I don't get why they still provide you with the stupid notepad. Just throw it away and preinstall Visual Studio Code as a text editor, Notepad is useless.
I only have three applications permanently pinned to my Taskbar and one of them is Notepad. I use it almost thoughtlessly as a scratchpad, clipboard cleaner, note taker.
I find it very useful to quickly copy-paste some stuff (use like a clipboard) and use it for temporary scratch notes while working on something. I wouldn't want to boot up a bloated software like visual studio code everytime for such a simple use case.
There are environments where you can’t install additional. It’s a real problem if you don’t have notepad. It would actually be really nice if they beefed it up a little.
1. On any work computer in enterprise setting, you can't install what you want. Not having Notepad install would be crippling
2. When I just want to copy or edit a piece of text, or remove its formatting, Notepad pops up in imperceptible amount of time (I have it bound to shortcut). No other alternative I've tried does that
3. World exists beyond Hacker News:). My wife, dad, father in law, mother in law, sister, etc - NONE of them would want to install another software just to write down a few notes. Certainly not an IDE... :S
Point being:
1. I have Sublime, Notepad++, Beyond Compare, and MS Word installed; they all have their uses. Notepad still does as well.
2. Let us all take the time to think beyond our own specific context & use case, and world will become a better place :)
that was fixed in windows 10, so you don't need to use wordpad and risk random characters getting inserted into your text files because you inadvertently used a formatting feature.
I'm sure wordpad and paint will come back when they find a way to cram IAPs into them. On that note...no...no I doubt candy crush will be going anywhere.
This should never be reset. There was a feature update that reset some settings when it was first rolled out. This is why I advise people to delay feature updates for at least a few weeks. There's no advantage to being an unpaid QA tester.
This isn't about having a minimal install. It merely removes links to paint and Wordpad.
> This change does not remove Paint or WordPad from Windows 10, but you can now disable both apps and also remove traces of these apps from the Start Menu and other locations.
I suspect it's done because they consider Paint and Wordpad to be deprecated and want to help discourage use.
Paint, to me, is like Notepad. A very low level tool to accomplish basic image manipulation, like Notepad is a low level tool to accomplish basic text manipulation.
I never see either tool going away. I have better tools installed (e.g. Paint.Net) but still go to Paint for basic image manipulation/cropping, because it is fast/simple.
I just wish Notepad would get those minimal quality-of-life features that are expected from even the most basic text editors. Like wrap-around search - every time I open a logfile in notepad, the lack of basic wrap-around search bites me.
> Removing these will actually remove files from the system and not just links.
It removes a copy. There's still another one in the installation archive. If you have your system set to CompactOS mode, which you would presumably do if you were worried about space, I think it really would just be removing a link.
> This is definitely not the reason.
Definitely? Even though they completely removed mspaint.exe from some of the preview builds a while back?
It removes a copy. There's still another one in the installation archive. If you have your system set to CompactOS mode, which you would presumably do if you were worried about space, I think it really would just be removing a link.
This is not true in this case and is probably due to some interpretation of how packages are installed in Desktop editions of Windows.
In Desktop editions of Windows, many OS files (not all) are installed into the Windows "side-by-side" (aka %WINDIR%\WinSxS) grouped by component. What happens is that when the package containing the component(s) is "staged" (prepared for installation), the files are placed there. When the package transitions to an installed state, the files from the WinSxS are "projected" into the main part of the filesystem using hardlinks.
To further elucidate, Windows has two types of "optional features":
1. "Legacy" optional features
These are the ones that work like you describe. They are sometimes informally referred to as "OCs" (optional components). Packages declare a portion of their payload as a "selectable update" that is then exposed by the legacy "Turn Windows features on or off" control panel and by dism [0]. When one of these legacy features is enabled/disabled the selectable updates may cause registry state to change, but largely just "unproject" or "project" the hardlinks I mentioned earlier.
