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!