Microsoft is getting rid of WordPad after 28 years – the veteran editor has been present in the OS since Windows 95::Microsoft has begun getting rid of another veteran application in its proprietary operating system. The company has released a new test build of Windows 11

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[–] 61 points 2 years ago (3 children)

LibreOffice is a good solution for anything one would use Office or WordPad for. Works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

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  • [–] 36 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Libre Office is a good replacement for Office/Word, but it is much heavier than WordPad.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It even feels heavier than Office on windows (on linux it feels much better).

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Likely feels that way because it has to load the Java runtime before launching.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I believe, it only loads a Java runtime for the JDBC database driver in LibreOffice Base. At least, you can tell it in the settings to not use a Java runtime and that seems to not affect the remaining functionality...

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    Tbh I don't use Windows or libre office so I'm just guessing. Back in the day I just know it took what felt like forever to load initially (and my pc fans took flight each time) but so did MS office 🤷

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    LibreOffice is also available as a Flatpak:

    Outside of that. And keeping in mind WordPad was a standalone rich text editor:

    Kate is pretty swell too:

    Or slim down to Kwrite:

    I myself am also mostly writing in markdown on Obsidian:

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Markdown has definitely replaced most of what I used wordpad for. Obsidian is nice, but I’ll also write markdown in vscode or even just vim. It all works and even when it’s not interpreted, it still looks readable. Plus since it’s all just text, easily converted, and widely supported, I don’t have to worry about format deprecation.

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    [–] 50 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 43 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Seems kinda sad. I doubt it’s a program many people use (or even know of) these days, but there is an odd charm to super simple rich text editors like WordPad and TextEdit in macOS.

    I suppose AbiWord sorta fills that niche as a replacement.

    Anyone remember Microsoft Office’s weird cousin, Works?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I'm trying to use AbiWord when possible, but since it supports DOCX, I use it for DOCX, and a heavy DOCX file opened in AbiWord means lots of CPU usage all the time it's opened, while LibreOffice doesn't have that problem.

    Maybe Ted fits more as a WordPad replacement.

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    [–] 23 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh well, Windows has become that one OS I use for one or two things that I complain every time I have to spin up my VM to use.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I only use it to play games, mainly a heavily modded Skyrim. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Steam so that I can use Proton to launch SKSE. I finally managed to get it to work once and was getting at 15 FPS on my RTX 3070.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago

    It was "Write" before Win95.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    WordPad was in that weird area between Notepad and Word (oh I get it, WordPad). I nevel felt like there was much use for it.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    In the 90s, there was no LibreOffice/OpenOffice, and Word was expensive. It did rich text WYSIWYG formatting for free. Was never great, but it was functional.

    Not much point to it anymore, though.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    For all intents and purposes it was free word

    I haven't really used word in over half a decade since TeX beats it in every conceivable way.

    Wordpad was useful in the sparse few cases where I was forced to open a .doc or .docx and couldn't be arsed to upload the file to Google docs

    I guess it will be missed for that

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Reject modern GUI text editors, embrace Vim

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Good.

    Anybody who misses it should use LibreOffice instead.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I just use libreoffice or vim for general text stuff I haven't used WordPad in 28 years. Was it ever able to edit Ms word documents? I feel like there was a reason I didn't use it.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    So the next Windows won't come with any text editor unless you pay extra for Word?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    If these fuckers touch notepad I'll riot.

    Actually that's not true, I'll just be quietly annoyed.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Don't worry lads, there'll be several open source clones of this within weeks all with various missing functionality. You won't have to be without for long. 😂

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    AbiWord was probably the closest as a FLOSS equivalent?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Now what program on windows is going to be indestructible?

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