2. Features On Demand
These are the "modern" Windows Optional Features. They are sometimes informally referred to as "FODs" (features on demand). Unlike the legacy features, one or more packages are associated with a feature via what is called a "capability" identifier. When a package declares this identifier, Windows exposes this as a "Feature On Demand" via the "Manage optional features" settings panel and via dism [1].
Unlike "Legacy" optional features, when a FOD is installed or uninstalled, it actually installs or removes all of the packages for that feature and the associated payload, etc.
Where the confusion likely comes is from the fact that installs are still done the same way I described earlier. That is, files are placed in the WinSxS and then projected as hardlinks into the filesystem.
Definitely? Even though they completely removed mspaint.exe from some of the preview builds a while back?
Choices of which product features are supported are orthogonal to the Features On Demand platform technology. With that in mind, consider that unused features don't need to be downloaded, reduce OS footprint, reduce update downtime, and reduce bandwidth usage during updates all of which can benefit both the customer and the supplier.
I have no insight into product feature choices, but I would encourage you to take a broader view of platform technology choices and consider that they may be orthogonal.
> provide the cab files for the feature via some other means
That's why I said 'by itself'.
> Regardless this is no different than a typical Linux system where you can remove and add packages as desired.
The minimal actual-machine install of a Linux distro pretty much always has a text editor, doesn't it? You'd have to be at sub-busybox levels of features to lack that.
To some extent you can remove everything but the package installer but that's not exactly a supported configuration.
The minimal actual-machine install of a Linux distro pretty much always has a text editor, doesn't it? You'd have to be at sub-busybox levels of features to lack that.
While it’s true that most will have it by default my point is that you can remove them and it is supported. Some Linux distros still expose this directly in their installers.
To some extent you can remove everything but the package installer but that's not exactly a supported configuration.
Sure it is. Ultimately I’m not sure what you’re driving at. This technology is about making things removable and that is a good thing. The choice is in the hands of the customer.
You could already remove notepad if you really really wanted to. Encouraging it has upsides and downsides, and I am very far from convinces that the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I guess my point is that it is not purely positive, so listing a very tiny positive is not enough to make this a good feature.
Especially if you follow the rule of thumb that every feature starts at negative one hundred points, because extra complexity has to be earned.
They should not preinstall any software, and let you install them at the first boot. Windows 10 comes with so much bloatware preinstalled that you then have to waste time to remove, I want just nothing.
Well a fresh Windows install actually contains far less apps or useful software compared to a typical Linux distribution install. The bloat is almost certainly because of OEM rubbish.
It doesn't make sense. Paint and notepad provide basic functionality and are less than a megabyte (and the size could be optimized more). Making them optional provides zero real-world benefit, with the downside that now some systems now have no way to edit a text file.
But paint is the default app for opening images, because of course, if you want to go through your 1200 holiday pics, you want to open them one by one in paint one after the other!
Thanks God Microsoft wisely resets my default away from irfanview when they (force) upgrade my OS!
Localizations are generally provided by a combination of "Language Packs" and "Satellite Packages" [0] so it works as you expect. But the ability to have "dynamic localization" has a cost in and of itself since localization is not just merely text but in some cases program code as well.
As for two executables? It's complicated and there are application compatibility considerations.
I don't know what you're referring to with "isn't a reason to remove two versions instead of one".
> I don't know what you're referring to with "isn't a reason to remove two versions instead of one".
The news is that you can remove all versions, and I'm saying that's not a major space savings.
So when you mention there are two versions, to say the space savings are larger... okay, that's true, but if you're removing the program then you don't care about app compat anyway. So you could remove one, and leave the other one alone.
Or in other words, the existence of two versions is not something that makes it a better idea to remove everything.
Consider two things you may have not: low storage space systems that need to prioritize security updates over functionality where every megabyte matters, and savings at sufficient scale from reduced bandwidth, cpu usage, energy costs, etc.
