This is my reaction even as a Windows user. In my experience, notepad is used when you just need to read what’s in the file and formatting and such doesn’t really matter, or you explicitly want as little processing of the data as possible. Like opening files that really aren’t text based files.
And then if you actually want formatting, images, fonts, etc to make something look good you get an actual document editor: Word, Libre Office, etc.
The only thing I see WordPad providing is it’s pre-installed and does have more functionality than notepad. I have used WordPad a couple of times when I’ve been on a new computer that doesn’t yet have everything installed and I don’t want to take the time to install an actual editor for whatever I’m doing. It’s pretty damn rare though.
N.B. Notepad3 (originally Flo’s notepad2) is a great drop-in replacement for notepad.exe (and even has an install option to do exactly that, so everything opens with it even if other programs call it). I install it on every Win system I have to manage. Not as big as Notepad++, but has syntax highlighting, line numbers and supports LF file endings.
EDIT: Disappointingly no screenshots on either site >:| It looks similar to vanilla notepad.exe
I get it. MS has a “free” rich text editor, it’s Word online. You can easily install any other simple rich text editor (is abiword still a thing?) on Windows. Wordpad probably has minimal usage.
abiword's basically a dead project for windows and macos. the linux version i think saw an update a couple years ago.. but i can't get to the site (abisource.com) now at all to check.
“No one’s paying for Microsoft Word, that thing that used to be free so… We gotta kill this so people too fucking stupid to use Libre Office get on board.”
Yeah, it’s kind of point. It shouldn’t have to be but just like Apple, make the non-payed version unnecessarily shit, artificially limited and constrained so people pay for the premium tier.
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