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For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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

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[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 17 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Grunt4019@lemm.ee 9 points 9 months ago

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

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.