Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2

Wordpad always seemed like an annoying and unnecessary half-step between notepad and word to me.

Microsoft: We can't spy on your usage when you use wordpad, use O365 instead! (guessing since MS recommends using O365 Word in its place).

TBH, I haven't used wordpad since Windows 98. Not saying others don't use it, but Notepad++ and a myriad of other options are better anyway.

What, they couldn't add AI to it?

WordPad 3d

Oh get fucked Microsoft. Now I have to use notepad when I put the tape measure on the spacebar so teams doesn’t change my status to idle.

Could they please retire modern Windows UI design?

Those contrasting color squares are not the zen those designers think. UI layout being different in paradigm for every application is not the productivity improvement they think. Using titlebars for something other than titles and control buttons is not optimization. Those buttons being some scratches on the screen barely visible is crap from any PoV I can imagine.

And somebody should explain to them that a good design for a billboard, a good design for a glossy magazine, a good design for a shop front, a good design for an office, a good design for a videogame, a good design for a movie and a good design for a workstation are all mutually incompatible in vast majority of cases.

And again about zen, simplicity, air and all that. I understand they think they are very smart and understanding of aesthetics. But zen would be having clean window borders and clearly visible control elements, for starters. And buttons not being just color squares. And in general solutions being subordinate to functional goals of the UI being usable. Industrial ergonomics are zen.

EDIT: I know it's offtopic, not interested - keep walking

Wordpad, as I recall, only existed because back in the Windows 95 days nobody had Office and couldn’t open Word documents.

Permanently Deleted

They should open-source it, as they did with Calculator.

As long as you have notepad, you're good.

here's a little known fact about WordPad: It was Microsoft's first word processing program. Originally introduced as an add-on to MS-DOS in 1981, WordPad later became a part of Windows in the 1990s after the release of Windows 95. It was designed to be simpler and more user-friendly than its more advanced counterpart, Microsoft Word.

Still on the last windows os am ever gonna use windows 10

I've used windows since the 90s. Not once have I intentionally used WordPad.

It did open by default for some file types for a long time (.doc), usually mangling the content cause it couldn't actually handle them properly. I think it was also the default for .txt files at some point, causing many curse words when editing plain text files, that invisibly weren't so plain any more after... Programs expecting a configuration fine really don't like that sort of thing.

So: I'm very ok with this. Just install LibreOffice or something if you needa Word-like experience. Install notepad++ for anything "plain".

And so the bloodline of windows write is extinguished

This is kinda sad that if you want to do even basic word processing with Microsoft software, your only option now is an ongoing subscription to do so.

Word pad the goat of somehow interpreting files as not UTF8

And they're making notepad pretty unusable also

I need any note taking app to require at least half a gigabyte of memory

Sad to see such a great program go…

I guess it's to direct more people to Microsoft 365 and Word. I hope that in reality more people will start to use LibreOffice and others.

idc what people say mswrite was always > wordpad > word

I wonder if anyone thought about looking up WordPal in the Microsoft Store and think about maybe that could be what it evolved into.

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... A long time.

More brilliant decisions from Satya Nadella. 🙄

Sad but expected. Most people are using either office or one of the free alternatives by now.

I hope it's still included on future Windows server versions. It's quite useful to open documentation or instructions included with some software.

i was using it as a screen whenever i was leaving my computer unattended, when i used windows.

Pfew ... I moved to Linux just in time!

Omg i use this to open shitty word docs at work, to dont make it swap much, as the word is a memory hog

No longer available and no longer integrated are not equivocal.