At the individual system level some things often don’t make sense until you consider them at the scale of hundreds of millions of systems or for particular environments.
Making them optional provides zero real-world benefit, with the downside that now some systems now have no way to edit a text file.
Consider that unused features don't need to be downloaded, reduce OS footprint, reduce update downtime, and reduce bandwidth usage during updates all of which can benefit both the customer and the supplier.
Also consider that not all environments need specific functionality or may purposefully want to remove it for a variety of reasons.
They're really pushing the Paint3D app, the Mixed Reality Viewer and the Photos app to take over Paint's roles and beyond. As for Wordpad they probably will deprecate and disable to gently nudge people to online Office 365 cloud subscriptions. Another reason I suppose is to decouple these apps from Windows system so their replacements can be updated through the store instead of waiting for OS feature updates.
Paint3D is an atrocious, poorly-designed app. Tools are all over the place, familiar shortcuts have disappeared, and the UI looks like it was designed for the Windows 8 vision of Windows-on-a-tablet. No thanks. WIN+R, mspaint, ENTER--every time.
If you are writing .net core sure. Otherwise you are going to hit issues building and debugging. Why you would be attempting that outside of a Windows VM, I'm not sure.
I use Linux as my main box, and Wine doesn’t really cut it. I don’t like having to mess with winetricks to get programs to work, and even then, some (like Visual Studio) still don’t work.
If I could just run an exe and Wine would detect what winetricks I need and install them then, that’d be great. (No, I can’t just install them all as I like to use different prefixes for each program)
I would prefer https://www.getpaint.net, if that web site weren't littered with misleading ad units designed to trick people who want to download the Paint.NET software into actually downloading adware.
As it stands, I can't in good conscience tell people to go to that site. Even if the actual Paint.NET software is good, the risk is just too high they'll end up installing something nasty.
I don't think the answer of "I need to make money somehow" and then maliciously taking it from others makes it okay. That's like saying it's ok I mug someone because I need some money. Intrusive and tracking ads are bad, even if the person hosting them "needs money".
Paint.NET is a worthy replacement to MSPaint, and I'm glad it exists. It IMO manage to balance simplicity and features that is quite accessible to an average user.
Outside of Paint3D I don't think any of those were/are related to the classic mspaint. Mixed reality is new (and not really related to paint) but Photos was clearly there to supplant Windows Photo Viewer.
It's been a loooong time since I used them. Sometimes, maybe on a fresh install, maybe when Win10 has decided to reset your defaults, there's that rare .rtf, .nfo, .bmp or some other file that awakens WordPad or Paint from their deep slumber in the depths of Microsoft Hell.
Presumably, Cthulhu comes next, which is why it's vital to hit the X button as soon as possible and stave off the apocalypse.
Sometime within the next 2 years, Microsoft will release Word3D, which will be a text editor written in Electron and which will consume 100MB of memory to edit a 1KB text file.
Ah yes, who can forget Eighteen Megabytes And Constant Swapping? IIRC it comes from the Lispy environment that lends it its scriptability. Memory is cheap nowadays so we can afford to be less suave and use the multi-purpose well-rounded duct tape that is Javascript
98 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadfor other approaches see:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/993225/whats-the-easiest-way...
I'll be very happy the day I can
on a windows box, and have my workplace spring to life, all dependencies handled.I'm very glad to hear that wsl has a viable display export -- the next time I have occasion to use a Windows 10 box, I'll give it a try.
The email app then formats it OK, and you have a local copy that can be found & opened without a word processing app.
2. When I just want to copy or edit a piece of text, or remove its formatting, Notepad pops up in imperceptible amount of time (I have it bound to shortcut). No other alternative I've tried does that
3. World exists beyond Hacker News:). My wife, dad, father in law, mother in law, sister, etc - NONE of them would want to install another software just to write down a few notes. Certainly not an IDE... :S
Point being:
1. I have Sublime, Notepad++, Beyond Compare, and MS Word installed; they all have their uses. Notepad still does as well.
