The WordPad text editor has been a part of Windows for almost 30 years and first appeared in Windows 95. Now Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of this tool, which, although it does not have the features of Word, but is still more functional compared to ” Notepad”. The imminent removal of WordPad is reported in the description of Windows 11 test build 26020, which is available to members of the Insider Preview program.

WordPad has been on Windows for decades, and during that time it has been positioned in two ways. At first, it was designed as a simple text editor with some Word functionality, and later as an advanced version of Notepad.

“We recommend using Microsoft Word to interact with rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf, and Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt”, – says Microsoft’s message. To some extent, this message suggests that Microsoft understands that WordPad has long been a cross between Word and Notepad and needs to get rid of it. Of course, this is just speculation, and Microsoft probably has better reasons to remove WordPad from Windows.

It is interesting that WordPad has become one of the few Windows programs that does not receive support for dark mode, which indirectly indicates the developers’ intention to get rid of the text editor. Currently, Notepad has recently received support for dark mode and the autosave feature is expected to appear in the near future. This shows that Microsoft will continue to develop this program in the future. In addition, Microsoft removed the Contacts app from Windows, mainly because most of its functionality was moved to Outlook.