This is slightly off topic but might be helpful to some people who use both Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac but are tired of the open document screen that starts by default when opening TextEdit. For example, I take calls while at my Windows based workstation. When I'm starting a phone call, I instinctively open notepad and jot down notes while on the phone. I don't usually save the file but I will complete the task I wrote down and/or document the call in another program after the fact. However, when I'm on my Mac I can't just quickly open TextEdit and jot down notes. When opening TextEdit I'm prompted to open a file or click the new document button. This throws me off my workflow since I'm used to NotePad immediately opening a new document buffer to write in. I found a workaround on the Apple support forums here:
1) Quit TextEdit
2) In the Terminal, type the following command:
defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false
3) Open TextEdit and presto!
I use notepad++ on windows and have open all the time. Any more I want to write down I open a new tab. Notepad++ keeps the tabs even if not saved and automatically reopens them next time you start it. Combined with search in open files feature it makes it extremely useful.
I love notepad++ and use it a lot when I need raw text.
I do like WordPad since it will do fonts, embedded pictures, etc. I really hate that MS is moving things to the cloud. I'm often in places that don't have wifi/cell coverage so getting to the cloud is impossible.
I use the autosave and take notes plugin in notepad++ which makes it perfect for this use case. I have it set to autosave when the window loses focus. And the take notes plugin lets me set a default filename with timestamp and save directory, which I set to my dropbox. The plugin also has an option to delete all empty text files when notepad++ is closed.
It feels as friction free as writing on a physical notepad with a paper and pencil.
I've never run in to that issue in the last 10+ years of using notepad++ with these plugins. Since my autosave location is dropbox, it's automatically backed up the moment the file is saved. I've set my control+n to a new note and not an empty file. The take notes plugin doesn't rely on the built in temp auto saves.
If a file is saved and then gets corrupted for whatever reason, I can also use dropbox to grab the previous known good version. I've tested it, but I've never had to actually use it.
This situation happened to me, and just in case it helps someone I thought I’d mention that the files are all saved on the disk - just go into settings and look up the location of the temporary save directory. Open that in explorer and you’ll have all the temporary files available.
No, I meant that the "temporary" files themselves got deleted!!
There were different bugs, some deleted session.xml and some the files themselves.
I had actually found the reasons and prepared bug reports, but then had some life messes and lost the reports themselves.
Maybe I'll try to see if I can find the code again (it was plain calls to "deletefile" or something like that ended up being called by an error handler, if I'm not mistaken - it was so reckless code that I moved away from Notepad++)
Yes, BBEdit on the Mac has always done that, too. I often open a new tab and paste something in there to keep it around for some indeterminate time. BBEdit saves the temp content until I decide to close the tab or to formally save it and give it a name. It does that even when closing the app or rebooting.
I was a longtime Windows user and used Notepad similarly. When I eventually transitioned to Apple I shifted to Notes, curious why you’d not use this in lieu of TextEdit?
I can open TextEdit and immediately start typing within a few milliseconds. Notes opens the last note used and takes a few seconds to load. Then I have to manually create a new blank note. Also, I have to remember to delete the note when done because they're saved automatically. When I'm done with TextEdit I can easily choose not to save the file. Using TextEdit is more of a seamless process and doesn't clutter up my files while also using less screen space.
Some update to Windows 11 recently made Notepad open your last tabs when opening it. This keeps throwing off my muscle memory because I'm so used to just launching notepad and pasting or typing immediately, but now that might mean typing into a random spot in some existing file. I'm guessing I can turn that off but I haven't bothered. Plus it's kinda nice to keep those random notes if I don't save them.
I always found that weird too! Apple should know better. On the other hand, I like that I can just quit the app and open it (even after restarting) and jump back to my __unsaved__ tabs.
A gripe I have with TextEdit (an app that I love for its simplicity) is that UI elements (like font selection windows) are too small.
Oh my god, thank you! This has been a constant minor annoyance to me since switching to a Mac. I always use Notepad as a kind of extended clipboard on Windows.
Rip C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories and back it up somewhere. WordPad.exe is standalone. If you're running Win7+ you'll need the en-us/muis/etc, if you pull from an XP install wordpad.exe is all you'll ever need to do.
