The WordPad text editor has been a part of Windows for almost 30 years, first appearing in Windows 95. Now Microsoft has announced the final removal of this tool, which, although it did not have the capabilities of Word, was still more functional than “Notepad”. The announcement of the future removal of WordPad is contained in the Windows 11 test build number 26020 description, which is available to members of the early evaluation program on the Insider Preview channel.
WordPad has been present in Windows for several decades and has been positioned in two ways during that time. Initially, it was presented as a simple text editor with some Word functions, and later as an advanced version of Notepad.
“We recommend using Microsoft Word to interact with rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf, and Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt,” Microsoft said in a statement. This message suggests to some extent that Microsoft understands that WordPad has long been a cross between Word and Notepad and needs to get rid of it. Of course, this is just speculation and Microsoft probably has better reasons for removing WordPad from Windows.
Interestingly, WordPad became one of the few Windows applications that did not receive support for the dark mode, which also indirectly indicated the developers’ intention to get rid of the text editor. At the same time, “Notepad” received support for the dark mode not so long ago, and the auto-save function should appear in it in the near future. This indicates that Microsoft will continue to develop this application further. In addition, Microsoft will remove the People app from Windows, mainly because most of its functionality has been moved to Outlook.
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