For apps like Calculator, the changes have been merely cosmetic, but everything from Sound Recorder to Media Player to Paint to the Snipping Tool has gotten some kind of thoughtful redesign and new features, often for the first time in a decade-plus.

The company could decide to keep adding capabilities to Notepad, an app that has been getting substantial attention from Microsoft during the Windows 11 era after many years of neglect.

Or substantial user backlash could make the company reconsider, as it did several years ago when MS Paint was marked as deprecated.

Though it was once slated for removal during the Windows 10 era, Microsoft quietly backtracked a few years later and began adding new features to Paint shortly afterward.

Paint’s history is even longer than WordPad’s, and there’s a history of people putting in lots of time and effort to make complex works of art within the software’s limitations; Microsoft’s official company accounts certainly don’t post screenshots of documents created in WordPad, though.

Like WordPad, Write was meant to fill the gap between the plain-text Notepad and a more fully featured word processor.

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