 There's only a handful of people in this world that I think can appreciate or really even just understand the beautiful relationship between the Libre man and his text editor. As a Vim user myself, I went from having no idea how to quit Vim to realizing that there's rarely ever a reason to want to quit Vim because you can do just about anything with Vim. I mean it truly is one of the most clutch programs that I have installed on my system right now. I've got it riced the way that I want it with a bunch of useful plugins installed and so you could say I'm a bit of a Vim enthusiast but of course there's other text editors out there that the Libre man might be using and some text editors that people get even more enthusiastic about like with Emax users some of them get to the point where they literally live within Emax like they'll use it to browse the web they'll use it for their email and basically their whole operating system just becomes one giant bootloader for Emax but even though I love them so much it wasn't my first text editor and GNU Linux wasn't even my first operating system like so many people out there I used Windows first and while I'm pretty sure that the first text editor I ever used was probably Notepad or possibly even an early version of Word like from Office 98 the most influential Microsoft text editor in my life was actually WordPad and here's why some of you have probably had a similar situation of this that made you appreciate WordPad so when I was going to school probably around sixth grade we started doing most of our writing assignments on the computer in fact I think the school started getting like some new computers around that time and I think like my first standardized test was around that time too like the first one that was on a computer but anyway we started doing more assignments on the computer and I really liked that because I had crappy handwriting I've always had really crappy handwriting and I think around fifth or sixth grade was also when I started playing RuneScape or RuneScape 2 you know what people would call old school RuneScape today and so that really got me learning how to type well like to actually know where the keys were without looking at it and I'm not sure how many words per minute I type but you know I got pretty good because it's got RuneScape has this whole chat feature and you know it's a very social game and most of the kids in middle school at that time I think we're still faster with like pen and paper or pencil and paper but I was the opposite right I was faster at creating text on a computer than with a pen and paper now at my school all of the computers had Microsoft Word on them right they were all Windows computers probably XP at the time and you would save your documents as like .doc files and then later on it would be .doc X files when that became the new standard and word but at first I'm pretty sure it was .doc so that's all well and good right these you know those file formats because then those files could be opened on any other school computer that had Word on it but when I got home right like if it was a project that I worked on in school then brought home I didn't have Microsoft Word on my laptop and my parents didn't have any copies that they could give me either and they certainly weren't going to go buy me a copy of Microsoft Word from middle school so the only computer that we had in the house that had Word on it was my dad's laptop but that was like an OEM copy of Word that came with the computer so there wasn't any way or at least back then at that time I didn't know if there was any way to get Microsoft Word off of his computer and onto mine I probably could have pirated it but yeah I didn't I didn't want to do that right at that age anything that I had pirated you know it was it was kind of a 50-50 shot whether or not I would end up getting a virus on my computer so the first time that I ran into this situation where I had a couple of pages of text from school that were typed out and saved to a dot doc format I was annoyed because I tried opening it up on my laptop in notepad and then I just got a bunch of gobbledygook here in the editor you know like symbols and other stuff because notepad can't handle that right like I'm pretty sure all notepad knows how to do is text files and I guess like source code files and stuff like that but you know rich text formatting and anything more complicated than that I don't think notepad is capable of dealing with so I thought I was gonna have to go into my parents room and type up you know finish typing up that document on my dad's laptop which meant I couldn't tab between typing and training combat and runescape but luckily before I stopped killing rock crabs and logged off on my computer I tried opening up the project in wordpad and I was relieved to see that it loaded without any issues and I was able to keep working on the project and even save it back into a dot doc file to continue working on it at school later now of course wordpad wasn't a true Microsoft word replacement it didn't have nearly as many formatting options you couldn't insert images into your documents I'm pretty sure it didn't have built-in spell check or grammar check but wordpad was literally my first ever comfy text editor and just like every other great piece of Microsoft software modern Microsoft has decided to kill it off because of their own greed so if we take a look on learn dot microsoft.com they have this page called deprecated features for windows clients and you know deprecating some of these features make some sense right like tls uh 1.0 and 1.1 that's really outdated and insecure so it makes sense to me for newer versions of windows to just not support it at all but there's no security issues with using an older version of wordpad or any older text editor for that matter like wordpad doesn't have security issues it doesn't take up very much space on your computer not that microsoft actually cares about software bloat in the first place and you know it doesn't matter that wordpad is no longer being updated because it doesn't need to have any updates like it does what it's supposed to do it works as a free minimalist document editor for microsoft proprietary dot doc and dot doc x files that have become the standard file format for documents in schools and offices and of course microsoft word the program that they're recommending you install instead that costs money you've got to pay for i think it's either a yearly or a monthly subscription and you got to have a microsoft account to use word and of course you can also use the online version but that requires an internet connection and a microsoft account as well there's so many hoops you have to jump through just to create a freaking document on windows like i can't imagine that wordpad would have actually taken any serious market share away from microsoft word like i really doubt microsoft was competing with themselves in that regard like it just doesn't make any sense because now for people in the future that find themselves in a bind like i was back in middle school there might not be able to figure out any solution to continue editing these proprietary file formats at home other than to buy a word now of course there are open source programs like libre office writer that actually give you even more features than wordpad does and can still read and write to dot doc in doc x formats but not everybody knows about this wonderful libre document editor or maybe they don't have internet like i said or they don't have administrator access to install a new application i mean it's honestly ridiculous that microsoft first created these proprietary formats push to make them the industry standard along with pushing to make their operating system the industry standard but now they don't even want to give you the basic tools with the operating system to process these kinds of files like how can we even call microsoft windows a usable desktop operating system anymore when you have to pay a subscription fee to do something as simple as edit a document at this point microsoft might as well just go all in on making this a gaming os like optimizing windows for games and stuff like that because of course a lot of games still only work on microsoft windows and that's got to be the only thing that's really keeping it alive at this point because calling windows a productivity os anymore is just a bad joke if you want to get some actual work done install a just works linux distro which will give you all the tools you need for editing documents and spreadsheets with only about half as much bloat and no built-in spyware