2. Let us all take the time to think beyond our own specific context & use case, and world will become a better place :)
> This change does not remove Paint or WordPad from Windows 10, but you can now disable both apps and also remove traces of these apps from the Start Menu and other locations.
I suspect it's done because they consider Paint and Wordpad to be deprecated and want to help discourage use.
Paint, to me, is like Notepad. A very low level tool to accomplish basic image manipulation, like Notepad is a low level tool to accomplish basic text manipulation.
I never see either tool going away. I have better tools installed (e.g. Paint.Net) but still go to Paint for basic image manipulation/cropping, because it is fast/simple.
Paint’s feature are an embarrassment and compare poorly to other consumer platforms.
The article is inaccurate. Removing these will actually remove files from the system and not just links.
I suspect it's done because they consider Paint and Wordpad to be deprecated and want to help discourage use.
This is definitely not the reason.
It removes a copy. There's still another one in the installation archive. If you have your system set to CompactOS mode, which you would presumably do if you were worried about space, I think it really would just be removing a link.
> This is definitely not the reason.
Definitely? Even though they completely removed mspaint.exe from some of the preview builds a while back?
This is not true in this case and is probably due to some interpretation of how packages are installed in Desktop editions of Windows.
In Desktop editions of Windows, many OS files (not all) are installed into the Windows "side-by-side" (aka %WINDIR%\WinSxS) grouped by component. What happens is that when the package containing the component(s) is "staged" (prepared for installation), the files are placed there. When the package transitions to an installed state, the files from the WinSxS are "projected" into the main part of the filesystem using hardlinks.
To further elucidate, Windows has two types of "optional features":
1. "Legacy" optional features
These are the ones that work like you describe. They are sometimes informally referred to as "OCs" (optional components). Packages declare a portion of their payload as a "selectable update" that is then exposed by the legacy "Turn Windows features on or off" control panel and by dism [0]. When one of these legacy features is enabled/disabled the selectable updates may cause registry state to change, but largely just "unproject" or "project" the hardlinks I mentioned earlier.
2. Features On Demand
These are the "modern" Windows Optional Features. They are sometimes informally referred to as "FODs" (features on demand). Unlike the legacy features, one or more packages are associated with a feature via what is called a "capability" identifier. When a package declares this identifier, Windows exposes this as a "Feature On Demand" via the "Manage optional features" settings panel and via dism [1].
Unlike "Legacy" optional features, when a FOD is installed or uninstalled, it actually installs or removes all of the packages for that feature and the associated payload, etc.
Where the confusion likely comes is from the fact that installs are still done the same way I described earlier. That is, files are placed in the WinSxS and then projected as hardlinks into the filesystem.
Definitely? Even though they completely removed mspaint.exe from some of the preview builds a while back?
Choices of which product features are supported are orthogonal to the Features On Demand platform technology. With that in mind, consider that unused features don't need to be downloaded, reduce OS footprint, reduce update downtime, and reduce bandwidth usage during updates all of which can benefit both the customer and the supplier.
I have no insight into product feature choices, but I would encourage you to take a broader view of platform technology choices and consider that they may be orthogonal.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
I find that worse.
> Choices of which product features are supported are orthogonal to the Features On Demand platform technology.
On a technical level they're separate. But on a "we're trying to deprioritize this to get people off of it" level, they're both worth considering.
Not strictly speaking true. You can always provide the cab files for the feature via some other means and still install them using the dism command.
Note also that this makes the feature removable it does not necessarily mean it won’t be preinstalled.
Regardless this is no different than a typical Linux system where you can remove and add packages as desired.
That's why I said 'by itself'.
> Regardless this is no different than a typical Linux system where you can remove and add packages as desired.
The minimal actual-machine install of a Linux distro pretty much always has a text editor, doesn't it? You'd have to be at sub-busybox levels of features to lack that.
