Microsoft WordPad to be deprecated from Windows

In a new feature note, Microsoft announced that WordPad is being deprecated and would be removed from future releases of Windows.

WordPad 10 running on Windows 11

WordPad, initially released in 1995, is a basic word processor that has been included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It was the replacement of Microsoft Write, which was the de facto word processor in Windows versions prior to Windows 95.

The application was built in C++ and used MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). An early archived version of the source code is available here in GitHub.

Microsoft's note, which is available here, stated, "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."