Goodbye Wordpad – PC Watch

Microsoft has announced that WordPad, the standard word processing app that comes with Windows, will no longer be updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. Personally, I’m not a big fan, and I wouldn’t be bothered if it disappeared. However, I would like to take this opportunity to think about the existence of standard apps.

Wordpad announced to be discontinued

Although the timing of when it will end has not been specified, it will end on September 1, 2023.Abolition announcedhas been done. From now on, Microsoft recommends Microsoft Word for rich text documents and Notepad for plain text documents.

In terms of functionality, the apps included as standard with the OS are mostly functional when compared to apps provided separately, whether paid or free, by Microsoft itself, the developer of Windows, or other third parties. inferior in quality.

This time, Microsoft is recommending Word and Notepad by name, but unlike Notepad, which continues to be updated as part of Windows and has recently added support for tabs, Word is an app that can be used standalone. is not offered with Windows as a replacement for WordPad. However, Word is an app included in Microsoft’s Office suite and is available for free on the web as a Microsoft 365 app.

The good thing about OS standard apps is that no matter what PC you go to, you are guaranteed to be able to use the apps unless they have been intentionally deleted by an administrator. I want to create a text file with a few lines, but I don’t have to get stuck because I don’t have an editor. Now,

C:\> copy con > file
abcd
^Z

That hack is nothing to be proud of.

Some users may find merit in the fact that it is light and easy to use due to its limited functionality, but when you use Word and WordPad on a regular PC, you will notice a difference in the ease of use. I guess that’s hardly the case.

Wordpad is an application with the file name wordpad.exe, and Notepad is an application with the file name notepad.exe. WordPad is the successor to Microsoft Write, but Notepad is still Notepad.

In the days of MS-DOS, an app called Edlin was provided for editing text documents. Because it was a so-called line editor and not a screen editor, it was rarely used, but in 1986, a bug related to Japanese string substitution was discovered in the version that came with MS-DOS 3.1, and it was recalled in the press. As a result, he quickly gained popularity. Notepad can be said to be the successor to Edlin, but in the Windows GUI era, a text editor suitable for that era was needed, and Notepad fulfilled that role admirably and is still in use today.

In that sense, Wordpad was probably a very half-baked existence, but it would be a bit of a waste to see it disappear.

plain and rich

WordPad is an app for working with rich text documents rather than plain text documents. The difference between plain and rich is whether the text being edited has formatting. In other words, you can assign any font to any string, specify the font size, and in some cases, add color, underline, strikethrough, or underline. Furthermore, it is worthy of the name rich in that it can embed not only images but also data from other apps.

Looking back, I think the reason WordPad had a future perspective was that if you weren’t printing, you didn’t need to be aware of the concept of pages in a document. Having no concept of pages means you don’t have to worry about physical vertical length. Even so, it is difficult to use without a width for lines to wrap, so you can specify wrapping at the right edge to fit the window width. Notepad also has the same functionality, and the two apps are similar and different, but they’re like sibling apps.

In this day and age, if you were to keep one and delete the other, you could have kept WordPad as both the big and the small. But what remained was a memo pad.

Personally, I’ve been wanting a standard app that doesn’t have a concept of pages and can edit rich text depending only on window size. WordPad was a similar app, but there was one thing it couldn’t do. It was not possible to set a link to a string.

As the Internet has become more popular and browsers have come to be provided as standard OS applications, it has become really easy to display graphical rich text without the concept of a page. Every document is a single page with window width bounded into the display device.

PDF solutions continue to be very popular, but if you want to view documents in a format that is optimized for the device’s performance and size, without assuming a typical size such as A4 portrait The concept of is rather disturbing. As long as you don’t have a concept of pages, you can display a document in a way that makes it look easy to read on either a business card-sized display or an A4-sized display.

In the past, devices were required to be independent, but now we want displays that are as device-dependent as possible.

But finally, Wordpad didn’t support hyperlinks. However, if you write a URL, the link will open when you click on it. That’s why it’s a shame. By the way, Microsoft Word naturally supports links.

The current Microsoft Word has five editing screen modes, and if you use one of them, “Web layout mode,” you can create rich text on the editing screen that has no concept of pages and wraps the width of the window at the right edge as one line. Functions as an editor. Personally, this is the direction I would like Wordpad to go in. Since it finally failed to meet that goal, I have no regrets about this app.

Browsers have solved many aspects of “reading” using a machine, but when it comes to “writing” using a machine, we have continued to insist on “achieving the same experience as printing on paper” with a machine. I feel like the future of word processing was lost at some point.

Reading, writing and personal computing

The browser is like an all-purpose app that supports all tasks. It used to be called a browser because it was only for “reading”, but now it is taken for granted that it also supports “writing”. And since many web services function as Progressive Web Apps, you can do most of the things without having to prepare a separate standard app. In that sense, the role of standard OS apps may be coming to an end.

What can you do with a PC that is not connected to the Internet? It’s also a good idea to think about how many of the things you want to do that you can do. Even during a plane flight, in the age of the Internet, you might be able to reaffirm your own personal computing experience.