To some extent you can remove everything but the package installer but that's not exactly a supported configuration.
While it’s true that most will have it by default my point is that you can remove them and it is supported. Some Linux distros still expose this directly in their installers.
To some extent you can remove everything but the package installer but that's not exactly a supported configuration.
Sure it is. Ultimately I’m not sure what you’re driving at. This technology is about making things removable and that is a good thing. The choice is in the hands of the customer.
You could already remove notepad if you really really wanted to. Encouraging it has upsides and downsides, and I am very far from convinces that the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I guess my point is that it is not purely positive, so listing a very tiny positive is not enough to make this a good feature.
Especially if you follow the rule of thumb that every feature starts at negative one hundred points, because extra complexity has to be earned.
Not in a supported fashion, and the OS would see it as corruption and automatically "repair" it by adding back the missing files.
I guess my point is that it is not purely positive, so listing a very tiny positive is not enough to make this a good feature.
Let's agree that whether it is positive or negative varies with the perspective and environment in which the system is used.
For me personally, this is a good thing no matter how I look at it.
Especially if you follow the rule of thumb that every feature starts at negative one hundred points, because extra complexity has to be earned.
The Features on Demand technology already existed, it's just now being used for more things.
The stuff paint does is basic functionality. Sometimes you need to crop or resize an image or draw a box.
Thanks God Microsoft wisely resets my default away from irfanview when they (force) upgrade my OS!
Either way not OK to fuck with users default apps.
Why does app compat need two separate executables? And compatibility isn't a reason to remove two versions instead of one...
As for two executables? It's complicated and there are application compatibility considerations.
I don't know what you're referring to with "isn't a reason to remove two versions instead of one".
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
The news is that you can remove all versions, and I'm saying that's not a major space savings.
So when you mention there are two versions, to say the space savings are larger... okay, that's true, but if you're removing the program then you don't care about app compat anyway. So you could remove one, and leave the other one alone.
Or in other words, the existence of two versions is not something that makes it a better idea to remove everything.
Consider two things you may have not: low storage space systems that need to prioritize security updates over functionality where every megabyte matters, and savings at sufficient scale from reduced bandwidth, cpu usage, energy costs, etc.
At the individual system level some things often don’t make sense until you consider them at the scale of hundreds of millions of systems or for particular environments.
This is a good thing, really.
And no matter what, notepad should be near the bottom of the list of things to make removable.
Consider that unused features don't need to be downloaded, reduce OS footprint, reduce update downtime, and reduce bandwidth usage during updates all of which can benefit both the customer and the supplier.
Also consider that not all environments need specific functionality or may purposefully want to remove it for a variety of reasons.
Break away from Microsofts abusive ecosystem.
Can you do assembly view and memory editing in VS Code by the way? I honestly don't know.
This wasn't argumentative, this was a genuine question - could you shed some light?
It has integrated git. It has integrated debuggers. It has integrated database tools. It has integration on tap, with extensions.
If I could just run an exe and Wine would detect what winetricks I need and install them then, that’d be great. (No, I can’t just install them all as I like to use different prefixes for each program)
i prefer https://www.getpaint.net/
As it stands, I can't in good conscience tell people to go to that site. Even if the actual Paint.NET software is good, the risk is just too high they'll end up installing something nasty.
https://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html
Presumably, Cthulhu comes next, which is why it's vital to hit the X button as soon as possible and stave off the apocalypse.
This is spectacular, and I'm consumed with curiosity wrt what's going on under the hood when you remove these two programmes.
More than just changes to file associations, natch.
Along with:
> The size of Microsoft Paint is 6.68 MB and WordPad occupies 6.25 MB ...
... and my curiosity extends to what kind of non-enterprise user (ie. someone who has to attend to this step manually) would bother.
Sometime within the next 2 years, Microsoft will release Word3D, which will be a text editor written in Electron and which will consume 100MB of memory to edit a 1KB text file.