For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor

Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 213 points –
arstechnica.com

Thus ending our long national nightmare of accidentally opening things in WordPad on a fresh install.

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It's still going to ship with Notepad.

Notepad is one of those apps that actually received an update not long ago: >!They've added Search with Bing to the Edit menu... (-‸ლ)!<

I wonder what updating that ancient code base was like.

They actually didn't update it at all. The Notepad app that ships with Windows 11 (and recent Win10 builds) is actually a completely rewritten, bloated, UWP (aka "Modern") app. The old Notepad is now an "optional feature" that needs to be manually installed.

I thought the point of notepad was to open quickly and do quick changes without having to open a more heavy duty editor.

To be fair, on modern systems it does open quickly in spite of it's size (probably because most of the shared libraries for UWP apps are already loaded in memory). And at the moment, the new Notepad doesn't offer any additional features which are common in heavy duty editors, so the "bloat" is mostly from an engineering standpoint. Well, I guess with the recent unwanted addition of Bing search, we're now starting to see signs of actual user-facing bloat.

I'll just install Vim with Chocolatey.

Windows is getting almost as user friendly as Linux

Hey, it also has tabs on Windows 11, which is a very useful feature! It's the only thing I find myself missing when I move from my W11 work laptop back to my W10 home desktop.

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Iirc, the original meaning of Word Processor required formatting, which Notepad doesn't do.

But otherwise yeah, this is a non-story. No one uses Wordpad or wants to use Wordpad. Let's focus on the egregious privacy concerns of Windows instead.

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