Microsoft announced today that it will deprecate WordPad with a future Windows update as it's no longer under active development, though the company did not specify the precise timing of this change.
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.
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.