Bonus points if you just grab a Windows XP iso and deflate wordpad.exe from the install image - copy WORDPAD.EX_ from the i386 folder and just run "expand wordpad.ex_ wordpad.exe".
Man people are nostalgic about the most bizarre things sometimes. My experience with WordPad was accidently opening something with it and having to change the default app for some extension.
I see nothing wrong with being sad that Microsoft is removing something from their OS and their suggested (but not included) replacement is a paid app which is at least an order of magnitude larger and more complex. Sure, WordPad isn't the best program of its kind (not the tool you need for every job), but still it was nice having the functionality there when you needed it without needing to install something (which in turn needs an internet connection). It was still an OK tool.
I liked WordPad because it was comfortably simple, did more than Notepad, but didn't have way more than I needed for personal use. It's similar to why I like Apple Notes (even though TextEdit is closer to WordPad). Most of the time, I don't need pages, margins, footers, a bunch of fancy formatting, but the ability to make text bold or italic, add hyperlinks, and maybe change the color or font. In which case I want all the doodads related to those unused features out of the way.
I like WordPad because when I collect screenshots and quick notes about what's of them, it's fast and doesn't get in the way: Alt+PrintScreen, Alt+Tab to WordPad, Control+V, type some text, Alt+Tab again to go back to the application you're screenshootting and you can keep going.
Control+S at the end and you have a RTF that can be read everywhere.
It is not just nostalgia. Windows used to have a built-in word processor. Not anymore. If I wanted to write a letter on a Windows computer I was unfamiliar with, I could use WordPad, I knew it was there, like Notepad and the calculator. WordPad is not the best word processor, by far, but it was there.
Now, there is no word processor I know is there. There is that useless trial version of Office 365, or maybe the real one. Or LibreOffice, that I am not very comfortable with. Or one of the webapps like Google Docs, but then I need an account, and internet access (not guaranteed).
The only use case I have ever used Wordpad for was to open text files with Linux End-of-Lines on a Windows computer with only Wordpad and Notepad (that do not see LF as proper and of lines and just displays one line of mess).
I remember using WordPad as a poor destitute kid forced to learn how to type in school and couldn't afford to fork over money for Word so my formatting and spacing was all fucked.
And then I learned that sometimes software is freely available online if you know where to look.
This article is definitely hamming it up to fill an article about a single line in a change log.
I don’t know if anyone is emotional about this. At worst maybe someone is vaguely annoyed that they will have to change their workflow that invariably involves .rtf files for some reason.
We used to use RTF for walls text in our game launcher (EULA, MOTD etc). We chose RTF because raw Win32 could render it without extra work and we wanted to minimize both launcher complexity and dependencies.
One thing we noticed was that RTF documents made in WordPad instead of Word were much, much smaller and since every byte added to our CDN bill we made a point of re-saving all our files in WordPad before publishing them. Sometimes simple is good.
This is such an annoying change. I work in a production facility and I don't get to choose what is installed on the computers. It's either WordPad, notepad, or open a browser for Word. WordPad is obviously a step up over notepad if you need any sort of formatting.
Now imagine a machine is malfunctioning and you need to look up the last known "good" settings to see if anything changed. First open a browser, then go to the office site, then fish out your cell phone because you're going to need the authentication code to log in, then dance around for a bit because you're in a warehouse and the reception is terrible, then open the Word app, then wait ages for it to "work on it".
All I'm trying to do is quickly read some text. I don't see how this is better than clicking a text file icon on the desktop.
Yes, in the automation world living on level 2/2.5 wordpad is great for doing things like taking screenshots too. In a GMP facility it could take some significant effort to get a screenshot tool or a rich text editor installed. Also, taking pictures with a phone is usually a huge no no.
Occasionally, you have to document something with…screenshots. Now, some versions of Windows Server come with snipping tool, which lets you save a screen shot. Others you still have to use the print screen key. Then what… well, you open wordpad and paste.
Luckily most of the systems we interact with now we get to install Office when the system is being qualified. Could be a huge PIA though otherwise.
edit: level 2/2.5 means no internet connection and therefore no browser based editors.
