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RIP Microsoft WordPad. You Will Be Missed

It's truly the end of an era as we say farewell to a real one.

By
Dua Rashid
PublishedYesterday
Comments (25)
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A screenshot of WordPad with "RIP, WordPad" typed in it.
Why am I getting emotional?Screenshot: Dua Rashid

After around 30 years of existence, WordPad is finally saying
goodbye. In the Windows 11 Build 26020 Insider Preview's Canary
Channel, Microsoft announced that WordPad will not be auto-installed
after installing the new OS build and will officially be removed in
the future update. It clarified that the text editor won't be
available for reinstallation. This really is goodbye, then.

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WordPad has been a default Microsoft app for as long as I can
remember. It was introduced in Windows 95 and is the successor to the
OG Microsoft Write. WordPad was initially positioned in two ways: 1)
a text editor that has some functionalities of MS Word and 2) a more
advanced version of the Notepad text editor, which was released some
40 years ago in 1983.

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According to a Microsoft Learn post on all the Deprecated features
for Windows clients, the company says, "We recommend Microsoft Word
for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for
plain text documents like .txt." This somewhat hints at the fact that
Microsoft, too, realized that WordPad is just a weird middle ground
between MS Word and Notepad and can be done away with. This is mainly
conjecture, though, and there's a possibility the company had other,
more solid reasons for removing the text editor.

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GeekWire also points out that they recently noticed that WordPad
didn't get a dark mode update and that it should have been enough to
give them an idea of its upcoming demise. It makes sense when they
compare it to Notepad's recent dark mode update and mention an
upcoming update with autosave functionality that it will get soon.

Another long-time Windows app, People, is also being sunsetted in the
update mostly because the bulk of its functionalities (mainly
managing contacts) are being moved to Outlook for Windows.

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I'm not going to lie. Even though I have probably used WordPad a
total of three and a half times in my life, and that too, when I had
my reasons for not using MS Word or Google Docs, I can imagine
others, like some of my colleagues feeling a bit more nostalgic for
the word-processing app when it's gone. WordPad did feel like one of
those things that would be around forever, and I don't know how I
feel about that.

On the bright side. It seems like Notepad is still here to stay.

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