Word to the wise

See my original post here (now updated): WordPad: The little program time (or at least I) forgot

Ars Technica has the story confirming Microsoft’s plan to eventually deprecate WordPad and I have to admit, much like in September 2020, I still never used it, so its absence won’t be felt by me. Some people in the reader comments of that article do raise some legit concerns about its removal, so I’m wondering how MS will address those (if at all). The main thing WordPad had was RTF¹Rich Text Format support, which is used by probably five people across the planet today. Still, it would be nice to have some built-in support in Windows, even if WordPad itself goes away. One suggestion was to add a rich text mode to Notepad that could be toggled on/off. Plus, MS has been tinkering with Notepad a lot lately and a lot of nerds are already upset over changes to it, so strike while the nerd rage is hot!

UPDATE, September 5, 2023: Three years later and "I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now" comes back to haunt me, like a slightly annoying ghost. Microsoft has announced that WordPad is being deprecated and will be removed from Windows in some unspecified future update. Story here: For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor

WordPad has been part of Windows since forever, or at least a very long time, and given its name, it seems like it’s been meant for people who need something like Notepad, but fancier, and who are unable or unwilling to buy Microsoft Word (or Office).

I have never been once of those people because I’ve had some version of Word dating back to Word 6.0, which came out in 1993. I’ve only opened WordPad out of curiosity over the years and only opened it today when I saw someone on a forum mention that it’s still included in Windows 10–and it is!

I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now, like they tried to do with Paint, until they discovered that people actually used Paint or at least had unhealthy, possibly nostalgic attachment to it. I have no such attachment to WordPad, but perhaps I should find its presence reassuring, should I let my subscription lapse and find myself with the urge to draft a letter in Comic Sans.