wordpad gets kicked to the curb because microsoft thinks they can sell a few more office subscriptions if the most basic of word processors wasn't included with windows.
meanwhile. notepad, the basic text editor that lacks even the basic formatting features found in wordpad, gets the spellchecker users have wanted in wordpad since windows write for windows 1.0
wordpad has always been gimped to keep it from taking any sales away from word. if microsoft wasn't worried about wordpad, they would have tossed a spellchecker into it back in the 1990s (when wordpad replaced write) and it would, ya know.. still exist (in upcoming versions of windows).
The entire point of Notepad was that it didn’t have fancy features, it just edited text files. They got rid of Wordpad, and now they’re gonna turn Notepad into Wordpad.
The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that -- though honestly, I don't see who the possible customer is for those features either. It's a waste of time, but it doesn't undermine the application.
What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don't get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I've lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.
RTF has to be one of the most atrocious document formats. It’s such a jumbled mess, it should be buried and forgotten. You can make it clean but of course Microsoft doesn’t.
I found it useful occasionally for a pretty niche use case. I automated generating documents with a program I wrote, then cleaned it up a bit in Wordpad before sending it on.
That’s about as niche as you can get, but I wonder if it’s not too uncommon. RTF is easy to generate programmatically, and it’s pretty widely supported across various platforms. I have since moved on, but maybe others haven’t.
Nothing, but laughing at your own jokes is a bit… odd.
If I comment on my own post, it’s because I have an opinion about it that I want separated from the post to have a separate thread of discussion. This isn’t that.
It’s not their own joke, though. Microsoft is making the joke. Expressing that you find it laughable rather than taking it serious, that is an expression of an opinion.
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