this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Honestly, what is the point of Wordpad when you have Notepad and Word?
Not everyone has the money for a copy of Word. There once was a time when free rich text editors were valuable. But at this point I agree it isn't needed anymore. There are plenty of FOSS alternatives to word that hit that market. Microsoft has probably kept it around this long to prevent people from looking, but now they've put their bet on cloud services.
Plenty? I know one and its fork. That's about one and a half.
EDIT: Oh, you probably meant the rich text editors like Wordpad, not text processors like Word. My bad for misunderstanding.
ScintillaTE is an old-ass one. Most people have never heard of it, and those that have have only heard of its variant, UniSciTE, which came bundled as the default text editor for Unity, something like 15 years ago.
I didn’t know Joeffice had a fork. What’s it called?
Knowing the Internet, it would be Joemom, I presume? :)
Assuming you are talking about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, there's also CollaboraOffice (although this may be counted as another half one, since it's a online fork of LO) and OnlyOffice in the FOSS sphere. Probably more out there I'm not aware off.
I think AbiWord is still around, which used to be the FOSS simple, WordPad-like word processor of choice.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web
Word is available for free now
Honestly I'm not too bummed, especially with open-source solutions like Notepad++, but it's the end of an era! Also, Word is paid, and so Windows not having a built in free RTF editor is notable
Yeah, that is a bit odd, but then again when's the last time you've seen something other than a cut-rate eBook in RTF? Everything is either some variant of plain text or a DOC file these days.
Plus, it's rare that you ever need to edit RTF files. Read, sure, but that could be handled by Word Viewer, which is free.
EDIT: Right, they're discontinuing the viewers, but apparently they have a cloud-based online thing that's free? Sucks if you live somewhere with crap internet I guess.
A lot of ebooks seem to be more epub or pdf these days. RTF isn't used quite so much.
RTF is a rarity these days since basically every phone, tablet, and other handheld device can handle either PDFs or HTML (and ePub is basically just a ZIP file with HTML in a specific naming scheme and structure). Back in the day though you'd find RTFs more often for use in budget/jury-rigged eReader options. It's much easier to parse, if nothing else.
Not all of us have Word, and Notepad doesn’t have rich text or the ability to open .doc files.
LibreOffice is free
And huge. And bloated, if you only need simple functionality.
Abiword is pretty nice and not too bloated from what I remember
Except it will nuke .docx formatting. Same in reverse.
I make templates for my clients and I always tell them not to open and save in any other client other than OpenOffice.
Even Libre does nuke some parts to some extend...
It’s not that bad and always improving. I inter operate the two every day.
OpenOffice is a dead project.
Every time I open anything open office in Word everything is scattered as is usally with the Word meme when moving a picture 2mm.
Libre aint much better. Also I prefer the OpenOffice design. Libre might be more modern and that's usually what I prefer but I feel like OO is more efficient with it's menu.
Can't beat the menu ribbon from Word/Office though.
Have you tried the Libreoffice ribbon menu?
No as my work is using open office and Ihad some issues creating them with libre and then using it in OO.
Outaide of that we have M365 and have no need to go Libre as I can't see me spending time to relearn it at work.
Sounds good though. If I am ever switching to FOSS in that department, I am willing to take a look.
I really like the form options and export to pdf of OO/Libre.
You’re assuming everyone is a power user. There will be thousands of people who won’t have an alternative and think that paying for word is the only option.
This is to fuck over the casual computer user who doesn’t know better or alternatives. Microsoft already knows that more informed users like us are a lost cause to upsell.
This is also why they tried that “malware” pop up to get people to go back to Edge. To once again, fuck over uninformed users.
It has been literally twenty years since I last heard any mention of Abiword!
WordPad (or at least uses to) opens much faster than word, but still has rich text. Perfect for some short notes.
Or eg to edit an ini file. They display as readable text in WordPad and not just a massive long string like in notepad.
It's nowhere near as bloated as Word but you have many more options than Notepad when it comes to formatting and presentation. It's actually impressive how much you can do within the limits of RTF.
lightweight notes with margins
Also try editing unix or Mac line endings in notepad
I use notepad super often as a copy edit paste aid. It loads in a millisecond.
Easy way to distribute rich text documents to users without them having to install anything.
@jeffw @dantheclamman Wordpad is better for coding
How do people use Wordpad for coding? I’ve never seen that done. If I ever open code in an editor with a “bold” button, I screwed up and close without saving.
He must be thinking of notepad. Which I mean, I would not choose to code in Notepad but I wouldn’t actively avoid it like I would wordpad.
It's the "I got to change 1 of code" editor.
The "my IDE didn't recognize the file type and opened it in here by default" editor.
WordPad was often used if a file was too big for Notepad, over 64 KB. But now there are better options.
Idea! A programming language where text formatting has syntactic meaning! Variable declarations must be italicized! Function calls underlined! And every line justified, of course.
Yep, violence it is then. Just like the lines: justified.
If Chicken can be a language, that can be a language!
And I don't mean the actually useful programming language. I mean the esolang one where the only valid character is Chicken.
Whatthefuck
Fair enough