Yes, one by one. It’s just tedious. There’s always a solution.
Often time screenshots correlate to steps. You open wordpad and start a numbered list. Write what action you perform and the screenshot. Repeat until you’re all the way done. Take it off the system, print it, sign and date it and attach to an MOC and your done.
I supposed you could copy and save in paint. Then do the same thing in Word off the system by dropping in all the images. Idk, doesn’t sound like that much more work, but it’s annoying enough.
Most of the machines have hundreds of settings divided across a dozen different sections. Simple things like bold and underline make it much easier to visually parse the sections.
Yes, Wordpad occupied an awkward middle ground. But it was something you knew Windows users had access to. It was relatively small and lightweight. Grandma could write a letter without having to deal with Word. There was no upsell. It was limited but also generous in a way -- like someone said, "we can't ship Windows without at least a basic word processor built in".
To me it's emblematic of a time when software tried to be self-contained and to serve the user, when operating systems (Windows in particular) had consistent interface conventions between programs, and when there was some consensus about what people could be expected to have.
Now, you'd probably point Grandma to Google docs. Which would be a little heavier, a little laggier, yes more capable, but also somewhere out there, a service, a thing available only thanks to the largesse of Google, a thing that can be taken away at any time, a thing that fosters dependence.
Its removal is consistent with the ongoing enshittification of Windows.
Exactly this: my 96-year-old grandma still uses Wordpad to write letters that she then prints out and mails to the family -- just like she has been doing for almost 25 years. There's definitely a niche for Wordpad.
I liked WordPad. It was a nice middle ground. Word is so bloated and feature rich that getting started was a faff. WordPad had enough formatting to be useful.
Wordpad is usually my go to when opening a unix text file (without carriage returns) that Notepad renders into a unintelligible mess. Word renders it properly, but then typically requires a bunch of subsequent formatting adjustments (font size, etc.) for good readability.
I would also open Linux txt files in Wordpad, where they looked normal, then when you saved them as an ordinary Windows txt file they would open properly in Notepad later.
In recent years Notepad has overcome its traditional limitation when opening Unix files directly, I just discovered this not too long ago:
“Eric Michelman wired a joystick to the zoom setting in Excel to make it easier to navigate large spreadsheets. He called it the ZoomLever. He demoed it at one of our team meetings and asked if anyone had any ideas for what we could use instead of the joystick. I had just bought a new VCR that had a remote with a wheel on it, and I brought it in the next day to show him. Eric asked if he could borrow it, showed it to the hardware guys, and soon we were playing with IntelliMouse prototypes with wheels on them.”
Although I don't like it, I often use WordPad on Windows machines because there is a bug in Notepad. If you have Notepad open with word-wrap on, it will insert line breaks into newly edited lines where they wrap on the screen. When I have to quickly edit and save a text file on some random Windows machine, I use WordPad to avoid polluting the file with out of place line breaks.
In Notepad I like to turn off word-wrap and make sure everything looks right before saving the file each time after I edit.
Basically without word-wrap each paragraph will be one long line of sentences.
With "paragraphs" separated by blank lines.
Then copying the non-word-wrapped text from Notepad, and pasting into an email window or message box allows the target window to display using its own word-wrap without the extraneous line breaks.
Then the receiver's email window can usually handle it when it is scaled differently than the sender, and it will be OK in both places.
Wordpad was essentially just the Text Edit control, wrapped in some GUI cheese. Unless they plan to remove that control, it's trivial to re-constitute the program. When I took a Windows programming course, this was actually one of the homework assignments.
But I think it's the loss of the Wordpad that matters to people, but that Wordpad will be yanked from all current and future Windows machines. For people who use a lot of different systems as guest, this can matter.
I think the only use I've ever had for it was for reading some rtf licenses and documents, before connecting the computer to internet and installing something better.
Actually as others said, since it's simply a Rich Edit wrapper they could just leave it; at least they could leave a view-only version, although the editing features are in all likelihood equally simple.
Any vulnerability it might have is probably present in the controls themselves rather than its code.
