letters, maybe writing short stories with specific margin sizes etc., all such stuff; that's what Wordpad is for.
Still useful (Score:3)
I sometimes use it when I need to print some lightly formatted text, like an envelope or mailing label. For when I want it to be a little fancier than a plain ASCII file, but not fancy enough to warrant firing up a full-blown word processor.
<tin_foil_hat>Maybe they're removing it to drive the last holdouts to Office 365.</tin_foil_hat>
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Maybe they are removing it because it's virtually unused yet presents a security risk. Only a few months ago Wordpad was exploited to exfiltrate NTLM hashes from windows boxes. https://msrc.microsoft.com/upd... [microsoft.com]
You will like it damnit! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just wait until Windows version 13..14..? when it's complete SaaS. You'll need to set your BIOS to boot from "the cloud" to load "your" OS that you pay a monthly subscription to. Software and features will come and go (much more than now) at the will of your Microsoft overlords. Oh, you want to keep that program that's being removed, that'll be another $1.99 a month please. You know, a maintenance fee to keep it running. No Internet today because your ISP is down, sucks to be you. Oops, an overdraft on your account, no problem, when you pay for your month again AND the overdraft fee AND the reconnection fee you can have access to your files again. Your keyboard doesn't have the Clippy key?! Dear God, that will be another $1.99 a month to make sure your Win-C key always works. Oh, your virtual Windows is running slow, no problem, for an extra $1.99 a month we'll defrag it for you. "Your data", we don't think so (EULA), we are using it to train our LLM ... hey, YOU agreed to it! But at least telemetry isn't a thing any longer, ya know, since your entire life is in their hands on the cloud. Yeah for Microsoft. In all seriousness, make the switch to something else while you can, be it Apple, Linux, BSD, BeOS (j/k), anything. Once your on the MS cloud you'll be screwed.
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Not many people moved, only a small percentage of users browse from ChromeOS, but that's fine for them. Not everyone wants a normal PC.
Pros and Cons (Score:2)
The problem is the default settings are US and can't be globally changed. Every new document must manually configured.
The advantage of WordPad is, it's faster than a browser or a word-processor. An RTF file is smaller than HTML (Because making CSS compact, isn't a priority.) The point of WordPad being, plain text can be quickly marked-up: Which is frequently needed before printing text documents.
I just did a fresh Windows 11 install on mom's PC (Score:1)
Microsoft need a much better way of handling that right-click "New" menu.
Next Microsoft will... (Score:2)
Next Microsoft will pull the word on Plugpad and I will care just as much.
Not Clipchamp (Score:3)
A better alternative for problem steps recorder is the new snipping tool. If has the ability to capture video now.
That's not the coolest thing they added to snipping tool; It has the ability to OCR a screen cap to get the text back out of it. It's awesome. <3.
WordPad was actually all most folks needed... (Score:2)
Notepad and Notepad++ don't do fonts, bold, italics, underlines, bullets, or any of the other things WordPad does. Word is complete overkill for the majority of users. WordPad was a perfect fit for a cut above basic text.
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Re: WordPad was actually all most folks needed... (Score:1)
I use Wor
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It had (has?) it's use (Score:2)
NotePad would only handle up to ~64,000 lines, WordPad uses a spill file and thus handles the very large files.
Just include Microsoft Word instead (Score:2)
I'm a veteran of the browser wars. I remember when Microsoft tried to snuff out its competition by including a fully-featured Internet Explorer with Windows, and justified this by saying that users wanted all the features of a best-in-class app.
I always wondered (sarcastically) why this didn't extend to their word processor, too. Why not include a fully-featured Microsoft Word with Windows?
Maybe now's the time to do that.
3MB (Score:3)
That's peak debloating right there. Always start with the smallest.
One of the best tools MS included with windows (Score:2)
I have used wordpad extensively for writing all of my books, all 4 of them. Why? Because the crappy computer I used at the start it was lightning fast. Started in a couple of seconds, loaded the document and displayed it fine. That I then edited when all chapters was complete in Libreoffice isn't the point, because that was just to fix spelling and add chapter headers so I could export it as a .epub.
What I meant to say was, of course they gonna kill the good part of Windows first, that's what they always do