If memory serves, the big advantage of wordpad back in the day was that it had line wrap, which was missing from notepad. But it’s been a while since I used windows 95…
Edit: confirmed notepad behavior. Wordpad crashes in the emulator, then causes windows to lock up.
From memory, WordPad's other advantage in Windows 95 days was that it could handle files larger than 64 kilobytes. Notepad could not; it would prompt you to open files in WordPad instead if you tried.
I always liked WordPad better than Word back then. It was faster and did all of the things I needed it to do. AbiWord occupied a similar sweet spot for me for some time after I went to Linux in the early 2000s.
Literally never found an use for WordPad. Neither for Notepad, if we're at it.
For text files, Notepad is pretty much useless. For short files I'm using Notepad++, I tried using plain Notepad and I can't describe exactly why but it's almost unusable in comparison. And for large files (MBs to GBs) I'm using less. From git bash.
And if I need any sort of rich text formatting, there's the free Libre Office which is usually good enough for the job. In case I need the actual MS version suite, I've got a Microsoft Office Home and Student retail license on my wife's laptop. The one that I actually own, not the SAS crap they're pushing nowadays.
Otherwise I find Libre Office fairly crappy and barely usable but for opening and looking in the occasional MS file, it's good enough. The "Excel" (Calc) is by some reason horrendously slow in drawing charts. Like if I got an 1000 rows CSV, it becomes almost unusable. On a machine that could have been used in the 90s to do galaxy collision simulations at NASA. Excel, obviously doesn't have this problem.
In summary both Notepad and Wordpad are useless to me.
I'm indifferent about Wordpad; always surprises me to read people don't regularly use Notepad.
I use it as a clipboard scratchpad. It strips RTF when copying between programs since Windows itself has no built-in way of doing so and you can also use it to clean up whatever you're copying. It loads fast and is minimalist.
Some programs on Windows vomit all over themselves when receiving RTF information, like Teams for example. I also read people use the Address Bar/OMNIBar in browsers, but that may transmit to the search provider.
I also use Notepad++ and VSCode. Notepad remains my favorite clipboard toy because it is so fast and light-weight. I use Notepad++ when I need to use its advanced search/replace and visualization tooling (e.g. View -> Show Symbol -> Show All) and VSCode when I need actual language colorization/structural auto formatting.
PS - Ctrl+Shift+V isn't a Windows feature and never was. It is a Microsoft Office shortcut that only 50% of Microsoft Office even supports (e.g. try it in Outlook). A couple of third party programs support it, but it is incredibly YMMV.
For small amounts of text, another simple way is to paste it into the Run dialog (Winkey-R) and then copy it back out again. Works well for turning URLs into plain text and removing the editor formatting from function names before pasting into a bug report, for example.
Since I spend a lot of time in the web browser, I use the address bar for the same thing. Ctrl+(C then T then V then A then C then W) is my muscle memory "copy without formatting" shortcut.
> always surprises me to read people don't regularly use Notepad.
There have always been so many free/shareware editors better in every way you wanted, even in launching speed.
It always surprised me to hear people regularly using it
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> I use it as a clipboard scratchpad. It strips RTF when copying between programs since Windows itself has no built-in way of doing so and you can also use it to clean up whatever you're copying.
I'm pretty sure it's not Notepad that strips RTF, it only exploits the windows clipboard feature: the clipboard can store data in multiple formats, and it's actually the applications that support storing it in RTF that also store it in normal text (this is actually usually handled by a control that the application is using, such as win32's Rich Edit).
In short, you can do the same by pasting the text in anything that doesn't support rtf (the only caveat is that the application might reencode and mangle the text when it reads it - old versions of Notepad could do it, for example).
There are also utilities that let you paste the clipboard's plain text directly.
Puretext is a free UWP app in the Microsoft Store for format stripping. The author is/was a MSFT dev, iirc. With it installed, WIN+V does a format_clear() paste.
If you enable clipboard history (Win+V), then you can click on the three dots over clipboard item to reveal additional options, and there will be a button to insert that item as a plain text.
1) Quit TextEdit 2) In the Terminal, type the following command: defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false 3) Open TextEdit and presto!
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253444981?sortBy=best